[This article is part of the Jadaliyya Iran Page's dossier, "Iran in Crisis: Seven Essays on the Obstacles to Freedom." Click here to read the dossier's introduction and browse the rest of the dossier.]
In early January 2026, mass protests swept Iran and were met with a brutal state crackdown; on 8-9 January 2026, thousands of civilians were killed, in what became the deadliest two-day episode in the country’s protest history. The violence marked a new escalation while extending a longer historical arc of central-state repression. This essay approaches the uprising from the vantage point of Iran’s Kurdish region, Rojhelat (Eastern Kurdistan), where systematic marginalization has structured political life for over a century.
The contemporary Kurdish-state conflict in Iran dates back to the early twentieth century, when state-led nation-building under Reza Shah Pahlavi pursued racialized, authoritarian homogenisation that entrenched the exclusion of non-Persian national communities. The second Pahlavi era (1941-1979) extended the first era’s repressive and exclusionary stance towards ethnonational diversity. Across the Pahlavi period, the central state systematically suppressed Kurdish sociopolitical rights through policies of centralisation, assimilation, and the repression of Kurdish claims of autonomy or cultural equality. During Reza Shah’s nation-building campaigns, non-Persian languages, including Kurdish, were banned from education, administration, and public life while directives promoted Persian nationwide and Kurdish cultural expression was curtailed under a broader policy of Persianisation aimed at creating a homogenous national identity. These policies entailed the denial of Kurdish identity in state ideology and the militarisation of Kurdistan. According to Kurdish scholar Amir Hasanpour, “Ideologically, the assimilation of non-Persian nationalities was based on the glorification of Iran’s pre-Islamic past and the ‘Aryan race’ to which Iranians claimed to belong. The political and linguistic aspects of the official line found immediate support among Persian nationalists who went to extremes in order to legitimise the assimilation policy.”
The 1979 Revolution offered the Kurds a short-lived hope of a better future in Iran. However, Kurdish demands for democracy and decentralisation were met with a violent response from the newly formed political elites in Tehran, leading to severe violations of Kurdish rights and tragic events such as Sanandaj’s “Bloody Newroz” in March 1979, during which several hundred Kurdish protesters were killed by the Iranian army.[1] The Kurdish conflict with the then-new Islamic regime in Tehran escalated further when the Kurds unanimously boycotted the Islamic Republic Referendum on 31 March 1979.
Economic and Ecological Struggles and Extractive Industries
The conflict in Rojhelat is not only waged through coercion and securitisation; it is also reproduced through political control over land, water, and subsoil resources. Extraction, therefore, functions as a quieter modality of domination that shapes everyday life and the material bases of resistance.
Rojhelat’s natural resources, including minerals, have become central to an extractive political economy with severe socio-ecological and economic consequences. The Iranian state’s extensive extraction including gold mining and water transfer projects, has been framed here as ‘exploitative extractive economic activities’, linked to internal colonial dynamics, in which resources are diverted from ‘internal others’ towards a select few through legal, bureaucratic, and coercive means. In this usage, “internal colonialism” refers to a state-led relationship that combines extraction with systematic political exclusion and cultural marginalisation, producing durable economic and social hierarchies.
Various critical studies on asymmetrical and conflict-prone Kurdish-state relations in Iran show that income from mining operations in Kurdistan is diverted to benefit the central government, economic elites, and dominant regions, with little reinvestment in local infrastructure, services, or growth. The Iranian state’s economic policy in Kurdistan is multifaceted; however, it repeatedly relies on deliberate disinvestment, resource extraction without local gains, the reproduction of poverty and dependency, and securitised governance to control the Kurdish population and sustain political dominance. Furthermore, available evidence suggests that neglect of the health and well-being of the Kurdish population during extractive activities such as gold mining, coupled with the unequal distribution of profits, has contributed to significant “de-development” in the region. The Kurdish people have limited agency and little influence in environmental and economic decision-making related to mining and other extractive activities in Kurdistan. In the asymmetrical relationship between the Iranian government and the Kurds in Iran, the Iranian government occupies the centre, while Kurdistan remains marginalised on the periphery.
In Iran, the government’s discourse since the Constitutional Revolution has often framed the Kurdish mobilisation as a threat to national security. The extent to which Kurds – or Kurdish political mobilisation – pose a threat to Iranian sovereignty is open to debate. However, this securitised framing has been used to restrict political activity in the Kurdish region and to legitimise repression.
In this context, the government’s strategy of domination through the economic exploitation of Rojhelat is not solely aimed at plundering its resources. Even if resource capture is an overriding objective, the effects described here are not reducible to economic gain alone. Extractive governance also functions to weaken Kurdish collective capacity and reproduce political marginalisation. In addition, underdeveloped infrastructures, deforestation, frequent forest fires, and frequent dam-building linked to controversial inter-basin water transfer schemes (supplying water to Iran’s central plateau) undermine Kurdistan’s socio-ecological and economic sustainability and contribute to underdevelopment and de-development. For instance, economic output in Kurdistan province accounts for less than one percent of the national GDP, placing it near the bottom among all Iran’s provinces in overall economic performance.
