Kurdish leader says resistance in Iran will intensify after rocket attack
ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – Mustafa Hijri, the leader of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (PDKI), has vowed to intensify resistance in response to the missile attack that targeted Iranian Kurdish opposition parties over the weekend.
In a televised speech on Thursday, that was also published on the PDKI’s official website, Hijri said that “the officials of the Islamists regime might conclude from this missile attack that they have put an end to the Kurdish people’s struggle [for liberty].”
The Kurdish leader reminded the current Iranian regime that its predecessors also carried out massacres against the Kurds, “but contrary to their objectives, the Kurdish struggle gained in strength over time, and today Kurdistan is more determined than ever to achieve liberty.”
The PDKI leader said the party would intensify the “combined military and civil resistance campaign known as Rasan in spite of terrorist attacks and threats from the clerical regime in Tehran.”
“The more severe the oppression, the more determined the Kurdish nation will become in resisting it.”
After a decades-long ceasefire, the Kurdish opposition group resumed its armed struggle against the Iranian government a few years ago. The PDKI is one of the exiled parties that seek to achieve Kurdish rights within a democratic and federal system in Iran.
On Saturday, a ballistic missiles attack claimed the lives of 15 and injured 42 more members from two opposition parties, the PDKI and the Kurdistan Democratic Party – Iran (KDP-I), whose headquarters reside in the outskirts of the Kurdistan Region’s town of Koya.
The attack was purportedly conducted from a 220-kilometer distance from the Iranian province of East Azerbaijan with seven domestically produced missiles.
According to the PDKI leader, Tehran’s ballistic missile attack is not a sign of strength, but a sign of weakness amid an economic crisis in Iran and sanctions re-imposed by the Trump administration.
The nature of the regime and its destructive policies at home and abroad, the PDKI leader highlighted, “have embroiled the Islamic Republic in so many self-made crises that it cannot escape from them; rather, they get worse and have crippling effects.”
The Kurdish leader said the Iranian government is a threat to the security of the Kurdish nation, Iran, and the Middle East, pointing to Iran’s involvement in wars in Yemen, Syria, and Iraq.
The leader called for greater unity among Kurdish parties at a time when “the Iranian regime is on the verge of collapse.”
He also thanked the Kurdish population in Iranian Kurdistan who went on strike on Wednesday to condemn the Iranian regime’s missile attack and the execution of six Kurdish political prisoners.
Other Iranian Kurdish leaders, such as Abdullah Mohtadi, Secretary General of the Komala Party, described the demonstrations as “a huge success.”
“Yesterday’s general strike in Iranian Kurdistan has so far been the biggest single act of civil disobedience against the Islamic regime in Iran since the protest movements began in December last year,” Mohtadi wrote on his official Twitter account.
Editing by Karzan Sulaivany