For most of the news media, the United States and Israel’s war on Iran has fallen off the agenda, but the story is far from over, and has many prequels. This history is vital for understanding the situation today, and because it is far from simple, I will summarise it over the course of two articles. This first article ends with the establishment of the Islamic Republic. Protests against that republic will be the subject of part 2.
Imperial machinations
Like other conflicts and wars in the region, Iran’s troubled relations with the United States and Israel — and also with the Iranian Kurds — have their roots in the poisonous soil of European imperialism.
The border between Rojehlat — Eastern or Iranian Kurdistan — and the other parts of Kurdistan has hardly changed since the 17th Century, but the division of the rest of Kurdistan by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, and the treaty’s failure to recognise a Kurdish state, weakened the position of Kurds everywhere.
While Lausanne followed the imperial conflict that we know as World War I, World War II — in many ways a continuation of the former — was followed by the creation of Israel and international recognition of the Zionist settler colonial project.
WWI helped catalyse the Russian Revolution and the subsequent global competition between the forces of communism and capitalist imperialism. WWII allowed this to transform into the Cold War between East and West. In both these periods, as still today, an overriding mission of Western governments has been the crushing of any emergence of communism, or even socialism.
Its geographical separation from WWII, and relatively late entry into the conflict, gave the US economic, political and military dominance, and enabled the growth of its military-industrial complex, whose power President Dwight Eisenhower warned about in his farewell address in 1961. This power has been used to intervene in other countries to prevent the immergence of left forces and unseat governments out of line with US capitalist interests.
An Anglo-American coup
During the 19th Century, Iran fell under increasing economic dominance by European imperial powers. Iran’s leaders gave away economic concessions in exchange for short-term gains, and early last century the British Anglo Persian Oil Company took control of the oil fields of south-west Iran.
In 1953, it was Iran’s turn to undergo a CIA regime change — in this case a joint operation organised by the US and the old imperial power, Britian. The Iranian parliament had voted to nationalise the oil industry — a challenge to Western commercial interests that was deemed intolerable. Prime Minister Mohamad Mosaddegh was removed in a coup and power was consolidated under the Shah, Mohammad-Reza Pahlavi, who had first been put in control by Britain and Russia during the war, when his father had refused to let the Allies use the trans-Iranian railway.
Revolution and counter revolution
The Shah maintained his rule through his notorious secret police, the Savak, but by the 1970s, economic hardship and inequality were becoming increasingly unbearable. In 1978-9, a mass movement strengthened by workers — especially oil workers — crippled the country and forced the Shah to flee.
Support for the left was surging, and workers’ strike committees were creating kernels of alternative organisation when Ayatollah Khomeini returned from exile in France. Khomeini was able to appeal to the more conservative elements, especially small businessmen and the rural, or recently rural poor, while neutralising potential opposition through superficially progressive rhetoric. One by one, Khomeini crushed those opposing him — secular leftists, Islamic leftists, women, groups seeking national autonomy. He had no hesitation in carrying out mass assassinations in order to impose his version of Islamic rule, and impose himself as supreme leader.
Khomeini was able to do this because he initially had the West’s backing — as a safe anti-left alternative — and because many of the left party leaders failed to understand the threat he posed, casting him as a “progressive bourgeois” who they should work with rather than oppose.
The Great Satan and the Axis of Evil
In November 1979, Iranian student activists took over the US embassy in the capital Tehran, taking 66 Americans hostage and demanding the extradition of the shah, who had gone to the US for cancer treatment. Fifty-two of the hostages were not released until January 1981. Khomeini supported the hostage taking, calling the US “the Great Satan”, and in 1980 the US cut off diplomatic relations with Iran. US sanctions against Iran were brought in in response to the hostage taking and were tightened several times, with drastic impacts on people’s living standards.
During the 1980s, the US gave support to Iraq in the Iran-Iraq War, and in 1984 President Ronald Regan designated Iran a “state sponsor of terror” following attacks on the US military in Lebanon by the Iranian-backed Hezbollah.
With the US’s “war against terror”, following 9/11, President George Bush declared Iran to be part of an “axis of evil”, alongside Iraq and North Korea. Meanwhile, fears that Iran was developing nuclear weapons led to more sanctions by the US, European Union and UN.
In 2015, Iran agreed to a deal whereby they would limit nuclear development and submit to regular inspections in exchange for the lifting of these sanctions. However, in 2018 President Donald Trump pulled out of the agreement and reinstated sanctions. In the early summer of 2019, explosions blamed on Iran hit oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman, and Iran shot down a US drone. The US assassinated Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, head of Iran’s elite Quds Force, the following year.
Israel – enemy and rival
Under the shah, relations between Iran and Israel had been good, reflecting shared alignment with the US and against pan-Arabism. Israelis helped develop Iran’s military and secret service.
Relations changed with the revolution, when Komeini declared Israel an enemy of Islam and handed the Israeli embassy to the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) — though the Iran-Iraq war forced Iran to continue to rely on buying Israeli weapons for some years.
The Islamic Republic’s support for the Palestinians is both ideological — as fellow Muslims — and strategic. They want to win support as defenders of Islam, and to distract attention from continued economic hardship.
After Israel invaded Lebanon in1982 — a time when eleven members of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) died fighting alongside the PLO, with whom they had been training — Iran helped organise Lebanese Shia and create Hezbollah.
The end of the Cold War and the defeat of Iraq in the Gulf War left Iran and Israel competing for regional dominance under the US, the one remaining superpower.
Government oppression and Kurdish resistance
Kurds — who make up 12-15% of Iran’s population — suffered under the ethnic nationalism of the shah and were active in the revolution. They fought for autonomy — not to replace one autocratic centralised regime with another — and the Kurdish provinces held out the longest against Khomeini’s Islamic republic. The Kurdish resistance was largely led by the leftist Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI) and also Komola, the Society of the Revolutionary Toilers of Iranian Kurdistan. In August 1980, Khomeini declared a jihad against the “infidel” Kurds, so licensing extreme brutality by the regime’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. By the end of 1981, Kurdish resistance was largely defeated, with small-scale fighting continuing into 1983.
Kurdish struggles for rights and freedom have become entangled in rivalries between regional powers, exploiting these divisions and being exploited by them. In the Iran-Iraq war, support given to Iran by Kurds persecuted by the Iraqi government helped bring the full wrath of Saddam Hussein down on the Iraqi Kurdish towns and villages, including Halabja where Saddam’s military massacred 5000 people in a chemical attack. (Palestinian reverence for Saddam as a supporter of their cause has undoubtedly complicated relations with the Kurds.)
The Islamic Republic proved to be every bit as racist towards non-Persians as the shah had been, as well as prejudiced against Sunnis, which most Kurds are. Rather than attempt to win Kurdish support, the government has kept control over the Kurdish regions through economic deprivation, and massive and pervasive securitisation. Overt political opposition of any kind is impossible in Iran, where even campaigning on ecological issues can land you in prison, and the remnants of the KDPI and Komola moved across the border, with their families, to refugee camps in Iraq.
The Kurdistan Free Life Party (PJAK) was founded in 2004 to propagate the ideas of Abdullah Öcalan in Rojhelat, but Öcalan’s influence there was already strong, as demonstrated by the mass protests at the time of his capture in 1999. PJAK guerrillas are based in the border mountains.
But the story of resistance – general and Kurdish – must wait for Part 2
[Sarah Glynn is a writer and activist – visit her website and follow her on X or bluesky.]