DUBAI — Iran’s Revolutionary Guards announced Thursday that they had killed five members of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan, known as the PDKI, a banned organization, in the country’s northwestern region, according to state media reports.
The Guards stated that the group was caught in an ambush after crossing into Iranian territory through mountainous border areas near the city of Piranshahr in West Azerbaijan province. Officials did not provide a specific date for when the operation occurred.
The Norway-based Kurdish rights organization Hengaw reported that the confrontation took place Wednesday evening.
The PDKI has engaged in on-and-off armed conflict with Iran’s Islamic Republic for decades, and Tehran has long considered Kurdish armed factions to be separatist threats to the country’s territorial integrity.
During a recent period of conflict with Tehran, both U.S. and Israeli hopes that Kurdish fighters might serve a ground combat role against Iran quickly fell apart. Mixed signals from Washington and Israel, combined with Iranian military strikes and threats against Kurdish positions in Iraq, discouraged those groups from entering the fighting.
A comparable incident near Piranshahr had already been reported by Iranian state media on Tuesday, when the Revolutionary Guards claimed to have killed six members of what they called an “opposition and separatist group.”
Also on Tuesday, state media reported that two Revolutionary Guards members were killed and two others wounded during a shooting in Kermanshah province in western Iran, which occurred Monday evening. Hengaw reported that a newly formed Kurdish armed group claimed responsibility for that attack, saying it was carried out in retaliation for the Guards’ role in crushing a protest movement that took place between 2022 and 2023.
