Kurdish group claims multiple attacks in Iran

In a statement posted on the group’s website the Party for Free Life in Kurdistan (PJAK) said that its armed wing had carried out a number of retributive attacks in the Harwaman, and West Azerbaijan provinces in the west of the country, and in the more central Kurdistan province.

A ceasefire between the PJAK and the Iranian state has been in place since 2011. The PJAK maintains that it has respected the truce, but claims that an October 4 attack on its fighters by Iranian forces that left 12 dead may have seen “chemical weapons” used, according to Iraqi Kurdish news website Rudaw.

In a statement following the October 4 attack the PJAK’s leadership council called for small-scale “revenge attacks” rather than the launch of an armed campaign against the Iranian state.

Tehran says that it carried out the October 4 attack after two members of the paramilitary Basiji force were assassinated in the city of Sardasht by PJAK members in May.

The PJAK, is one of a number of armed Kurdish groups in Iran, and has waged an intermittent armed struggle against the Iranian state since 2004 and seeks greater political and cultural rights in addition to self-determination for Kurds living in Iran.

Its precise origins are disputed however the movement came into existence in the late 1990’s and has connections with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), currently conducting its own insurgency against the Turkish state.

Both Turkey and Iran view the PJAK as analogous to the PKK and, along with the US designate the group a terrorist organisation. This designation of the group is not shared by the EU, UN, or Russia.