The lack of state investment and limited industrial development in Kurdistan has contributed to persistently high unemployment rates across Kurdish provinces, often exceeding Iran’s national average. As a result, many Kurdish men and women across age groups and educational backgrounds, including university graduates and PhD holders, have turned to kolberi, cross-border labour in which kolbers carry goods on their back. This work entails life-threatening risks, such as being shot by Iranian border forces.
Mohammadpour, focusing on the socioeconomic and psychological impact of kolberi in Rojhelat, describes Iran’s exploitative policy as necropolitics, a term that foregrounds the “death-making” institutions and policies shaping Kurdish life in Iran and beyond. Kolberi remains a tragic feature of the Kurdish economy, a result of the absence of stable formal employment and persistence of unemployment and exclusion. More broadly, Kolberi demonstrates how structural economic marginalisation pushes people into hazardous work as a survival strategy. Yet public criticism of these illegal forms of labor has often been met with further militarisation and securitisation of Kurdish society.
Kurdistan’s Democratisation Dynamics
The collective experience of marginalisation has enabled the Kurdish people in Iran to develop a distinct approach to mobilisation and resistance against successive exclusionary and authoritarian state projects in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, making Kurdistan a key site for oppositional ideas and strategies. This section traces Kurdish sociopolitical mobilisation patterns; the conditions that place Kurdistan at the centre of Iran’s democratic struggles; the role of Kurdish political parties in mobilising the Kurdish movement; and Kurdish civil society’s efforts to promote Kurdish national identity, equitable redistribution, and socioecological justice.
The post-1979 revolutionary Kurdish resistance to the Islamic Republic helped transform Kurdistan into a major locus of oppositional politics within Iran. Over more than a decade of armed struggle, often articulated through egalitarian and intersectional values, Kurdish forces mounted a significant challenge to the Islamic Republic’s authority in Kurdistan. The Kurdish movement in Iran is often described as intersectional because it resists ethnonational discrimination while also politicising multiple, interconnected systems of power and exclusion, including gender, ethnicity, religion, class, and forms of state repression that structure everyday life. Here, “intersectional” refers to organising across these axes as mutually constitutive rather than separate grievances. This indicates that Kurdish activists, especially women, are challenging multiple interconnected forms of discrimination, such as patriarchal, theocratic, and assimilationist state power, rather than a single axis of exclusion.
For instance, Kurdish female activists like Zara Mohammadi and Mojgan Kavoosi, both Kurdish language teachers and political activists, have been imprisoned for teaching Kurdish and promoting Kurdish culture and identity. Their cases illustrate how ethnic identity, gendered labor, culture, religion and state ideology intersect under conditions of securitised governance. They have been targeted because public Kurdish-language activism challenges state-backed hierarchies that privilege Persian and Shia-centered definitions of national identity. These cases therefore connect ethno-national rights, cultural claims, and gendered repression within a broader struggle against a state that suppresses subaltern identities and regulates social life through religious norms. The Kurdish movement’s mobilisation capability and its multi-issue political framing became more visible during the Jin, Jiyan, Azadi (Women, Life, Freedom) uprisings in 2022-23, in which Kurdistan served as the initial epicentre and a sustained focal point of a nationwide challenge to the Islamic Republic’s authority and value system.
A grassroots cultural and ecological movement, comprising environmental NGOs and cultural associations, has also become part of the broader Kurdish movement, concentrating on cultural and linguistic promotion, environmental protection and justice, and opposition to resource extraction and exploitation. Kurdistan has many local, small- and medium-sized environmental NGOs and cultural institutions that contribute to and lead civic resistance to and public critique of state policy. Among others, the environmental NGO Chya Green Organisation of Mariwan and the cultural and linguistic association Nojin are often cited as leading Kurdish civic networks that promote environmental protection, justice, and the Kurdish language and identity. Despite security repression, these NGOs and associations have remained relatively vocal in their criticism and denunciation of the Islamic Republic’s policies in Kurdistan.
Iran has rarely had sustained opportunities to practise democracy, despite its ethnonational and religious diversity. Its modern history has been shaped by two undemocratic regimes: the secular authoritarian rule of the Pahlavi dynasty and the theocratic authoritarian rule of the Islamic Republic. This has contributed to a weak institutional tolerance for pluralism, including ethnonational, religious, and cultural diversity. In a context where a dominant state-national discourse and security narrative often frames calls for decentralisation as a betrayal and a threat to territorial integrity, intercommunal ties can be marked by distrust, which undermines the mobilisation of nationwide anti-regime protests.
Successive Iranian regimes have been effective at maintaining divisions among Iran’s diverse national groups, with democratic demands from non-Persian communities, including Kurds, Azeris, Arabs, and Baluchis, consistently met with resistance and suppression by the state and in some instances, diaspora royalist groups. Kurdistan, as a political and geographical periphery, has often been treated by the modern nation-state as a security threat, due to the Kurdish movement’s organisational capacity, mass mobilisation potential, and political consciousness. This has contributed to impoverishment and exclusion. At the same time, from a democratisation perspective, Kurdish mobilisation has generated organisational forms and political vocabularies, including pluralism, decentralisation, and social justice claims, that can widen democratic horizons for Iran as a whole.
