Trump states he has excluded Kurdish forces from joining the Iran war

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President Donald Trump stated that he has informed Kurdish forces not to enter the Iran war while the US and Israel continue to launch strikes against Tehran.

“As you know, we are very friendly with the Kurds, but we don’t want to make the war any more complicated than it already is. I have excluded that, I don’t want the Kurds to go in,” Trump said on Air Force One on Saturday while on his way back to Florida after attending a military service for six fallen US soldiers.

Israel’s military had been facilitating the path for Kurdish forces to take positions in Iran’s northwest, with the ultimate goal of inciting armed Kurds to revolt against Tehran.

Trump said he has “had a good relationship” with the Kurds and they have told him they are “willing to go in” to Iran. “But we really, I’ve told them, I don’t want them to go,” he added.

Airstrikes have targeted Iranian military and law enforcement in the largely Kurdish region adjacent to northern Iraq, where US aerial protection in 1991 helped establish a semi-autonomous Iraqi Kurdish administration in Erbil. The US and its allies have relied on the Kurds, the world’s largest ethnic group without its own state, in neighboring conflict zones.

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Kurds entering the war against Iran could have broader repercussions and Iraqi Kurd leaders are hesitant to commit, according to a person familiar with their thinking.

On Thursday, Ali Larijani, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, said they have already attacked Kurdish groups in Iraq and warned that the country would not tolerate separatist movements, while Turkey said organizations promoting Kurdish separatism threaten regional stability and the territorial integrity of neighboring states.

While some Kurdish factions are preparing for potential cross-border operations into Iran, Dlawer Ala’Aldeen, founding president of the Erbil-based Middle East Research Institute, said the groups remain fragmented and lack the ability to directly challenge the Iranian state despite posing a potential pressure point on its borders.