The Iran–PJAK conflict is an armed conflict between the Islamic Republic of Iran and Kurdish rebels of the Kurdistan Free Life Party (PJAK), which began in 2004. The group has carried out numerous attacks in the Kurdistan Province of Iran and provinces of Western Iran. PJAK is closely affiliated with the militant Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), the primary opponent of the Republic of Turkey in the Kurdish–Turkish conflict. PJAK has been designated as a terrorist organization by Iran, Japan, Turkey, and the United States.
Following massive clashes in summer 2011, a cease-fire was declared between the parties, with Iran claiming victory and PJAK allegedly ending all armed operations as of 29 September 2011. Since then, several violent incidents have occurred, including the December 2011 Baneh clash and another clash in April 2012. In 2013, the confrontations became more frequent, including clashes in May, the August 2013 Sardasht clash and more events in October. The heavy 2016 West Iran clashes took place on 19 April.
As with the PKK, PJAK leaders say their long-term goals are to establish an autonomous Kurdish region within the Iranian state. It is mainly focused on replacing Iran's current form of government with a democratic and federal government.
Background
Since the Iranian Revolution, there has been an ongoing conflict between Iran's central government and Kurdish political movements rooted in the predominantly Kurdish region of western Iran. The level of violence has ebbed and flowed with peaks of serious conflict in 1979, the early eighties and the early nineties.
Kurdish casualties are estimated by the Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI) at more than 30,000 civilian dead in addition to 4,000 Kurdish fighters. Along with the dead, there have been tens of thousands of people imprisoned; hundreds of villages destroyed and hundreds of thousands of people displaced. The local economy of an already under-developed region has been severely damaged by the conflict, as of course has the Iranian economy as a whole.
Founding of PJAK
The exact history of PJAK is widely disputed. Turkey and Iran claim that PJAK is no more than an offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). According to some sources, members of the PKK founded the PJAK in 2004 as an Iranian equivalent to their leftist-nationalist insurgency against the Turkish government.
According to founding members of PJAK, however, the group began in Iran around 1997 as an entirely peaceful student-based human rights movement. The group was inspired by the success of Iraq's Kurdish autonomous region and by the PKK's struggle in Turkey. Discouraged by the failure of previous Kurdish revolts, however, PJAK's leaders initially worked only to maintain and build a Kurdish national identity. After a series of government crackdowns against Kurdish activists and intellectuals, the group's leadership moved to the safety of Iraqi Kurdistan in 1999. There they settled in the area controlled by the PKK on the slopes of Mount Qandil—less than 16 kilometres (10 mi) from the Iranian border. Once established at Qandil and operating under the PKK's security umbrella, PJAK adopted many of the political ideas and military strategies of jailed PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan, whose theories had initially inspired PJAK's founders while still in Iran. The PKK's ideological influence also transformed PJAK from a civil rights movement to a more ambitious and multi-directional independence movement, aided by the transfer of many seasoned PKK fighters of Iranian origin into PJAK.
Abductions of Iranian security forces
PJAK's leaders have twice kidnapped groups of Iranian soldiers in 2003 and 2004. In both instances Iranian soldiers were released unharmed after being tried and acquitted for crimes against the Kurdish people by ad hoc PJAK courts in Iranian Kurdistan.
Timeline
2004
The PJAK group's first armed attack took place in 2004 in the area of the city of Marivan in Kurdistan province, after Iranian security forces fired on a protestors killing 10 people.
2005
In July 2005, massive three-week long riots in North-West Iran, met by massive security response, left some 20 Kurds dead and 300 wounded. The protests erupted following the killing of an activist by Iranian security forces in the city of Mahabad on July 9. More riots followed in October 2005.
