The Kurdish Question

The Table

On July 13, 1989, Dr. Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou sat down at an apartment in Vienna to negotiate Kurdish autonomy with representatives of the Islamic Republic. He had spent decades advocating for a single principle: “Democracy for Iran, Autonomy for Kurdistan.” He was the leader of the PDKI — the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan — the oldest and most influential Kurdish political party, founded in 1945. He had survived the revolution, the Iran-Iraq War, and multiple assassination attempts. He believed that dialogue could produce what armed struggle had not.

The Iranian delegation pulled out pistols and shot him dead at the negotiating table. His two aides were killed beside him. Austria — in a decision that strained credulity — allowed the assassins to leave the country.¹

Three years later, in Berlin, it happened again. Ghassemlou’s successor, Sadegh Sharafkandi, was assassinated at the Mykonos restaurant on September 17, 1992. This time, the German judiciary investigated. In a historic 1997 verdict, the court ruled that the killings were ordered by the highest levels of the Iranian state — explicitly naming the Supreme Leader and the President.² The ruling established the legal precedent of “state terrorism.”

When Iranian Kurds today are asked to trust that a centralized transition plan will eventually deliver on promises of autonomy, they remember the table in Vienna. Promises made to Kurds by centralized Iranian authorities have a specific historical record. The record is written in blood.

The Chant

And yet. During the January 2026 uprising, something remarkable happened in the ethnic periphery.

In Dehloran — a city with a Kurdish and Lor population — protesters shouted: “This is the national slogan: Reza Pahlavi.” In Baghmalek, in Arab Khuzestan, the same chant echoed. In Mashhad — the Supreme Leader’s birthplace, the holiest city in Shia Islam — crowds chanted “Javid Shah” in the city center. In Qom, the theological heart of the regime, protesters near the seminaries adopted the same cry.

GAMAAN polling data shows that monarchist support cuts across ethnic lines. The “Javid Shah” phenomenon was not confined to the Persian heartland — it appeared in Kurdish, Lor, Arab, and Azeri regions. The Pahlavi name, for many in the ethnic periphery, represented not Persian chauvinism but the opposite of state collapse — a unifying symbol against the chaos that could follow the regime’s fall.

But slogans shouted under gunfire and structural demands made after the gunfire stops are different things. “Javid Shah” as a rallying cry against the Islamic Republic does not automatically translate into acceptance of a centralized unitary state under a Pahlavi-appointed transitional government. The solidarity of the barricade is real. It is also temporary.

The Critique

The TISHK Center for Kurdistan Studies produced the most detailed critical analysis of the Emergency Phase Booklet’s implications for ethnic minorities. Their argument targets not the plan’s technical competence but its political architecture.

The mechanism that makes ethnic demands invisible is deliberate conflation — treating any demand for self-governance as a threat to territorial integrity, so the word “autonomy” triggers “Balkanization” in the listener’s mind before the actual proposal is examined. Both the Pahlavi monarchy and the Islamic Republic used this technique to delegitimize Kurdish, Baluchi, and Arab aspirations. The TISHK critique asks whether the transition plan repeats it.

By centralizing all appointments under one unelected “Leader of the National Uprising” — executive, legislative, and judicial — the plan reproduces the structural logic of the system it claims to replace. The TISHK analysts argue that the booklet prioritizes “security” and “territorial integrity” over democratic pluralism, and frames ethnic assertions through a security lens rather than a rights lens. When Kurdish demands for autonomy are treated as threats to territorial integrity rather than as democratic aspirations, the transition plan risks radicalizing the exact groups it needs to co-opt.

The booklet’s emphasis on a “Unitary State” and “National Army” — language that echoes both Pahlavi-era and Islamic Republic centralizing rhetoric — alienates communities whose historical experience of Iranian centralism has been uniformly negative. Reza Shah renamed Arabistan to Khuzestan in 1925 and criminalized minority languages. The Islamic Republic constitutionally excluded Sunnis from the presidency and Supreme Leadership. For Kurds, Baluchis, and Arabs, any plan that defers autonomy to “after the transition” sounds suspiciously like every previous promise that was never honored.

The plan’s defenders argue that centralization during the emergency phase is a temporary necessity — that you cannot negotiate a federal constitution while the electricity grid is failing and foreign militias are still in the country. The critics respond with the question that no Iranian centralist has ever answered satisfactorily: When, precisely, has a centralized authority voluntarily devolved power to ethnic minorities after the “emergency” passed?

The Cafe

Spain faced the same fracture — and found a solution.

The Basque Country had ETA, an armed separatist organization that conducted a decades-long terrorist campaign. Catalonia had a powerful independence movement. Galicia had its own nationalist aspirations. The military and right-wing monarchists viewed any concession to separatism as treason. The regional nationalists viewed any centralized Spain as a continuation of Franco’s oppression.

