Trump, Iran & The Kurds: A People Used and Abandoned Again?
- Sherko Sabir
- 4 hours ago
- 8 min read
As Washington sharpens its posture toward Tehran, Kurdish fighters are once again being courted as indispensable allies. But history asks a painful question — what happens to the Kurds when the war is over?
Table of Contents
Background: The Kurds and American Power
For over a century, the Kurdish people — numbering between 35 and 45 million across Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran — have found themselves at the intersection of great power rivalries. Stateless and spread across four nations, they have repeatedly been drawn into alliances with foreign powers who valued their military capability, their territorial knowledge, and their fierce resistance. And repeatedly, when those powers had secured what they came for, the Kurds were left behind.
The United States has been no exception. From the CIA's covert backing of Kurdish rebels in Iraq during the 1970s — abruptly cut off after the Algiers Agreement between Washington's then-ally Saddam Hussein and Iran — to the post-2003 partnership in Iraqi Kurdistan, to the remarkable battlefield alliance with the Syrian Kurdish forces of the YPG and SDF during the war against ISIS, America has consistently turned to the Kurds when it needed them most.
That relationship reached its most intense modern expression under the anti-ISIS campaign, when Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Syrian Democratic Forces became the primary ground force in dismantling the Islamic State's so-called caliphate. Thousands of Kurdish soldiers died in that fight. And yet, as events in 2019 would demonstrate, American loyalty had its limits.
The 2019 Betrayal: Abandoned to Turkish Forces
In October 2019, Donald Trump — then in his first term as President of the United States — made a phone call to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan that would have devastating consequences for the Kurdish people of northeastern Syria. Within days, Trump announced the withdrawal of American troops from the Syrian border region, effectively clearing the path for a Turkish military offensive against the very Kurdish forces that had fought alongside U.S. soldiers to defeat ISIS.
The SDF — the Syrian Democratic Forces, Kurdish-led and U.S.-backed — had just weeks before been integral to the final defeat of ISIS. Now, with American troops pulling back, they faced Turkish artillery, drones, and proxy militias largely alone. The operation, dubbed "Operation Peace Spring" by Ankara, was condemned internationally as a brutal invasion of Kurdish-held territory. Hundreds of thousands of Kurdish civilians were displaced. Kurdish fighters who had spent years battling ISIS were forced to abandon front lines and rush to defend their own towns.
Critics across the political spectrum — including senior Republican figures like Senator Lindsey Graham and former Defence Secretary James Mattis — condemned the decision in stark terms. Former ISIS prisoners escaped as Kurdish guards were redeployed to fight the Turkish advance.
"The Kurds are fighting for their land. They didn't help us in the Second World War, they didn't help us with Normandy." — Donald Trump, defending the Syria withdrawal, October 2019
That remark was widely reported as one of the most callous dismissals of a loyal ally in recent American foreign policy memory. It ignored not only the thousands of Kurdish lives lost fighting ISIS alongside U.S. forces, but the immense strategic value the Kurds had provided at enormous cost to themselves. Trump later imposed limited sanctions on Turkey and called the situation "very bad" — but the troops did not return, the offensive continued, and Kurdish-controlled territory shrank permanently. The message to the Kurds, and to Washington's allies more broadly, was unmistakable: American protection could be revoked in a single phone call.
A Longer Pattern: Decades of Broken Promises
To understand 2019, it helps to understand that it was not an aberration. It was the latest chapter in a pattern so consistent that Kurdish political thinkers have a phrase for it: the Kurds have no friends but the mountains. Time and again, external powers have armed and mobilised Kurdish fighters, only to abandon them when geopolitical calculations shifted.
1975 — The Algiers Betrayal: The United States and the Shah of Iran abruptly cut off support for Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq after the Algiers Agreement with Saddam Hussein. Kurdish leader Mulla Mustafa Barzani was left without weapons, funds, or refuge. Tens of thousands of Kurds fled or were captured.
1988 — Silence Over Halabja: Saddam Hussein's regime killed up to 5,000 Kurdish civilians with chemical weapons in the town of Halabja. The United States, then backing Iraq in its war with Iran, offered no meaningful condemnation and blocked UN resolutions criticising Baghdad.
1991 — The Uprising That Was Left to Bleed: After President George H.W. Bush called on Iraqis to rise up against Saddam, Kurds and Shia Arabs did exactly that. America stood back as Saddam's forces crushed the uprising with helicopter gunships, killing thousands. Roughly two million Kurds fled to the mountains.
2019 — Trump's Syria Withdrawal: American forces pulled back from the Syrian border following a Trump-Erdoğan phone call, opening the door for Turkey's Operation Peace Spring and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Kurds who had been U.S. partners in the defeat of ISIS.
Each of these moments followed the same arc: a period of usefulness, a strategic pivot by Washington, and a Kurdish population left to face the consequences alone. The pattern is so established that it now forms part of how Kurds understand their position in the world — not with bitterness alone, but with a hardened pragmatism about what outside alliances can and cannot provide.
