Trump’s Kurdish flip-flop: exposing the chaos in America’s Iran war strategy

Anyone who still believed that Donald Trump had a clear sense of his objectives in the war against Iran, and a detailed strategy for achieving them, was proven wrong over the weekend. The latest example of Trump’s erratic approach is his handling of the Iranian Kurds. On Thursday, 5 March, in his usual convoluted manner, the US president told the Reuters news agency that he thought it was “wonderful” that the Kurds in Iran wanted to rise up against Tehran. Trump had hoped that the Iranian Kurds, who have decades of experience in armed struggle, would do the dirty work for the US and Israel. But just one day later, on Friday, 7 March, he changed course. “I don’t want the Kurds to go into Iran,” he said on the flight back from the state funeral for fallen US soldiers, adding: “The war is complicated enough as it is.”

It is probably much more complicated than Donald Trump initially assumed. Even the internal complexity of Kurdish politics seems to overwhelm him. On the one hand, there are five Iranian Kurdish parties that formed an alliance on 22 February, called the Coalition of Political Forces of Iranian Kurdistan. This alliance includes parties with opposing political orientations, such as the culturally and economically conservative Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (KDP-I), the social democratic Komala of the Workers of Kurdistan, and the Kurdistan Free Life Party (PJAK), originally an offshoot of the Turkish-Kurdish Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Also involved are the Kurdistan Freedom Party (PAK) and the Organization for the Struggle for Iranian Kurdistan (Khabat). The ideologically fragmented Iranian Kurdish opposition was brought together by intensified repression from the Tehran regime in the weeks leading up to their meeting. In relative terms, Tehran’s crackdown claimed the most victims in Iranian Kurdistan and Baluchistan.

The regional government of Iraqi Kurdistan (KRG) also plays a crucial role. This entity was established in 1992. At that time, the Iraqi Kurds obtained their limited autonomy only because the US toppled Saddam Hussein and plunged Iraq into chaos, from which not only the KRG but also the so‑called Islamic State (IS) emerged. The leaders of the Iranian Kurdish parties are all based in Iraqi Kurdistan, with the tacit approval of the Iraqi Kurdish authorities. That is why Donald Trump personally phoned three leaders of the Iraqi Kurds on Wednesday, 4 March, urging them to provide logistical and military support to the Iranian Kurds as soon as they took up arms. But unlike the Kurds of Iran, the Kurds of Iraq have a great deal to lose: their autonomy and, if not full security and peace, then at least the absence of open war. Moreover, the KRG is extremely vulnerable. It is squeezed between Shia Iran to the east and the Shia‑dominated central government in Baghdad to the south and west. In terms of security, it depends on the US, and economically it is closely intertwined with Turkey. It is therefore no surprise that both its president, Nechirvan Barzani, and the KRG’s second most powerful figure, Bafel Talabani, resisted Trump’s pressure. He told them: “The Kurds must decide: us or Iran!” Turkey was also immediately alarmed. If the Kurds of Iran were actually to launch attacks, the Iraqi Kurdish region would risk becoming a theatre of war involving not only Iran and Baghdad but possibly Turkey as well.

Trump’s vacillation suggests that the US government did not think through the use of Iranian Kurds in any depth. But that is not the only reason why this idea is widely attributed to Israel. Israel has maintained close relations with Kurdish actors for decades. Early in his term, Israel’s foreign minister Gideon Sa’ar described the Kurds as “natural allies of Israel”. This view, however, goes back much further. As early as the 1950s and 1960s, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion focused on all non‑Arab groups in the Middle East as potential allies of Israel. Tel Aviv supported the Iraqi Kurds in their struggle against Baghdad. The Mossad helped them establish their intelligence service, Parastin. In order to facilitate a potential uprising by the Kurds, Israeli warplanes bombed positions of the Iranian military and its militias in Iranian Kurdistan in the early days of the current war. Unlike Washington, Tel Aviv appears to have a clear sense of what it wants to achieve with this war: the end of the mullah regime. Donald Trump, by contrast, seems to change his mind on this almost daily. This has strengthened the hand of those in Washington who argue that it was not an Iranian threat to the US that pushed Washington into war, but rather Tel Aviv’s determination.

Caption: A pro-Kurdish protester faces Turkish police as they attempt to walk to the Kurdish-managed northeastern Syrian city of Qamishli during a demonstration in support of Syrian Kurds, in Nusaybin disrict of Mardin, Turkey, 20 January 2026. Syrian government forces pushed more into northeast Syria’s Kurdish-held areas on 20 January after taking swathes of territory long held by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). EPA/METIN YOKSU