According to Kurdish sources, as many as 100,000 state security forces backed by helicopters, moved into the region to crack down on the demonstrations. The Kurdistan Democratic party of Iran urged "international organizations, human-rights supporters and the international community to make efforts to stop the bloodshed of the people by the Islamic regime of Iran". Hussein Yazdanpanah, the general secretary of the Revolutionary Union of Kurdistan, who was at the time in exile in the city of Irbil, also criticized the crackdown. That year, the PJAK began widescale engagements with Iranian security forces in the Marivan region.
Istanbul's Cihan News Agency claimed that over 100 members of the Iranian security forces were killed by PJAK during 2005.
2006
In February 2006, 10 protestors were killed by police in the city of Maku. PJAK responded with three attacks against two Iranian bases. In retaliation, PJAK claims to have killed 24 members of Iranian security forces in a raid on April 3, 2006. On April 10, 2006, seven PJAK members were arrested in Iran, on suspicion that they killed three Iranian security force personnel. Shortly afterward, on April 21, and again a week later, Iranian troops fired nearly 100 artillery shells at PJAK positions near Mount Qandil and briefly crossed the Iraqi border, according to the Iraqi Ministry of Defense.
PJAK set off a bomb on 8 May 2006 in the city of Kermanshah, wounding five people at a government building. Following this, the Iranian military retaliated with bombardments on suspected PJAK positions in US-occupied Iraq along the Iranian border. A number of civilians died as a result. The PKK's Roj TV claimed that PJAK troops killed four Iranian soldiers on May 27, in a clash near the town of Maku in Iranian Kurdistan.
The September 2006 Sardasht incident (an Iran–Iraq cross-border raid) was a military operation which took place on Iran–Iraqi Kurdistan border, in which at least 30 Kurdish militants of the Kurdistan Free Life Party (PJAK) were allegedly killed and 40 injured by Iranian security forces. Following the clash, a PJAK spokesman inside Iraq declared an immediate, unilateral ceasefire. Senior Iranian military spokesman Hamid Ahmadi rejected the call, saying: "A ceasefire with a terrorist group doesn't make any sense".
The fighting came a week after the Revolutionary Guards announced a new military offensive against PJAK, or the Free Life party of Kurdistan, with the intention of driving them from their positions in Iran.
On September 28, 2006, Iran said that two members of the PKK blew up a gas pipeline to Turkey near the town of Bazargan in West Azerbaijan province.
2007
On February 24, 2007 an Iranian helicopter crashed near the town of Khoy, killing 13 soldiers, including several members of the elite Revolutionary Guards and Said Qahari, the head of the Iranian army's 3rd Corps. PJAK quickly claimed to have shot down the helicopter using a shoulder-launched missile, killing 20 soldiers, including several senior officers, during an hour-long battle. Iran, however, blamed the crash on bad weather. After that, Iran launched a counter-offensive against the group in the northeast of Iran's West Azerbaijan province, near the Turkish border. According to Iran's state news agencies as many as 47 Kurdish rebels and 17 Iranian soldiers were killed in the violence between February 25 and March 1, 2007.
In August 2007, PJAK claimed it managed to down another Iranian military helicopter that was conducting a forward operation of bombardment by Iranian forces.
According to Kurdish officials, Iranian troops raided northern Iraq on August 23, 2007, inspecting several villages suspected of being PJAK strongholds.
2008
The Iranian news agency IRNA reported on October 11, 2008 that members of the paramilitary Basij units killed four PJAK militants in a clash close to the Iraqi border.
In August 2008, under Iranian pressure, one of Iraqi Kurdistan's ruling parties, the PUK, launched an offensive against PJAK forces. KDP-leader and President of Iraqi Kurdistan, Massoud Barzani condemned PJAK operations against Iran multiple times.
2009
On April 24, 2009, PJAK rebels attacked a police station in Kermanshah province. According to updated reports 18 policemen and 8 militants were killed in a fierce gun battle. According to Iranian government sources, the attack resulted in 10 policemen and 10 militants being killed. According to the Heidelberg Institute for International Conflict Research, the attack, which occurred on April 24 and 25, involved PJAK attacks on two police stations in the cities of Ravansar in Northern Kermanshah province and in Sanandaj, the capital of Kurdistan province, killing eleven police officers, with more than ten PJAK militants reportedly killed.
