Thirty-five years ago on Tuesday, a posse of Iranian students stormed over the gates of the US embassy in Tehran and provoked a crisis with America whose wounds are yet to heal.
The 444-day Tehran Embassy hostage crisis, which finally ended in early 1981 with the freeing of 52 American captives, was the defining event of a tumultuous year.
The month after the takeover, Soviet troops entered Afghanistan, and before the hostage crisis was over, Iran and Iraq were at war.
America’s inability to free its diplomats – one abortive rescue attempt ended in disaster – crippled US foreign policy and undermined the presidency of Jimmy Carter.
The daily focus on the fate of the hostages also drew attention away from other dramas, among them a bloody campaign by Iran’s new Islamic masters to crush a revolt by the country’s Kurds.
In an atmosphere of paranoia that marked the early months of the revolution that triumphed in February 1979, a Shia clergy intent on monopolising power saw former allies on the left and among Iran’s ethnic minorities, above all the Kurds, as potential enemies.
The hostage takeover was sparked by a US decision to admit the exiled Shah for medical treatment. It was seen as a sign of America’s antipathy towards the revolution. One of the students’ first demands was for his extradition.
The self-styled Students in the Imam’s Line had the full backing of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of the revolution, and other senior clerics, although it took some time for that to sink in among officials in Washington.
The embassy siege was used as a tool by the clergy to diminish the authority of the non-clerical government, purge secularists, take over the process of framing a new constitution and intensify a witch-hunt for domestic enemies.
By the time of the takeover on November 4, the regime was already in conflict with the country’s Kurdish minority. Unrest was to spread elsewhere among Arabs, Baluchis and Azeris.
The Kurds had seen the overthrow of the Shah as an opportunity to secure autonomous rights within the new republic.
But their demands for autonomy and recognition of Kurdish rights – there was no call for independence – put them, in the regime’s eyes, on the side of enemies perceived as plotting the Islamic Republic’s downfall.
Already in March 1979, Kurds – predominantly Sunni – were in revolt against their exclusion from the new Shia-dominated regime.
Khomeini had barred the Kurdish leader, Abdulrahman Qassemlou, from representing his people in the Assembly of Experts that was to draft a new constitution. (Qassemlou was to be murdered in Vienna a decade later by presumed Iranian agents.)
While some Kurdish leaders sought an accommodation with the Islamic Republic, others primarily linked to the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan, opted for an armed struggle.
The ensuing Kurdish revolt spread out from Paveh, where local Kurds seized police and army headquarters.
The regime response was unforgiving. Khomeini proclaimed a jihad against the Kurds and branded their leaders enemies of the state. Tehran deployed warplanes, tanks and artillery against its lightly armed opponents.
By August, and through the early months of the Tehran hostage crisis that was monopolizing the world’s attention, the regime moved to crush resistance in Kurdish strongholds such as Saqqez and Mahabad.
But despite hundreds of battlefield deaths and summary executions, ordered by Hojatoleslam Sadeq Khalkhali, the regime’s so-called ‘hanging judge’, the Kurdish rebels held out in their strongholds until the spring and summer of 1980.
By September, with the embassy hostage crisis in Tehran yet to be resolved, Iranian Kurdistan became a borderland between two warring states following Iraq’s invasion. A low-level Kurdish insurgency stuttered on until 1983.
The extent of the clerical regime’s paranoia about the Kurds can be judged from an exchange between an American hostage and one of his interrogators.
Months into the crisis, John Limbert, a diplomat and a Kurdistan scholar, and one of the 52 American hostages, was dragged from his bed by his guards for the latest of many interrogations.
This time he was questioned by Hossein Sheikholeslam, a leader of the takeover of what the students dubbed the Nest of Spies.
He wanted to know about the diplomat’s contacts. “Tell me about your agents in Kurdistan,” he demanded, according to an account my author Mark Bowden.
Limbert knew about the revolt in Kurdistan and guessed that the embassy’s occupiers must assume he had agents there, fostering a plot against the Islamic Republic.
The diplomat had no such contacts, according to his own account. He had not been in Kurdistan for seven years. The brawny Sheikholeslam, a future Iranian ambassador to Syria, was unconvinced.
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