In the early hours of 17 August 2026, two explosive drones struck the private office of Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) Prime Minister Masrour Barzani and the residence of the head of Parastin, the KRG’s intelligence agency, in Erbil. The Kurdistan Counter-Terrorism Service said the drones, identified as Iranian-origin Hadid-110 loitering munitions, were launched from Iranian territory. Barzani condemned the strike as a threat to the region’s stability and directly pointed at Iran. Iran’s Foreign Minister, Abbas Araghchi, denied responsibility on X, warning of ‘false-flag ploys’ meant to sow discord.
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The strike advances through Kurdish political ranks, from opposition camps to KDP leaders’ residences during the February, April war, ending at the prime minister’s office. But it is not just a war against armed groups or any single one. None of the exiled parties in Iran’s sights, PDKI, Komala, PJAK, PAK, has waged a sustained offensive campaign against Iran in over a decade, and most of the campaign’s victims have had no connection to any of them. The attacks are on organisational capacity in the broadest sense: the demonstrated ability of Kurdish networks, armed, unarmed, familial, cultural, to mobilise a domestic public. Therefore, the attacks inside the Kurdistan Region and the executions, killings, and disappearances inside Iran are two sides of the same coin.
Iran’s campaign started weeks before the US-Israeli strikes on 28 February 2026, triggered by Kurdish civil mobilisation. On 5 January, Kurdish parties called for a general strike, which spread across over fifty towns in Kurdistan, Kermanshah, West Azerbaijan, and Ilam provinces. Towns like Abdanan and Malekshahi reportedly slipped from state control as security withdrew. One party, PAK, later acknowledged it had maintained networks linked to the protests, an admission that clarifies what Tehran fears: not infiltration by armed units, but an exiled apparatus capable of organising a domestic public. But the mobilisation itself was overwhelmingly civilian and so has been Iran’s targets.
Iran’s retaliation began almost immediately with strikes on PAK positions from January 21, and more notably, a wave of arrests, prosecutions, and killings of Kurdish civilians with no party links. No Kurdish armed group had attacked inside Iran in a sustained way since PJAK’s 2011 ceasefire with the Revolutionary Guard. Over a decade of restraint has shown Iran is not punishing an insurgency but a public moved by an exile’s appeal in one week.
When the war began on 28 February, this campaign merged into the wider conflict. Washington and Israeli officials claimed arming Iranian Kurdish fighters was a lever against Tehran. The Kurdish parties declined the offer and denied receiving arms from the US despite repeated claims by President Trump. However, such distancing achieved nothing as the regime’s attacks persist on armed groups, the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, and civilians. Community Peacemaker Teams documented 751 attacks on the Kurdistan Region between 28 February and 28 May; by early August, Rudaw’s tally had reached roughly 855 strikes, with at least twenty dead. A regime responding to armed provocation would have targeted fighters at the war’s height, but instead, it used its heaviest weapons on unarmed civilians at home.
Set beside events in Kurdistan Region, Iran’s recent actions since January highlight a broader campaign against Kurdish civil society, not just armed factions. Iranian courts have sentenced many Kurdish detainees to death, mainly on charges of moharebeh (‘waging war against God’) and afsad-i fil-arz (‘spreading corruption on earth’), which serve as broad tools against dissent rather than evidence of violence. Ashkan Maleki and Mehrdad Mohammadinia, two Kurdish men from Qorveh arrested during the January protests, were secretly executed on 1 June after being accused, via televised coerced confessions, of acting for ‘hostile governments’. By Hengaw’s count, Iran executed at least 36 Kurdish prisoners between January and mid-June 2026. The numbers keep increasing since then. None of these cases alleges the condemned fired a weapon; they allege membership, coordination, association.
