ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and units of the Kurdish opposition group Kurdistan Free Life Party (PJAK) clashed near Mahabad in western Iran on Sunday, two days after another clash in the area left two members of the Iranian security forces dead and two others wounded.
In a short statement late Sunday, PJAK said the IRGC had launched an operation in the Gagosh area, south of Mahabad in West Azerbaijan province, triggering clashes between PJAK fighters and IRGC forces.
“The IRGC has started an operation in the village of Gagosh in the Mahabad region and, based on our information, the clashes have continued until now,” PJAK said, adding that it had no further accurate information about the fighting.
The IRGC has not released any information regarding the reported clashes in Mahabad. The incident marks the second such confrontation within a week between Kurdish opposition groups and Iranian security forces.
The IRGC has been on high alert in Kurdish areas since late February, when the US and Israel carried out an extensive aerial bombing campaign targeting thousands of locations across Iran. IRGC bases in Kurdish areas were heavily bombed, mostly by Israeli warplanes and drones, weakening the force’s grip on the region.
The IRGC mobilized thousands of its Kurdish militia members and deployed them to border areas to stop an imminent attack by Kurdish opposition groups, which were poised to enter western Iran in the early days of the war before President Donald Trump halted the operation.
The clashes in Mahabad came two days after a checkpoint at the entrance of Baneh city in Kurdistan province was attacked by a unit of a Kurdish opposition group, killing two members of the security forces and wounding two others. No group has claimed responsibility for the attack.
Since the beginning of the US-Iran war, the bases of Iranian Kurdish opposition groups in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq have come under hundreds of missile and drone attacks by the IRGC and its affiliated Iraqi militias. Despite a fragile ceasefire, the attacks have continued.
The IRGC maintains that Iraq and the Kurdistan Region must disarm or expel Iranian Kurdish opposition groups from their territory, and has reserved the right to attack them at will.
On Saturday, the body of a member of one of the Iranian Kurdish opposition groups was found stabbed to death in Erbil, prompting the party to accuse Tehran of being behind the killing.
Iran has carried out a series of assassinations in the Kurdistan Region over the past decade, killing several officials and members of opposition groups. The IRGC’s Ramazan Headquarters, responsible for the Kurdistan Region, and Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence carried out an assassination campaign in the early 1990s that killed nearly 300 members of various Iranian Kurdish opposition groups, mostly in Sulaimani and Erbil provinces.
Gagosh, where the recent clashes have occurred, is a village in the Mangur-e Sharqi rural district of Khalifan in Mahabad county, West Azerbaijan province.
