Iran warned Kurds to withdraw from Kirkuk

Tehran has attempted to expand influence amid crisis over Kurdish referendum

Asenior Iranian military commander repeatedly warned Kurdish leaders in northern Iraq to withdraw from the oil city of Kirkuk or face an onslaught by Iraqi forces and allied Iran-backed fighters, Kurdish officials briefed on the meetings said.

Major-General Qasim Sulaimani, commander of foreign operations for Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards, travelled to Iraq’s Kurdistan region to meet Kurdish leaders at least three times this month before the Baghdad government’s lightning campaign to recapture territory across the north.

The presence of Sulaimani on the frontlines highlights Tehran’s heavy sway over policy in Iraq.

Sulaimani met leaders from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), one of the two main Kurdish political parties in northern Iraq, in Sulaimania the day before Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Al Abadi ordered his forces to advance on Kirkuk, according to a PUK lawmaker. Sulaimani’s message was clear: withdraw or risk losing Tehran as a strategic ally.

“[Al] Abadi has all the regional powers and the West behind him and nothing will stop him from forcing you back to the mountains if he decides so,” the lawmaker quoted Sulaimani as telling the PUK leadership.

The Iranian general evoked late Iraqi president Saddam Hussain’s ruthless suppression of a Kurdish rebellion in 1991, when almost the entire Kurdish population fled northern Iraq to the mountains, the PUK lawmaker said.

“Sulaimani’s visit ... was to give a last-minute chance for the decision-makers not to commit a fatal mistake,” said the lawmaker, who like others interviewed in this story declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the issue.