The 1978 Constitution established the Estado de las Autonomías — the State of Autonomies. The constitutional text affirmed the “indissoluble unity” of Spain but simultaneously created a framework for Autonomous Communities with control over education, culture, local policing, and regional administration. Originally designed for the “historic nationalities” — Basques, Catalans, Galicians — the framework was generalized to all regions in a policy called “café para todos” — coffee for everyone.

The genius was structural ambiguity. Formally, Spain remained a unitary state. Functionally, the Autonomous Communities operated with a degree of self-governance that satisfied moderate nationalists without crossing the formal federalism red line that would have triggered a military coup. The Basque Country got its own police force, its own tax system, and its own parliament. Catalonia got control over education, culture, and healthcare. Neither got formal independence — but both got enough self-governance to make independence a marginal rather than mainstream demand.

How this maps to Iran: Kurdistan, Baluchistan, and Azerbaijan as Autonomous Provinces — retaining foreign policy and defense at the center while devolving control over education, culture, local policing, resource management, and language policy to the regions. The framework satisfies the demand for self-governance without crossing the “Balkanization” red line that pan-Iranists view as an existential threat. It gives ethnic minorities a structural guarantee — embedded in the constitutional architecture, not dependent on a leader’s goodwill — that their rights will survive the transition.

The Emergency Phase Booklet does not include this framework. That omission is its most dangerous gap.

The Arithmetic

The ethnic arithmetic of a post-regime Iran is not abstract. It involves specific groups with specific armed capacities, specific territorial control, and specific demands that will not wait for a constituent assembly.

The Kurds. Two major armed parties — PDKI and Komala — maintain peshmerga forces with decades of mountain warfare experience. PJAK, a PKK offshoot, adds a pan-Kurdish dimension with connections to the broader Kurdish movement across Iraq, Turkey, and Syria. Kurdish regions saw some of the heaviest repression during the 2022 uprising — heavy artillery, drones, large-scale troop deployments against Mahabad, Sanandaj, and Javanrud. The Kurdish slogan — “Democracy for Iran, Autonomy for Kurdistan” — is a federalist position, not a separatist one. But the distinction collapses if the transition government treats autonomy demands as security threats. And the memory of Ghassemlou’s murder ensures that promises without structural guarantees will not be believed.

The Baluchis. Sistan and Baluchestan is consistently Iran’s poorest province — lowest life expectancy, lowest literacy, least access to clean water. Baluchis constitute roughly two percent of Iran’s population but twenty percent of all executions in 2023 and twenty-nine percent of political executions between 2010 and 2024.³ The Sookhtbars — fuel porters who carry subsidized Iranian fuel to Pakistan because there are no industrial jobs — are routinely shot by border guards; hundreds killed or injured in 2024 alone. Molavi Abdolhamid, the Sunni Friday prayer leader of Zahedan, transformed from a quiet cleric into the most sustained opposition voice in the country after security forces opened fire on worshipers leaving the Great Mosalla on September 30, 2022 — the “Bloody Friday” that killed at least eighty-two people in a single day.⁴

The Azeris. Iran’s largest minority — sixteen to twenty-four percent of the population — shares Shi’a Islam with the state, enabling greater integration. But cultural nationalism has surged around the catastrophic shrinking of Lake Urmia — over ninety percent loss — which Azeri activists attribute to deliberate central government water diversion.⁵ The 2006 “Cockroach Cartoon” uprising — triggered by a state newspaper depicting a cockroach speaking Azerbaijani Turkish — showed that the demographic giant could awaken rapidly and unpredictably.

The Arabs of Khuzestan. Sitting atop the vast majority of Iran’s oil and gas wealth while remaining one of the most deprived communities. River diversions have decimated local agriculture. The “Uprising of the Thirsty” in July 2021 — protesters chanting “I am thirsty” in a province that produces most of Iran’s oil — crystallized the paradox that defines Arab Khuzestan.

The Ethnic Arithmetic:

Group Population Share Key Grievance Armed Capacity
Kurds ~10% Autonomy, language rights, Ghassemlou assassination memory PDKI + Komala peshmerga, PJAK (PKK-linked)
Baluchis ~2% Poorest province, 20-29% of executions, Sookhtbar killings Armed groups along Pakistan border
Azeris ~16-24% Lake Urmia (90% loss), mother-tongue education Demographic weight, 2006 uprising precedent
Arabs (Khuzestan) ~2-3% Oil wealth/deprivation paradox, river diversions Cross-border armed groups

Group	Population Share	Key Grievance	Armed Capacity
Kurds	~10%	Autonomy, language rights, Ghassemlou assassination memory	PDKI + Komala peshmerga, PJAK (PKK-linked)
Baluchis	~2%	Poorest province, 20-29% of executions, Sookhtbar killings	Armed groups along Pakistan border
Azeris	~16-24%	Lake Urmia (90% loss), mother-tongue education	Demographic weight, 2006 uprising precedent
Arabs (Khuzestan)	~2-3%	Oil wealth/deprivation paradox, river diversions	Cross-border armed groups

Each of these communities has a specific grievance, a specific armed capacity, and a specific demand. A transition plan that treats them as a monolith — or defers their demands to “after the emergency” — risks discovering that the emergency never ends because the periphery refuses to accept a center that doesn’t represent them.

