The target of the Iranian shelling, which began in mid-August, is a little-known Iranian-Kurdish rebel group known as the Party for Free Life in Kurdistan (PJAK). About 2,000 PJAK guerillas, which Iran accuses of infiltrating across the border into the Islamic Republic, are camped out in the lime-green hills dotted with walnut trees along the Iraq-Iran border. In Rezga “there are a lot of peshmergas” armed with RPGs and Kalashnikovs, the farmer told me, using the colloquial term for Kurdish guerillas. “There are so many that I can’t count.”
At first glance, the battle in the hills of an obscure corner of Iraq seems like little more than a longstanding local dispute. Iran has been shelling the Kurdish region of northern Iraq “since forever,” says Joost Hiltermann, a Middle East expert at the International Crisis Group. As the Kurdish population of Iraq has secured a significant measure of independence from Baghdad’s central government, Tehran has worried that Iran’s own Kurdish population might take inspiration from its Iraqi counterpart. The conflict has traditionally been “totally local, with little chance of spreading,” Hiltermann says, before adding one caveat: “unless the U.S. starts to support PJAK, and you get a proxy war inside Iran.” In that case, he insists, “Iran will retaliate. [And] not necessarily in the Qandil Mountains.”