Iran responded a week later by attacking PJAK positions along the border area of Panjwin inside Iraq using helicopters. According to Iraqi border guards officials, the area attacked by Iran was not considered a stronghold of PJAK, that appeared to have been the target of the raid. According to the ICRC, more than 800 Iraqi Kurds have been forced from their homes by the recent cross-border violence.
2010
In 2010, PJAK claimed responsibility for the deaths of 3 Revolutionary Guard soldiers in Khoy. Earlier in the year Iranian police arrested a suspect in the killing of a prosecutor in the same region during clashes with "Kurdish militants."
On 13 May 2010, Iraqi and Iranian border guards exchanged gunfire near the border village of Shamiran, after the Iranians mistook the Iraqis for members of PJAK. It was the first major incident between the two since December 2009, when Iran took control of a disputed oil well. The gunfight lasted 90 minutes and an Iraqi officer was captured.
2011
On March 24, two Iranian police officers were killed and three others injured in two attacks in the city of Sanandaj in Kurdistan Province and on April 1 four border guards were killed and three others were wounded in an attack against a police station near the city of Marivan. On April 4, Iran's Islamic Revolution Guards Corps said the perpetrators of the previous attacks in Sanandaj were killed.
Two militants affiliated to PJAK were reported to have been killed and another wounded by the IRIB TV website on June 19, 2011, in Iran's northwestern town of Chaldran in West Azerbaijan province.
On 16 July 2011 the Iranian army launched a major offensive against PJAK compounds in the mountainous regions of northern Iraq. On July 17, the Revolutionary Guard killed at least five PJAK members and captured one named Saman Naseem, in a raid that destroyed one of the group's headquarters in northwestern Iran. PJAK claimed 21 Iranian soldiers were killed in the clashes. Iranian authorities on the other hand confirmed their casualties at 1 killed and 3 injured while claiming to have inflicted "heavy losses" on the militants. They announced that they had captured three militant bases, one of which was identified as Marvan and was said to be the leading PJAK camp in the region. PJAK militants claimed that they only lost two fighters during the attack carried out by the Iranian forces.
On July 20, PJAK killed 5 Revolutionary Guard members and one commander while Revolutionary Guard forces killed 35 PJAK fighters and captured several others during clashes on July 25. By July 26, more than 50 PJAK fighters and 8 Revolutionary Guards had been killed, and at least 100 PJAK fighters had been wounded according to Iranian sources, while over 800 people had been displaced by the fighting. At least 3 civilians were killed. During clashes in the Jasosan and Alotan heights the next day, Iranian forces claimed to have killed over 21 PJAK fighters, confirming that two Revolutionary Guards had been killed and two had been injured during the clashes.
On July 29, suspected PJAK militants blew up the Iran-Turkey gas pipeline, which was repaired the next day. On August 1, Iranian forces killed 3 and arrested 4 of the militants said to be responsible for the attack, at least one of which was a Turkish citizen.
On August 5, the leader of the Kurdistan Free Life Party (PJAK), Rahman Haj Ahmedi, claimed that more than 300 Iranian Revolutionary Guards had been killed in a series of ambushes, while acknowledging 16 loses. Iranian officials however, claimed to have killed over 150 PJAK forces during the operations, confirming the deaths of only 17 Revolutionary Guards.
On August 8, 2011, Abdul Rahman Haji Ahmadi, the leader of PJAK, said the armed militant group is prepared to negotiate with Iran and maintained that Kurdish issues need to be solved through "peaceful means". In an exclusive interview with Rudaw, Haji Ahmadi acknowledged that in some cases compromise is inevitable and indicated that PJAK is willing to lay down its arms. He said fighting may not help Kurds secure "political and cultural rights" in Iran.