Kurdish rebels clash with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards

TEHRAN, Iran — Kurdish rebels and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps have engaged in armed clashes along the Iranian border with Iraq in recent days, raising tensions in the region, Iranian state television reported.

On social media, videos purport to show the shelling of positions held by the rebels, the Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran. While both groups claim to have killed more than a dozen of their opponents, there are no reliable figures as yet, Iran’s state news agency, IRNA, reported.

The Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran has been striving for decades for independence in the Kurdish areas of western Iran. While many of Iran’s approximately 6 million Kurds feel strong connections to the nation, they speak a separate language and are mostly Sunni Muslims in a Shiite country. The Kurdish regions, like all Iranian border regions, are poor compared with Iran’s larger cities.

The rebels have clashed periodically with the Iranian armed forces, at times ambushing military patrols. They say some of their leaders were assassinated in Europe in the 1980s and 1990s, and that Iran has been executing activists linked to their cause.

The Guard Corps base in the region, Hamzeh Seyyed ol-Shohada, said in a statement on Saturday that the clashes were continuing in the area of Mahabad, a Kurdish city, and the Sarvabad

border area. It said that a number of “terrorists linked to counterrevolutionary groups” had been killed in the fighting.

One Iranian general, Mohammad Pakpour, said the rebels were supported by “reactionary states,” a label Iran uses for Persian Gulf kingdoms. Iran often accuses Sunni nations of supporting Sunni separatists against the government.