The Trump administration should continue keeping US Army bases in the autonomous Kurdish Region of Iraq as a deterrence to Iran, according to Hussein Yazdanpanah, president of the Kurdistan Freedom Party (PAK) and commander in chief of the Kurdistan National Army.
“The Kurdistan Region needs the assistance of the major powers to overcome Iran’s hegemony,” he recently told The Jerusalem Post.
Major powers such as the United States, Israel, and Saudi Arabia must not abandon the Kurds, Yazdanpanah said.
The PAK is a Kurdish nationalist and separatist fighter group with roots in the Kurdish region of Iran, which Kurds refer to as Rojhelat, or Eastern Kurdistan. It is based in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI). Rojhelat is Iran’s most heavily militarized and oppressed region.
It is home to Iran’s estimated 10 to 15 million Kurds, or about 10%-17% of Iran’s population, as well as being strategically located along the borders with the Kurdish regions of Turkey and Iraq.
Last week, Mazloum Abdi, general commander of the US-backed and Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), delivered a key address at the Middle East Peace and Security Forum (MEPS 2025) in the Kurdish city of Duhok in the Kurdish Region of Iraq.
He called for dialogue with the regime in Damascus and decentralization where regions govern themselves.
Yazdanpanah said decentralization was “meaningless,” adding that the “need to go to the root of the Kurdish problem, which lies in the very nature of what Syria is about – an artificial state.”
“Syria, as a nation-state, has not existed in history,” he said. “Whereas Kurds are a nation – an indigenous and ancient nation.”
Syria was weak from birth, marked by regular bloody coups, Yazdanpanah said. The only stability it saw was during the ruthless Assad rule, which promoted pan-Arab nationalism, not Syrian nationalism, he added.
“Kurds cannot continue living on the margins as they have for the past 100 years,” Yazdanpanah said.
“You have seen for yourselves that more than 20 years after the fall of Saddam Hussein, Baghdad is still a threat to the autonomous Kurdish Region in Iraq,” he said.
Iran’s Hegemony over Iraq, the Kurdish Factor, the Iran–Israel War
Once the current Arab-Islamist regime in Damascus “gains its strength and control,” it will “attack the Kurds and commit similar mass murder as it committed against Druze civilians in Sweida,” Yazdanpanah said.
“We have brotherly relations with the leaders of South Kurdistan (KRI), and the security and prosperity of South Kurdistan are very crucial for PAK,” he told the Post. “However, due to Tehran’s hegemony over Iraq and pressures from the central government in Baghdad on the Kurdistan Region, we were not invited to the [MEPS 2025 conference in Duhok].”
According to Hussain Abdul-Hussain, a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), “With pan-Arab nationalism dead, Syria has reverted to its primordial tribal configuration, where Muslims see themselves as the ruling tribe.”
That leaves non-Muslims and non-Arab ethnic minorities existing at their mercy or “relegated to second-class status,” he said.
When ISIS attacked the Kurdish regions of Iraq and Syria in 2014, PAK’s male and female fighters joined the front lines from Kirkuk to Kobane, assisting Kurdish fighters in Syria and Iraq.
PAK also played a central role in the fight against Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), an Iranian Shia-backed militia and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force when they tried to invade Erbil, the capital of the Kurdish Region in Iraq, following the independence referendum of September 2017.
On June 13, PAK was one of the few daring Kurdish groups that openly welcomed and supported the Israeli attack against Iran and called for a nationwide uprising, despite the fear of a brutal crackdown.
PAK called on Kurds to attack Iranian regime targets and avenge the tens of thousands of Kurds who were massacred by the mullahs.
After the military humiliation the Iranian regime suffered during the 12-day war between Israel and Iran, which subsequently led to a brutal crackdown, the Kurds were on the receiving end.
The 12-day war revealed critical weaknesses in the mullah regime’s military, strategic, and ideological frameworks. The regime carried out a wave of arrests and multiple executions of people it called “Zionist collaborators.”
Most of the arrests were made in the Kurdish region. A number of Kurdish men were charged with espionage and publicly executed.
Since the beginning of 2025, more than 1,500 people have been executed in Iran, with Kurds making up the largest share among targeted minority groups.
Amnesty International called the rate of capital punishment the “highest figure recorded in decades.” This move by the regime was intended to suppress dissent and bully populations in minority-populated regions of Iran.
Suzan Quitaz is a Kurdish-Swedish journalist and researcher on Middle Eastern affairs. She was an Israel-based journalist and podcast presenter for an Arabic and English series, “Exposing the Lies – The Voice of Truth from the Middle East,” at The Jerusalem Centre for Security and Foreign Affairs. She previously worked as a field producer and journalist at a number of Qatari media outlets.