Rebel leader Ebrahim Alizada said: “Our armed struggle began in Iranian Kurdistan and will continue until we have freedom.”
Hundreds of young men and women armed with AK47 rifles, machine guns and RPGs are training in northern Iraq for this mission.
Many more are based across the border and group leaders say the rebels are already carrying out “covert actions” in Iran. link
from March 2003
In an agreement signed Tuesday with the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), soldiers and their families loyal to the Komala political party will start evacuating Wednesday from the Halabja valley in order to clear the way for an attack against hundreds of Ansar al-Islam fundamentalists….
Mahammad Haji Mahmood, chair of the Kurdistan Democratic Socialist Party, who helped negotiate the evacuation, said the agreement allows Komala soldiers to keep their arms when they depart over a three-day period for northern territory along the Iranian border….
Mahmood said that the PUK, which had paid Komala nearly $200,000 a month in order to help keep stability in the region, agreed to pay the party upwards of $600,000 in back payments in order to seal the agreement. In addition, the PUK will ensure that any injured soldiers will receive immediate medical treatment and that all the soldiers and their families will be able to return to their lands about five months after the U.S.-led war against Iraq is over. Anwar Mohammad, a senior leader of the Komala group, said, “We’ve agreed to move out of the region so we don’t give another excuse for the Americans to attack us again — we are not surrendering. Someone gave the wrong information to the Americans. We think the bombing was a mistake.”…
“We have adopted a different ideology from Ansar, who were previously our friends,” said Mohammad. “We are not like them.” link
The Kurds sometimes remind me of the girl everybody knew at some point of youth, hopelessly clinging to a bad boyfriend, convinced that if she would just tolerate enough ill-treatment, he would show up one day on bended knee with ring in hand. (Actually Americans remind me of the same thing sometimes, too, but that’s another show).