Along with executions, the killings of unarmed activists follow a recognisable script. On 20 August, intelligence forces in Kermanshah shot dead Pouria Naderi, a 29-year-old Yarsani Kurdish activist and former Woman, Life, Freedom detainee who had refused a summons and been under pursuit since January. According to Hengaw, the same officer involved in Naderi’s killing had earlier overseen the killing of two brothers who ran a Kurdish cultural library in the same city. Officials again described an ‘armed clash’. On 16 August, Ministry of Intelligence forces detained Nazanin Hosseinpour, a 34-year-old mother of two in Piranshahr whose husband has cancer; four days on, her family has been told nothing, and her only stated link to any opposition is that her father belongs to a Kurdish party abroad. And on 19 August, media and language activist Abed Alizadeh was seized in Takab for social-media posts defending protesters and promoting Kurdish language teaching, joining a documented run of similar arrests this year: a writer, a cultural-association member, a mother-tongue educator, that Hengaw has tallied at fifteen just in 2025. None of these people held a weapon; their offence was civic activities or family membership.
The same logic crosses the border. On 27 June, an Erbil-based member of one exiled party, PAK, was found dead in his hotel room, killed, the party alleges, by Iranian intelligence, a political operative, not a fighter. On 1 July, six PDKI Peshmerga were killed in an ambush near Piranshahr while on what the party called a political and organisational mission, not a combat operation. Most tellingly, on 26 July, IRGC intelligence forces shot dead Mehdi Tavakoli, director of the Kurdistan Photographers’ House and founder of the Chaw Art House, along with his mother and sister, as their car was fired on near Sanandaj. State media claimed the car’s occupants were armed militants killed in a clash; no evidence of any clash has surfaced, and the family was pressured to call it an accident. That a cultural organiser had to be recast, in the state’s own telling, as a combatant only underlines that his real offence was organisational. None of this required the war, and none tracked its rhythm. It is into this pattern that the strike on Barzani’s office belongs: an attack on the one government still willing to let organised Kurdish opposition, and the civilians it can reach, continue to exist.
Iran aims to eliminate Kurdish alternatives, armed or civilian, a goal dating back to the 1989 assassination of PDKI leader Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou in Vienna. The current campaign clearly reveals Tehran’s fears. Previously, Iranian Kurdish parties were seen as armed separatists, with cross-border strikes justified as counter-terrorism. Now, those parties have not engaged in armed conflict for over a decade; their recent activities stem from a general strike, not a battlefield clash. An insurgency can be contained by denying weapons, but an organised opposition with public support cannot. That is why membership, associations, and authorship are now lethal. The drone over Masrour Barzani’s office was mainly a message to the one government still permitting an organised Kurdish opposition.
Yunus Abakay is a researcher at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter, specialising in social theory and political studies, with particular expertise in Kurdish politics.
What stands out in this analysis is the distinction between targeting armed capability and targeting organizational capacity.
From a field-informed strategic perspective, these are not the same problem. An armed organization can be measured through weapons, personnel, territory and operational activity. Organizational capacity is broader: it includes networks, communication, social relationships, political legitimacy, recruitment, information flows and the ability to mobilize under pressure.
This distinction changes the strategic calculation.
Pressure against a network may produce an immediate tactical effect, but it can also generate adaptation. Organizations may disperse, change their methods, move activity into different social or political spaces, or develop new forms of resilience. The same pressure can therefore produce consequences beyond the original target.
The critical question is not simply whether a campaign can disrupt a network today. It is whether the campaign reduces that network's capacity to adapt tomorrow — or instead transforms the network into a more dispersed and resilient system.
This is where tactical effect and strategic outcome must be separated.
The strategic outcome becomes clearer only after asking what remains possible following sustained pressure: What organizational capacity survives? What forms of adaptation emerge? Which actors retain freedom of action? And which future options have been eliminated or unintentionally created?
In that sense, the deeper issue is not only the suppression of an opposition movement. It is the interaction between pressure, organizational resilience, adaptation and the preservation or loss of strategic options.
Wahidullah Noorzai (NIDA)
Field Strategist | Military & Security Analyst | Field-Informed Strategic Reasoning