Putting Kurds in Spotlight, Iran’s Leaders Try to Deflect National Protest

An image of Mahsa (Zhina) Amini, an Iranian Kurdish woman, is displayed on a pole during a protest following her death, in Los Angeles, California, US, September 22, 2022. (Reuters)
An image of Mahsa (Zhina) Amini, an Iranian Kurdish woman, is displayed on a pole during a protest following her death, in Los Angeles, California, US, September 22, 2022. (Reuters)
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Putting Kurds in Spotlight, Iran’s Leaders Try to Deflect National Protest

An image of Mahsa (Zhina) Amini, an Iranian Kurdish woman, is displayed on a pole during a protest following her death, in Los Angeles, California, US, September 22, 2022. (Reuters)
An image of Mahsa (Zhina) Amini, an Iranian Kurdish woman, is displayed on a pole during a protest following her death, in Los Angeles, California, US, September 22, 2022. (Reuters)

Facing their biggest challenge in years, Iran's religious leaders are trying to portray the angry protests over the death of Mahsa Amini as a breakaway uprising by her fellow Kurds threatening the nation's unity rather than its clerical rule.

Amini, a 22-year-old from Kurdistan province in northwest Iran, died in the custody of the country’s morality police after she was detained for violating strict codes requiring women to dress modestly in public.

Protests which started at Amini's funeral in her Kurdish hometown of Saqez spread rapidly across the country, to the capital Tehran, cities in central Iran, and the southwest and southeast where Arab and Baluch minorities are concentrated.

Across the country, including at universities and high schools, the rallying cry "Women, Life, Freedom" and the same calls for the downfall of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei were heard, yet much of the crackdown by security forces focused on the northwest where most of Iran's estimated 10 million Kurds live.

Riot police and Basij paramilitary forces have been transferred to the area from other provinces, according to witnesses, and tanks were sent to Kurdish areas where tensions have been particularly high.

Iran has also attacked Iranian Kurdish armed groups in neighboring Iraq it says are involved in the unrest. Iran's Revolutionary Guards fired missiles and drones at militant targets in northern Iraq's semi-autonomous Kurdish region, where authorities said 13 people were killed.

"The Kurdish opposition groups are using Amini's case as an excuse to reach their decades-long goal of separating Kurdistan from Iran, but they will not succeed," a hardline security official said.

His comments were echoed by a former official, who told Reuters senior security officers were concerned that "the support Kurdish people are getting from across Iran will be used by Kurdish opposition groups to push for independence."

Iranian state media have called the nationwide protests a "political plot" ignited by Kurdish separatist groups, particularly the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI).

‘Separatist threat’

"Since the very start of the uprising the regime has tried to portray it as a Kurdish ethnic issue rather than a national one, invoking a separatist threat emerging from the Kurdish region," said Ali Fathollah-Nejad, a political scientist at the American University of Beirut.

Those efforts by authorities had been undermined, Fathollah-Nejad said, by significant solidarity between Iran's different ethnic groups during the nationwide protests.

Still, looking across their border to Iraq, and further west to Syria, Iranian authorities can point to Kurdish ambitions for self-rule taking root when central government was challenged.

Syrian Kurdish forces exploited the tumult of the 2011 uprising against President Bashar al-Assad, allying with the United States against ISIS and carving out a swathe of northeast Syria under their control.

In Türkiye, where around a fifth of the 85 million-strong population is Kurdish, Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) fighters have fought an armed insurgency against the state since 1984 in which tens of thousands of people have died.

In Iraq and Syria, Kurds have demonstrated in solidarity with the protesters in Iran. In Türkiye, a deputy leader of the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party told Reuters the party "salutes the women in Iran" calling for their rights.

"As in Türkiye, Iraq and Syria, in Iran it is the Kurds who seek democracy, the Kurds who seek freedom," said Tuncer Bakirhan, a former mayor who was removed from his post and jailed over alleged militant ties.

Iran's constitution grants equal rights to all ethnic minorities and says minority languages may be used in the media and schools. But rights groups and activists say Kurds face discrimination along with other religious and ethnic minorities under the country's Shiite clerical establishment.

Amnesty International has reported that "scores if not hundreds" of political prisoners affiliated to the Kurdish group KDPI and other proscribed political parties are in jail after being convicted in unfair trials.

"The regime has never recognized the rights of its Kurdish population," said Hiwa Molania, a Kurdish Iranian journalist based in Türkiye. Despite those restrictions at home, and the examples of Kurdish autonomy in Iraq and Syria, many Iranian Kurds insist they are not seeking secession.

"Iranian Kurds want their constitutional rights to be respected," said Kaveh Ghoreishi, an Iranian Kurd journalist and researcher. "People in the Kurdistan province... want a regime change and not independence."

Ali Vaez, senior Iran analyst at the International Crisis Group, said accusations of Kurdish separatist ambitions aim to create a "rally around the flag effect" that encourages Iranians to support the leadership rather than the protesters.

However, the real danger was not any breakaway ambitions of Iran's minorities, but their treatment by Iran's leadership.

"The system’s disregard for the legitimate grievances of ethnic and sectarian minorities ... have rendered the country increasingly vulnerable to the civil strife that has pulled countries in the region like Syria and Yemen into a deadly downward spiral," Vaez said.



