Secret Agents Liquidate Prominent Kurdish Separatist Leader

Iran’s Kurdish community is up in arms over the assassination by 50 Iranian special operations agents of Shuhan Kadiri, their most prominent leader.

Kadiri, who preached Kurdish independence as a member of an underground Kurdish organization called the Revolutionary Union of Kurdistan, was cut down by dozens of bullets on July 16 when Iranian agents burst into a coffee-house in Mahabad in the Kurdish region of northern Iran. Within hours of the assassination, Kurdish villages and towns were afire with reports of their hero’s death as a martyr to the cause of Kurdish independence. A new legend claimed that the waters of the fountain in the square outside the coffee-house had turned red at the moment of his death. There was also a gruesome report that his Iranian murderers had tied Kadiri’s body to a motorcycle and dragged it to the next town.

All these reports and rumors galvanized Kurdish clerics into issuing the next day a proclamation glorifying the dead man as a martyr murdered for venturing to fly the Kurdish flag.

Kurdish fury did not stop there.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s Iranian sources report that the assassination was the signal for the launching of a Kurdish guerrilla war against Tehran.

The Iranian government thus finds itself confronted with three domestic ethnic warfronts: in oil-rich Khuzestan, it faces ethnic Arabs; in Balochistan in the southeast, a guerrilla war is already raging – and now one has been sparked in the Kurdish region too.

The Balochis declared war over a similar incident to the one that enraged the Kurds. On July 7, an Iranian assassination squad murdered their national leader Murad ben Abbas by poisoning his food.

Iran faces three uprisings by Kurds, Balochis and Khuzestani Arabs

On July 11, thousands of Balochi rioters attacked government offices and the courthouse in Saravan, a town near the Pakistani border. The Iranian army opened fire on the protesters, they shot back and battles went on that night and the next day. No reliable casualty figures are available, but it inevitably ran into scores on both sides.

Balochi fury spread the next day to Zahedan, capital of Iranian Balochistan.

This week, the Balochi Ashari tribes joined the resistance to the Tehran government, ambushing Iranian military convoys with rocket-propelled grenades and automatic rifles.

There is little doubt that Western intelligence agents on the ground are helping to foment the riots and clashes in all three restive regions.

Mass riots and guerrilla operations flared this week in the Kurdish towns of Sanandaj, Biyar, Oshnouiyeh, Orumiyeh, Mahabad, Saqqez and Saindezh. The rioters attacked and set on fire government buildings, and the homes of Kurds known to collaborate with the central government were looted and torched to calls of death to Iran’s leaders. Singled out was the home of the Kurdish ayatollah Mulla Sohrebi who favors Iran’s spiritual overlord Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Tuesday, July 26, Kurdish guerrilla units made their first appearance in 25 years.

Firing rocket-propelled grenades and automatic rifles, they struck two Revolutionary Guards camps in Sar Dast, a town west of Saqqez not far from the border of Iraqi Kurdistan.

At least 15 Iranian troops were killed and 20 injured. Tehran retaliated by sending heavy military reinforcements to the Kurdish region, imposing a night curfew on all Kurdish towns and roads and, as we write these lines, Revolutionary Guards units are surrounding Kurdish towns. Their commanders have summoned the mayors, town dignitaries and clerics and presented them with an ultimatum: surrender the heads of the Kurdistan Revolutionary Union hiding in their towns or else the troops will storm in and seize them by force.