The leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party told Rudaw that the coalition of Kurdish parties "deliberately decided not to participate in the conflict between the US-Israel and Iran." This statement is a deflection from a serious problem diagnosis and from an acute communication crisis within the Iranian opposition.

What we know is that the western front entry scenario had already failed from the very moment it was supposed to approach execution. Now that we find ourselves in a ceasefire, it is worth examining this closed case.

This scenario sought to rest on two contradictory pillars: on one hand, the rapid collapse of the political center in Tehran, and on the other, the legitimization of a force that had not yet clarified its relationship with Iran as a whole.

How Did It Begin?

The return of a number of European-based refugees to Iraq several weeks before the war began on February 28 was a powerful signal of the war's onset. Only 6 days into the war, on March 5, reports quoted President Trump as saying he supported a Kurdish ground attack on Iran and was "fully in favor" of the idea. At the same time, Reuters' March 6 report stated that Trump would support Israeli operations in western Iran to back Iranian Kurdish militants who wanted to use the war to capture border cities. Earlier troop movement dynamics in Iraq had already suggested that important news about Kurdish entry and operations was imminent.

But Trump's first public reaction moving toward closing the scenario came on March 7 — just two days later — when he told reporters aboard Air Force One:

A few weeks later, on April 6, President Trump again repeated his position in response to a question from a Rudaw journalist. Rudaw reported that Trump said at that day's press conference that he preferred Kurdish forces to stay away from the Iran war, because in his view their entry would bring new "problems" and "difficulties" — and "death" for themselves. The exact quote was:

To complete the timeline, there is one more important data point. On March 10, Khaled Azizi of the Democratic Party told Rudaw that they had not received a "clear message" from Trump or the US government about the Kurds' role in this war. This shows that even after the noise of the March 5–7 period, at the operational level, no coherent and definitive message had been conveyed to Kurdish forces.

Why Did It Come to This?

The coalition of Kurdish parties, instead of defining itself as a national force for participating in Iran's transition, introduced from the very outset the language of the "Kurdish nation" and the vision of a "national entity" into political discourse at the moment of crisis and war. This was sufficient for the plan to decline — before reaching operational maturity — in the minds of a large part of Iran: from a national solution to a peripheral identity project. In a war-gripped Iran, any force that cannot define its relationship to the Iranian nation clearly, unambiguously, and without qualification is neither a rescue instrument nor a reliable partner — it is simply an additional risk.

The problem was not merely a conceptual conflict. At the operational level too, the scenario was plagued from the start by confusion. On one hand, signs of initial inclination in Washington to exploit this lever were visible; on the other, it took only a few days before Trump openly said he did not want the Kurds involved. This sudden reversal had a clear meaning: even the American architects themselves understood that this path, far from generating a military advantage, would unleash a collection of unplanned crises harder to contain than the war itself.

The next decisive factor was Turkey. Even the suggestion of a Kurdish government forming following a successful operation would immediately provoke Ankara and elevate the entire scenario from a limited operation to a regional crisis. Turkey does not understand such an event merely as a development inside Iran, but as a direct threat to its own security order. For this reason, any plan that carries the scent of redrawing identity and political borders in western Iran becomes costly and undesirable for Washington the moment Turkey enters the calculation.

Trump retreated precisely at this point. He realized this solution would not produce a quick gain, but would instead liberate a set of unplanned risks — from escalating tensions with Turkey to the activation of ethnic rivalries and the fragmentation of a scene that was supposed to coalesce in favor of the war coalition. The scenario died at the level of political calculation before it suffered any military defeat.

A Deeper Pathology

Here a deeper pathology becomes visible: part of the problem-solving framework of Kurdish activists is so identity-oriented that it loses the capacity to define a national solution. A force that cannot build a single connection between the pain of Mahabad and the massacre in Tehran, between the wound of Sanandaj and the nationwide suppression across Iran, will sooner or later be seen by the main body of Iranian society as a local and non-national force.

Kurdish academic and political figures have generally withdrawn from producing solutions and have firmly stood on the narrative of Kurdish national identity. They face both a communication crisis with other Iranian intellectual forces and have remained deeply distrustful and without answers. Some have even downplayed the Dey Month protests and their victims as a means of differentiation.

The crisis is not limited to the fact that some belittle the Lion and Sun revolution. The Persian left, precisely because those protests were tied to the Pahlavi cause, attempted to characterize them as violent and to assign shared culpability for the regime's crimes to the protesters. The greater problem is that the vast massacre in Tehran and other Iranian cities was reduced, in this worldview, to something normal and marginal. Some openly said "we have had this experience before" — as if the central issue were not the fall of an anti-Iranian regime, but the securing of an identity share after its fall.