Trump's New Iran Confrontation and the Kurdish Card
Donald Trump's return to the White House in January 2025 brought with it an aggressive reinvigoration of the so-called "maximum pressure" campaign against Iran. Sanctions were tightened, diplomatic channels narrowed, and American military posture in the Middle East was once again raised to a state of heightened readiness. As 2025 moved into 2026, the spectre of direct military confrontation between the United States and Iran grew into a pressing reality.
In this context, the Kurds — particularly the Kurdish communities of northwestern Iran, the KDPI and Komala parties, and the broader Kurdish population stretching across Iraqi Kurdistan toward the Iranian border — have again emerged in Washington's strategic calculations. Kurdish groups in Iran have long been marginalised, persecuted, and denied basic cultural and political rights by Tehran. They have their own grievances, their own fighters, and their own desire for autonomy or independence that could, in theory, align with American interests in destabilising or pressuring the Iranian government.
Reports have emerged of renewed U.S. contacts with Kurdish opposition groups in Iran, and of increased American interest in Iraqi Kurdistan as a staging ground for intelligence operations. For Trump specifically, Kurdish groups within Iran represent a potential disruptive force that could tie down Iranian military and security resources, gather intelligence, and apply pressure from within. In any scenario short of full-scale war, they offer deniability. In a scenario of open conflict, they offer a ground presence without the need for large American troop deployments — which Trump has consistently sought to avoid.
Senior U.S. officials have spoken of supporting "regional partners" — a phrase whose ambiguity is itself deliberate. But Kurdish analysts and diaspora leaders have been clear: when American strategists speak of regional partners in the context of Iran, they are often speaking of Kurds. The question, as always, is not whether America wants Kurdish cooperation. It is what America is prepared to give in return — and for how long.
The Kurdish Calculus: Risk vs. Necessity
The question of whether Kurdish groups should align with Washington in any new Iran confrontation is one that divides Kurdish political opinion deeply. On one side, there are those who argue that strategic engagement with the United States — however fraught with historical risk — remains one of the few paths toward securing meaningful international recognition and leverage. On the other, there are those who have watched 2019 unfold in real time and argue that the lesson of that betrayal cannot simply be set aside.
Kurdish leaders in Erbil, in the diaspora, and among the Iranian Kurdish opposition parties are navigating this with extreme care. They know that Trump's interest in them is transactional. They know that the moment an agreement with Tehran becomes strategically preferable to continued confrontation, Kurdish interests will be traded away. This is not speculation — it is the lesson of 1975, of 1991, and of 2019. It is history, written in Kurdish blood.
The Kurds are not naive. They have read history. The question is whether, this time, any alliance with Washington can be structured to protect them when the wind changes — or whether they are once again being offered a blank cheque that will bounce.
At the same time, the Iranian Kurdish population faces genuine and severe repression under the current regime in Tehran. The Islamic Republic has consistently suppressed Kurdish political activity, banned the Kurdish language from public use, executed Kurdish activists, and carried out cross-border strikes against Kurdish groups based in Iraq. For many Kurds in Iran, the possibility — however fragile — of American support for their cause carries real and urgent meaning.
The Iraqi Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) finds itself in a particularly delicate position. It shares a long and economically vital border with Iran. Iranian influence in Baghdad is substantial. Any open alignment with a U.S. anti-Iran campaign carries severe risks of economic punishment and potential military retaliation from Tehran. And yet the KRG also cannot afford to wholly alienate Washington, which remains its ultimate security guarantor and a counterweight to Turkish and Iranian pressure alike.
Conclusion: Will History Repeat Itself?
The pattern is clear. The Kurds — across Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and Iran — possess something the great powers want: fighting capability, territorial presence, local knowledge, and political legitimacy among their own people. They are repeatedly invited into alliances on terms that favour the stronger party. And when those alliances have served their purpose, the Kurds are discarded with remarkable consistency.
Donald Trump's record with the Kurdish people is not ambiguous. In 2019, he made a decision that exposed Kurdish civilians and fighters to Turkish military assault, and he justified that decision with language that was dismissive and historically illiterate. That the same man now seeks Kurdish cooperation against Iran is not surprising — it is, in fact, entirely consistent with how Washington has always approached the Kurdish question: as a resource to be used, not a people to be protected.
This is not to say that Kurdish groups should refuse all engagement with the outside world. Geopolitical survival sometimes demands uncomfortable alliances. But any such engagement must be entered into with eyes fully open, with written security guarantees where possible, with international witnesses, and with a clear understanding that American commitment is contingent, not permanent.
The Kurdish people deserve more than to be a recurring instrument of other nations' foreign policy. Until the United States is prepared to stand behind its Kurdish allies not only when it is convenient, but when it is costly, the mountains will remain the only reliable friends the Kurds have. History is watching. And the Kurdish people, who have survived empires, genocides, chemical attacks, and countless betrayals, are watching too — with long memories and, increasingly, with a demand that this time, things must be different.
Written by Sherko Sabir | Kurdish News
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