General strikes, often announced by Kurdish political parties in exile, have long been a significant form of resistance to, and condemnation of, the Islamic Republic’s multifaceted marginalisation of Kurdish people. Like anti-regime street protests, they operate as a collective signal of refusal. This repertoire was often utilised during the Jin, Jiyan, Azadi uprisings in Kurdistan, particularly as militarisation and state violence made public gatherings far more lethal, including the massacre in Javanrud (October 2022). General strikes in Kurdistan exemplify political resistance under authoritarian surveillance, shaped by regional history, systemic repression, and tactical decisions coordinated through a decentralised, networked structure. These strikes, usually involving shop closures, work stoppages, and public acts of dissent, are organised despite intense state surveillance and remain a core form of protest. Unlike protests that involve large street demonstrations with visible leaders, general strikes in Kurdistan typically rely on trusted local nodes, affiliated political groups and parties and informal networks that combine in-person relationships with encrypted messaging or social media to reduce leadership and organiser visibility and the risk of mass arrests.
Although relatively new, the Dialogue Centre for Cooperation, composed of seven Kurdish political parties based in Iraqi Kurdistan, has played a significant role in fostering collaboration among Kurdish political parties, the Kurdish community in Iran, and the diaspora. The January 6, 2026 call for a general strike in Kurdistan, issued in support of the nationwide protests and condemnation of state violence in Kermanshah, Ilam and Lorestan, where several hundred protesters were killed during the early days of the anti-regime protests, was issued by the Kurdish Dialogue Centre for Cooperation.[2]
Kurdistan has over 80 years of experience in movement mobilisation led by modern political parties. The KDPI (Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran) and Komala (Revolutionary Komala of Toilers of Iranian Kurdistan) have been, respectively, the leading Kurdish political parties in Iran since 1945 and 1979. The Kurdish movement, often in dialogue and occasional alliance with other ethnonational groups including Azeris, Arabs, and Baluchis, as well as progressive forces from the centre, has contributed to the development and promotion of democratic discourses including pluralism, decentralisation, and federalism.
The state often attempts to reframe peaceful public protests in Kurdistan as armed clashes between its forces and the Kurdish Peshmerga (freedom fighters). This framing was used during the 2022-23 Jin, Jiyan, Azadi uprisings. Labelling civilian uprisings as armed clashes served several purposes: legitimising lethal force, enabling collective punishment, transforming Kurdistan into a testing ground for violence, and amplifying narratives of territorial disintegration allegedly driven by Kurdish mobilisation. In this context, general strikes have served as an important means of protest and condemnation, allowing Kurdistan to set the terms of confrontation while reducing exposure to mass casualty violence. These mobilisation strategies also reflect a broader political anxiety about what might follow the Islamic Republic.
Transformation, Unpredictability and Awareness
The anxiety that a future revolution could be hijacked by non-democratic forces is acute, jeopardising the prospect of a democratic transition. The absence of a unified opposition and a clear plan for a post-Islamic Republic order remains among the most worrying issues for many people across the country. Some diaspora communities in Europe and the US, and their media platforms—including satellite TV stations such as ‘Iran International’ and ‘Manoto’—have promoted Reza Pahlavi, the son of the ousted Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, as a leading alternative to the Islamic Republic. However, he remains a polarising figure. Many Iranians view him as incompetent and undemocratic. His self-positioning as a national leader has often generated division rather than unity. Kurdish people, like [1] other subaltern national communities and progressive forces in the centre, largely view Reza Pahlavi as an undemocratic, divisive, and exclusionary force, and refuse to cooperate with royalist groups. The legacy of Pahlavi rule in Kurdistan includes national and cultural marginalisation, militarisation, the securitisation of Kurdish identity, and restrictions on Kurdish language and cultural expression, shaping Kurdish attitudes toward royalist restoration. Therefore, support for Pahlavi remains minimal in Kurdish majority areas.
From this perspective, regime change alone is not the primary aim of these struggles. Rather, the central demand is a democratic, decentralised, and inclusive political system that accommodates Iran’s diverse ethno-religious and cultural fabric. Otherwise, the risk is a renewed cycle of authoritarian rule, producing disappointment and political disengagement among future generations in Iran.
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[1] The Bloody Newroz in Sanandaj, a brutal attack by the Iranian army on civilians, occurred less than five weeks after the Revolution’s victory and a few days before the Kurdish and Iranian New Year (Newroz) on 18 March 1979.
[2] The statement was signed by the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran, Komala Party of Iranian Kurdistan, Kurdistan Free Life Party (PJAK), Komala, Kurdistan Organisation of the Communist Party of Iran, Revolutionary Komala of Toilers of Iranian Kurdistan (Komala), and the Kurdistan Organisation of Khabat.