On the morning of September 8, Iran, in a truly unprecedented move, fired seven Fateh-110 short-range ballistic missiles into neighbouring Iraqi Kurdistan. The target was the headquarters of Iranian Kurdish opposition forces, in the Iraqi Kurdish city of Koya. The missiles killed at least seventeen people and wounded 49, including women and children.
As Iraq analyst Bilal Wahab noted, the building did serve as a headquarters for the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (PDKI), which is actively at war with Iran, but the missiles “primarily hit members of the more passive and pro-dialogue KDP-I, raising questions about Tehran’s claim that the operation was purely a counterterrorism measure.”
Iran used drones to pinpoint the target and assess the damage afflicted by the missiles. Had they deviated even slightly off their target they could have instead rained down on Koya and killed scores of unsuspecting civilian bystanders. This was the first time Iran had fired ballistic missiles into Iraqi Kurdistan and the first time Iranian missiles targeted an Iraq-based opposition group since April 2001.
I visited Koya on September 10 and met several members and family of the “pro-dialogue KDP-I” faction of the Iranian Kurdish dissidents who were still visibly shaken and distraught by the deadly strike. The group lives with their families in a permanent camp of small brick houses. The sight of three civilian airliners flying high in the clear blue sky above put them at ease that a potential follow-up attack was not likely since firing more ballistic missiles would have run the slight risk of hitting such aircraft. Some eyewitnesses said at one of the funerals of the attack’s victims the day before that they became fearful upon seeing more Iranian drones circling overhead.
The general feeling in the camp was one of abject despair and anxiety.
While the camp did not have any medicine or barely a single painkiller for its wounded, residents said the United Nations did not provide any aid in the aftermath of the attack, Kurds there were adamant that they needed protection above anything else, declaring they are used to surviving on next to nothing. One of the group’s Peshmerga fighters said that the UN should help the non-combatant women and children stuck in the camp in Koya to leave the region for their own safety. Pointing to Iran’s execution of Kurdish political prisoners, without even the semblance of a fair trial, on the very same day as the attack he somberly concluded that they are being killed simply because they are Kurdish.
The civilians in the group have a very tenuous legal status; banished from Iran for fighting the Islamic Republic in the 1980s and 1990s, they are essentially stuck in Iraqi Kurdistan, an autonomous region with no ability to issue passports. Both the Iraqi central government and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) verbally condemned the attack but did not take any action to reprimand Iran. They did nevertheless refuse to extradite the dissident Iranian Kurds, a demand Tehran made shortly after the attack.
I met one young woman who lost her left eye from shrapnel in the explosion and suffered a large head wound. Her mother was crying hysterically, saying that her daughter was married to one of the group’s Peshmerga fighters who was killed in the attack, leaving the wounded widow with an infant daughter to care for.
When the residents of the camp heard the explosion they fled in terror to a nearby mountain for shelter. Children in the camp’s playground, which I learned was built by a proselytizing Christian missionary group, recounted that experience. One young boy gestured about how he felt his heart had jumped out of his chest after each successive explosion. Another expressed fear that they might not survive another attack. Asked why they couldn’t simply run back to the mountain he said that the Iranians likely saw the photos published on social media of them sheltering there and might also target the mountain next time, a disturbing scenario for a six-year-old to have to contemplate.
Some of the adults in the camp were also concerned about where exactly the surface-to-surface missiles had been launched from. While the Iranian press later reported that they were launched from inside Iran approximately 220 kilometers from their target, which is within the missile’s range, KDP-I Kurds expressed fears that they had been launched from inside Iraqi Kurdistan. Koya is controlled by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) party which historically has much closer relations with Iran than the other major Iraqi Kurdish party, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP). Their fears may prove sufficiently founded. According to Iraqi journalist Omar Sattar: “A team of US security investigators found that the missiles used in the attack were fired from locations only 20-40 kilometers from the targeted areas, taking advantage of the launch pads that Iran had deployed within the borders of the city of Sulaimaniyah.”
Furthermore, according to a Reuters report in August, Tehran provided ballistic missiles to its proxies in Iraq, potentially to target Israel and/or Saudi Arabia if a war breaks out. The report claimed that Iran has a missile factory inside Iraqi Kurdistan which, if true, also lends credence to the possibility the missiles were fired from inside the region. Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has officially denied that any Iranian missiles are based in his country.
Sulaimaniyah is the largest city in the PUK zone of Iraqi Kurdistan. That party previously sanctioned Iranian attacks on these Kurdish groups in its territory in July 1996 in return for support against the KDP during the four-year civil war between the two. The Iranian Kurds expressed fears that Tehran is trying to create a major rift between them and the PUK to create a conflict which would undoubtedly result in the vastly stronger and superiorly armed PUK forces decimating them and doing Iran’s dirty work for it in the process. They insisted they will not fall for such a ploy by fighting their fellow Kurds.
One thing that really struck me from my visit was the lack of militancy in the group. They are quite family oriented which is somewhat rare for such groups in this region. The Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), for example, conditions its members to completely sever all ties with their families so they can focus exclusively on their decades-old struggle against the Turkish government. Also, the anti-Iran Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK), a cultish militant group that was formerly based in Iraq, made all its members divorce, a condition its two married leaders opted not to apply to themselves.
Ultimately it’s not clear what will come of this attack. It could foster even greater anti-Iran sentiment in Iran’s Kurdish region and lead to a much deadlier cycle of violence in the long-term. An unrelated attack this month on an Iranian military parade in the city of Ahvaz, that killed 25, also shows that Iran’s poorer western frontier provinces – home to the majority of Iran’s Arab and Kurdish minorities, many of whom are discontented by Tehran’s governance for numerous political and economic reasons – are vulnerable to deadly terrorist attacks. The aforementioned Mr. Wahab also points out in his analysis that “targeting a meeting of opposition political leaders deep inside Iraq casts serious doubt on Tehran’s claim that its missile program is purely defensive in nature.”
Whatever the case ultimately proves to be, the events of September 8 in Koya are a very worrying development for this already troubled and war-weary region.
Photo: Takver