'We Will Die from Hunger': Gazans Decry Israel's UNRWA Ban

 Itimad Al-Qanou, a displaced Palestinian mother from Jabalia, eats with her children inside a tent, amid Israel-Gaza conflict, in Deir Al-Balah, central Gaza Strip, November 9, 2024. REUTERS/Ramadan Abed
Itimad Al-Qanou, a displaced Palestinian mother from Jabalia, eats with her children inside a tent, amid Israel-Gaza conflict, in Deir Al-Balah, central Gaza Strip, November 9, 2024. REUTERS/Ramadan Abed
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'We Will Die from Hunger': Gazans Decry Israel's UNRWA Ban

 Itimad Al-Qanou, a displaced Palestinian mother from Jabalia, eats with her children inside a tent, amid Israel-Gaza conflict, in Deir Al-Balah, central Gaza Strip, November 9, 2024. REUTERS/Ramadan Abed
Itimad Al-Qanou, a displaced Palestinian mother from Jabalia, eats with her children inside a tent, amid Israel-Gaza conflict, in Deir Al-Balah, central Gaza Strip, November 9, 2024. REUTERS/Ramadan Abed

After surviving more than a year of war in Gaza, Aisha Khaled is now afraid of dying of hunger if vital aid is cut off next year by a new Israeli law banning the UN Palestinian relief agency from operating in its territory.

The law, which has been widely criticised internationally, is due to come into effect in late January and could deny Khaled and thousands of others their main source of aid at a time when everything around them is being destroyed.

"For me and for a million refugees, if the aid stops, we will end. We will die from hunger not from war," the 31-year-old volunteer teacher told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone.

"If the school closes, where do we go? All the aspects of our lives are dependent on the agency: flour, food, water ...(medical) treatment, hospitals," Khaled said from an UNRWA school in Nuseirat in central Gaza.

"We depend on them after God," she said.

UNRWA employs 13,000 people in Gaza, running the enclave's schools, healthcare clinics and other social services, as well as distributing aid.

Now, UNRWA-run buildings, including schools, are home to thousands forced to flee their homes after Israeli airstrikes reduced towns across the strip to wastelands of rubble.

UNRWA shelters have been frequently bombed during the year-long war, and at least 220 UNRWA staff have been killed, Reuters reported.

If the Israeli law as passed last month does come into effect, the consequences would be "catastrophic," said Inas Hamdan, UNRWA's Gaza communications officer.

"There are two million people in Gaza who rely on UNRWA for survival, including food assistance and primary healthcare," she said.

The law banning UNRWA applies to the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Gaza and Arab East Jerusalem, areas Israel captured in 1967 during the Six-Day War.

Israeli lawmakers who drafted the ban cited what they described as the involvement of a handful of UNRWA's thousands of staffers in the attack on southern Israel last year that triggered the war and said some staff were members of Hamas and other armed groups.

FRAGILE LIFELINE

The war in Gaza erupted on Oct. 7, 2023, after Hamas attack. Israel's military campaign has levelled much of Gaza and killed around 43,500 Palestinians, Gaza health officials say. Up to 10,000 people are believed to be dead and uncounted under the rubble, according to Gaza's Civil Emergency Service.

Most of the strip's 2.3 million people have been forced to leave their homes because of the fighting and destruction.

The ban ends Israel's decades-long agreement with UNRWA that covered the protection, movement and diplomatic immunity of the agency in Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

For many Palestinians, UNRWA aid is their only lifeline, and it is a fragile one.

Last week, a committee of global food security experts warned there was a strong likelihood of imminent famine in northern Gaza, where Israel renewed an offensive last month.

Israel rejected the famine warning, saying it was based on "partial, biased data".

COGAT, the Israeli military agency that deals with Palestinian civilian affairs, said last week that it was continuing to "facilitate the implementation of humanitarian efforts" in Gaza.

But UN data shows the amount of aid entering Gaza has plummeted to its lowest level in a year and the United Nations has accused Israel of hindering and blocking attempts to deliver aid, particularly to the north.

"The daily average of humanitarian trucks the Israeli authorities allowed into Gaza last month is 30 trucks a day," Hamdan said, adding that the figure represents 6% of the supplies that were allowed into Gaza before this war began.

"More aid must be sent to Gaza, and UNRWA work should be facilitated to manage this aid entering Gaza," she said.

'BACKBONE' OF AID SYSTEM

Many other aid organizations rely on UNRWA to help them deliver aid and UN officials say the agency is the backbone of the humanitarian response in Gaza.

"From our perspective, and I am sure from many of the other humanitarian actors, it's an impossible task (to replace UNRWA)," said Oxfam GB's humanitarian lead Magnus Corfixen in a phone interview with the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

"The priority is to ensure that they will remain ... because they are essential for us," he said.

UNRWA supports other agencies with logistics, helping them source the fuel they need to move staff and power desalination plants, he said.

"Without them, we will struggle with access to warehouses, having access to fuel, having access to trucks, being able to move around, being able to coordinate," Corfixen said, describing UNRWA as "essential".

UNRWA schools also offer rare respite for traumatised children who have lost everything.

Twelve-year-old Lamar Younis Abu Zraid fled her home in Maghazi in central Gaza at the beginning of the war last year.

The UNRWA school she used to attend as a student has become a shelter, and she herself has been living in another school-turned-shelter in Nuseirat for a year.

Despite the upheaval, in the UNRWA shelter she can enjoy some of the things she liked doing before war broke out.

She can see friends, attend classes, do arts and crafts and join singing sessions. Other activities are painfully new but necessary, like mental health support sessions to cope with what is happening.

She too is aware of the fragility of the lifeline she has been given. Now she has to share one copybook with a friend because supplies have run out.

"Before they used to give us books and pens, now they are not available," she said.