Turkish Think-Tank: Iran Shifts Strategy Against Kurdish Armed Groups From Retaliation to Sustained Attrition
Iran's ongoing missile and drone strikes against Kurdish armed organizations based in northern Iraq are not an improvised wartime reaction but rather the battlefield expression of a long-accumulating strategic transformation, researcher Çağatay Balcı argued in an analysis published May 2026 by the Iran Research Center (IRAM), a Turkey-based think tank specializing in Iranian affairs.
For decades, Tehran's approach to secessionist Kurdish groups rested on three interconnected methods: decapitation, opportunistic strikes, and punitive retaliation. The most emblematic decapitation operations were the assassinations of Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI) leaders Abdurrahman Ghassemlou in Vienna in 1989 and Sadegh Sharafkandi in Berlin in 1992 — operations designed not only to physically eliminate leadership but to seed distrust and organizational disintegration within the groups. The punitive dimension was equally systematic: every armed action inside Iran's borders was followed, with a predictable delay, by missile strikes on the responsible organizations' Iraqi headquarters — a reactive, threshold-based cycle rather than a sustained campaign.
2022 as a Turning Point
The strategic inflection point came with the 2022 Mahsa Amini protests, which erupted most intensely in the Kurdish-majority provinces of West Azerbaijan, Kurdistan, Kermanshah, and Ilam. Iranian security services concluded from this pattern that Kurdish armed organizations possessed not merely military capacity but significant political and ideological influence over Iran's restive borderlands — a threat qualitatively different from what had been previously managed. Tehran responded with intensified diplomatic pressure on Baghdad to dismantle the groups' Iraqi bases while simultaneously escalating direct strikes on their installations, a dual approach that marked the beginning of its shift toward a permanent pressure model.
The 2026 Trigger
Three developments in early 2026 pushed Iran's threat assessment to its highest level. First, Kurdish armed groups visibly increased their organizational activity in the Kirmanshah and Luristan protests. Second, on February 22, KDPI, PJAK, PAK, Komala, and Habat formalized a joint "Coalition of Political Forces of Iranian Kurdistan" — which Tehran interpreted not as a mere organizational step but as preparation to coordinate with external military actors. Third, when the U.S.-Israel-Iran conflict erupted on February 28, these groups publicly sought support from Washington and Tel Aviv, confirming Iran's fears about their external alignment. Former Supreme National Security Council Secretary Ali Laricani stated at the conflict's outset: "We will punish any separatist initiative in the harshest terms."
The PJAK Exception
The most revealing element of Iran's new strategic framework is what it omits. Despite PJAK's formal membership in the coalition, Tehran has conspicuously excluded it from the strike campaign — a calculated choice that, according to Balcı, is designed to generate distrust between PJAK and the other coalition members and erode the coalition's internal cohesion from within. The continuity of these strikes even after the April ceasefire demonstrates that the attrition campaign is no longer a wartime instrument but a permanent fixture of Iran's regional security do
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