“There are no real obstacles, our teams met today to continue discussions,” head of the KDPI Mustafa Hijri told Rudaw’s Jaafar Mubasher in an interview. “It is normal for any bilateral discussion to have topics that need further talks.”
The KDPI is a Kurdish party that has waged an on-and-off armed war against the Iranian government since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
In the 1980s, it fought alongside other Kurdish parties in a war against the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Crops (IRGC) and other security forces in Kurdish areas of northwestern Iran, also known as Rojhelat, when larger opposition eventually forced them out. Since that decade, they have been based in the autonomous Kurdistan Region in northern Iraq, prompting Iran to shell areas in the region in what it says are efforts to target the group.
The party split after its 13th congress in 2006. The KDPI and Iran’s Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP-Iran) have been engaged in several rounds of unification talks over the years. But the duration of the talks raise skepticism regarding whether the parties will actually reunite.
“There are some details that need to be agreed on, such as reunification of our peshmerga forces, and how we hold our conferences,” he said. “We both want to make sure that there are no obstacles left, and we agree on everything, and then we will reunite.”
According to Hijri, the discussions are set to reach a conclusion by Newroz, the Kurdish new year on March 21.
“If by then it does not work, then there is not much new to discuss,” he said.
Hijri told Rudaw late last year that despite certainty being hard to come by in politics, “I can say from our side we are serious about this unification, because this is important for the unity of Kurds in Rojhelat [Iranian Kurdistan] in our opinion.”
