When President Donald Trump urged Iranians last month to take to the streets and promised help that never came, the country’s Kurdish provinces stayed largely quiet. This is because the Kurds already saw that regime forces were readying for a slaughter.
“We saw them ahead of time. They had machine guns on pickup trucks and military vehicles, they were armed to the teeth, and we know they had orders to shoot to kill,” Abdullah Mohtadi, the exiled secretary general of the Komala Party of Iranian Kurdistan, told The Free Press in an interview last week. “They don’t need a pretext to kill people in Kurdistan. So when we saw them prepared and determined to shoot people, we did not call for demonstrations.”
Mohtadi’s insight suggests that Iran’s regime was not nearly as vulnerable to mass demonstrations as Trump and Iran’s exiled crown prince Reza Pahlavi claimed at the time. Rather, the security forces made preparations to crush the uprising that began in the last days of December, when merchants in the big cities began demonstrating against the regime after the collapse of Iran’s currency, the rial.
