A referendum on patience

Why Iran’s Kurds chose not to seize their moment, and what that silence really means

By Abduhadi Al-Tamimi

No one could talk Masoud Barzani out of the referendum. Not in Erbil, not in Sulaymaniyah, not anywhere else. Even those in his inner circle tried.

Donald Trump, then deep in the chaos of his first term, fired off angry messages about the vote.

Barzani had spread a map across the table for his advisors, its terrain traced over in red ink. Borders. There were many maps like it, most of them sketched by desire and guesswork, by pacts and disputes that were never settled.

ISIS was still dug into Iraq’s Sunni cities, staring down an inevitable defeat at the hands of a global coalition, and in doing so it had produced a map of its own. One that belonged to it, or perhaps to Iraq’s Sunnis, and that someone might pull from the stack the day the maps start competing.

History might have lost had a Kurd not shrugged off protocol and pressure and calculation to walk forward, turning down requests from world leaders.

Barzani rarely spoke about the referendum after that, or what came next. It was a personal undertaking. He had braced himself for the price, absorbed it with patience, and sometimes with a sadness that has not left his face since, a face that now wears the full weight of his seventies. Someone put it to Trump simply at the time: “A stubborn nationalist leader.”

A stubborn cleric. That was Trump’s verdict on Ali Khamenei nearly a decade later, as he announced the killing of Iran’s supreme leader in the first hours of a war he had branded with the aim of “complete and unconditional surrender,” before revising it loudly from one press conference to the next.

Someone among Iran’s leadership may have tried reasoning with the supreme leader about capitulation. But Khamenei surely knew, early on, that the republic he had steered for four decades had used the rubble from its missile tunnels and drone caverns to seal off every road back from the brink.

Barzani, though, was not Khamenei. All the Kurdish leader ever wanted was a map that someone might one day retrieve during negotiations over the boundary wounds of a nation crushed by cartography. The supreme leader held a different conviction entirely: that his sacred trust was to erase the maps around him, to replay the ancient Persian pattern of revolution and renewal, the conviction that upheaval rises from the east to remake the world, from the Abbasid uprising to the Islamic Revolution.

That is perhaps why Barzani grasps the weight of the Iranian moment more sharply than most. Where others see opportunity, he sees an earthquake.

When Trump called him days into the war to talk about “Iran’s Kurds,” Barzani did not raise what had just happened with the SDF. Erbil had already spent days studying the anguish on their leader’s face in that now-famous photograph alongside Tom Barrack and Mazloum Abdi. But his mind was almost certainly on something more dangerous.

There is an odd thing that links Trump and Barzani at the margins. Trump can cut through war briefings, missile tallies, and nuclear dread to rhapsodize about the spectacular new ballroom he is building in the White House, with its blazing golden curtains. Barzani, too, will interrupt his guests, but only to pull back the curtain of his office on Saladin Mountain and point into the valley below, to the spot where Revolutionary Guard artillery arrived in the 1990s, riding the divisions of Kurdish infighting.

Iraqi Kurds did not answer the call to back a new Kurdish revolution inside Iran during the war. This is not something you can weigh with the calculations an intelligence officer and his AI program found plausible and actionable. These programs miss a great deal at this early stage of their lives. They miss what the people of Iran’s Kurdish cities know in their bones, cities soaked in blood since the last brutal uprising just weeks ago, and the one before it, and the one before that. Cities where dread drips from the gutters of old houses and suspicion leaks through the cracks in the walls.

It is easy enough for an enthusiastic politician, having read somewhere that the Kurd’s only friend is the mountain, to cheer for borders that might rip themselves free from the Middle East’s minefield. It is much harder for him to understand that the mountain is more complicated than a poem.

Stand on either slope and you can see it plainly: Iranian Kurdistan is a mirror of Iraqi Kurdistan. Not just in geography, language, and the social fabric, but in the fractured lineup of parties. Iran engaged them or fought them, backed some and then turned on others, executing them in the squares of Sanandaj. It is no distortion of history to say that the Islamic Republic filed the Iranian Kurdish card, for decades, under the political management of every overlapping complexity in its regional project.

But the mountains keep their own secrets. Hundreds of passes and crossings, tunnels and caves, as old as the Kurds themselves. Their uses shifting with the times, from cigarette smuggling to weapons and artillery.

Iran knows perfectly well, even as it endlessly accuses Erbil of letting Kurdish dissidents slip through, that those borders can never be hermetically sealed. The Revolutionary Guard was tangled up in the game of those porous frontiers for years. Not just to move fighters and weapons when arms served as bargaining chips, but to secure the supply lines of extremism and its enormous crimes between Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria.

The Kurds understand that the drones and missiles falling on their cities today are messages to Iran’s Kurdish cities first, and to Erbil, Sulaymaniyah, the consulate, and the oil and gas fields second.

And these are messages sent by someone who knows. Iran understands, before anyone else, that the authorities in the Kurdistan Region cannot do much if Iran’s Kurds decide to force their own path. They cannot redirect them. They cannot stop fighters crossing through the triangle of no-man’s-land that reaches deep into Iran, sometimes under the Guard’s own protection. Nor can they conjure a revolution ahead of its time. Neither can Trump.

The Islamic Republic never came to Kurdish doors carrying the banner of “One Arab Nation,” as the Baathists did in Syria and Iraq, or the slogan of the Turkish Nation, as Ataturk did. The nationalist tide rising across the region had lifted the Kurdish tide with it. But Iran chose a different route. It waited half a century to force a kind of breakthrough through shared Islam, Sunni or Shia, and it is ready to wait half a century more.

It never quite worked. Iranian Kurdistan never fell in line. And so all eyes turned toward it to deliver the first cut at the banquet of Iran’s partition.

Yet the picture remains tangled.

America is no longer America. It has squandered much of its credibility, even among its closest allies, by walking away from its commitments time and again.

Iran is no longer what it was. At its weakest, it is prepared to rig itself, the region, and entire belief systems with explosives.

The Kurds are no longer what they were. They have gradually left behind the way of armed revolution and committed themselves to the mechanics of international geopolitics.

The world is no longer what it was. Just causes are no longer quite so just. Democracy has been in retreat since the dawn of the technological age.

It will take time to understand why Iran’s Kurds did not seize their moment. It was never their moment to begin with. Perhaps for the first time, they chose not to let the world see them as fighters whose choices can be manipulated, but as the custodians of an experience hewn into the mountainside, one that insists on respect before recognition, from Persians, Arabs, and Turks alike.

Have they squandered their Iranian map? No. They have just begun to draw it anew, with a referendum on patience.

Abduhadi Al-Tamimi is a writer on history and politics. He writes under a pen name.