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Iran seizes bases belonging to PKK offshoot in Iraq
The Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) quoted Colonel Delavar Ranjbarzadeh, a local commander of the powerful Revolutionary Guard, as saying that “a large number” of members of the Party for a Free Life in Kurdistan (PJAK) had been killed in fierce fighting over the past two days. The clashes were still ongoing.
“Three bases in Iraqi territory were providing assistance to the terrorists…all the bases have fallen into the hands of the [Iranian] forces,” IRNA quoted Ranjbarzadeh as saying. He said PJAK members have sustained a “heavy and historic defeat.”
Iranian media often report clashes in western Iran between security forces and Kurdish terrorists said to be members of PJAK, an offshoot of the Turkey-based Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which took up arms in 1984 seeking to form an ethnic homeland for Kurds in southeastern Turkey and northwestern Iran. Like Iraq and Turkey, Iran has a large Kurdish population, mainly living in the northwestern and western areas of the Islamic republic.
PJAK says Iranian forces entered Iraq's semi-autonomous Kurdish region to fight them. They claim that PJAK has killed 53 Iranian soldiers and wounded 43 while only two PJAK members were killed and seven wounded in the fighting.
Iran threatened last week to attack PJAK bases in Iraqi Kurdistan after accusing the president of the regional government, Massoud Barzani, of providing bases to the group without informing the central government in Baghdad. Iran has accused the US, Britain and Israel of seeking to incite tension on Iran's borders to undermine the government in Tehran, charges those countries have denied.
Iran and Iraq fought an eight-year war in the 1980s, but since the overthrow in 2003 of Iraq's Saddam Hussein, a Sunni, relations between majority-Shiite Iraq and predominantly Shiite Iran have improved.
According to intelligence reports, there are an estimated 600 PJAK terrorists and nearly 4,000 PKK members in northern Iraq.
More than 40,000 soldiers and civilians have been killed in the clashes between Turkish security forces and the PKK thus far. The PKK has been declared a terrorist organization by several members of the international community, including the US and the EU. The US branded PJAK a terrorist organization in February 2010 and prohibited American citizens from doing business with the group.
Among the many significant decisions made in cooperation between Iranian and Turkish security forces, the secret security services of both Turkey and Iran have confirmed that they will provide real-time intelligence as part of a two-way process to fight terrorism.
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