The Precedent

Afghanistan offers the starkest warning.

When King Zahir Shah was overthrown in 1973, Afghanistan lost its keystone — the traditional unifying symbol in a tribal society with Pashtun, Tajik, Hazara, and Uzbek populations who shared no ideology, no economic system, and no political party. What they shared was a king. Removing the keystone produced forty years of catastrophe.

In 2001, after the fall of the Taliban, seventy percent of Afghans polled for Zahir Shah’s return as a symbolic head of state. The United States, pursuing its own political calculus, sidelined him. The government that replaced him never achieved legitimacy in the Pashtun heartland, depended entirely on foreign military support, and collapsed within days of American withdrawal.

The lesson is double-edged. Yes: removing the unifying symbol without a replacement causes state collapse. But also: the unifying symbol must deliver on its promise to the periphery, or it becomes just another center imposing its will on communities that have been imposed upon before.

The Mahsa Charter — the “Alliance for Democracy and Freedom in Iran,” formed in 2023 to bridge the monarchist-federalist divide — included both Reza Pahlavi and Kurdish leader Abdullah Mohtadi. It fractured. The centralist faction attacked Mohtadi’s federalist history. The ethnic faction felt that demands for linguistic rights and decentralized governance were being diluted. The collapse played directly into the Islamic Republic’s most potent survival narrative — the fear of “Syrianization,” of territorial fragmentation.

If you have ever watched a family business torn apart during succession — the heirs who agree on everything while the patriarch is alive and agree on nothing once the question becomes who controls what — you understand the dynamic. The Islamic Republic is the patriarch that everyone opposes. What happens after it falls depends on whether the heirs have agreed on the inheritance before the funeral.

The Honest Ledger

The Kurdish demand for autonomy is not separatism. “Democracy for Iran, Autonomy for Kurdistan” — the PDKI’s slogan since 1945 — explicitly accepts the Iranian national framework. The Baluchi demand for basic development — clean water, jobs, an end to execution overrepresentation — is not radicalism. The Arab demand for a share of the oil wealth that sits beneath their homes is not extremism. The Azeri demand for mother-tongue education and environmental protection is not treason.

But these demands have never been met by any Iranian government — monarchist, republican, or theocratic. Both the Pahlavi dynasty and the Islamic Republic treated ethnic assertion as a security threat. The 1946 Republic of Mahabad was crushed and Qazi Muhammad hanged. The Turkmen land councils were destroyed by the IRGC in 1980. Kurdish regions have been subjected to military campaigns under every regime. Reza Shah’s forced sedentarization of tribal populations — documented by American Justice William Douglas as bordering on genocide in the case of the Lurs — is within living memory’s reach.⁶

A transition plan that does not address this history — that defers the ethnic question to a future that never arrives — is not a plan for a democratic Iran. It is a plan for a different version of the same problem.

Spain solved it with “coffee for everyone” — constitutional ambiguity that gave the regions enough self-governance to make secession marginal. Iran’s opposition has not yet offered its coffee. The baristas are waiting.

The Inheritance Test: A transition plan’s viability can be measured by a single question: Does it give ethnic minorities a structural guarantee — embedded in the constitution, not dependent on a leader’s promise — that their rights will survive the transition? If the answer is “trust us,” the plan has already failed. The table in Vienna proved what “trust us” is worth.

This article is part of What Comes Next. For the full comparative analysis of monarchist transitions, see The Juan Carlos Trap. For the Emergency Phase Booklet in operational detail, see The 180-Day Blueprint.

Abdorrahman Boroumand Center, memorial entry for Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou; PDKI, “Gathering in Brussels to Demand Justice in the Case of Dr. Ghassemlou’s Assassination,” July 13, 1989 ↩
Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, “Murder at Mykonos: Anatomy of a Political Assassination,” Berlin court verdict, April 1997 ↩
Iran Human Rights, “Execution of Ethnic Minorities in Iran,” annual report, 2024; USIP Iran Primer, “Report: Executions of Minorities in Iran in 2024,” February 2025 ↩
Amnesty International, “Iran: At Least 82 Baluchi Protesters and Bystanders Killed in Bloody Crackdown,” Zahedan, September 30, 2022 ↩
The Guardian, “Iranian Greens Fear Disaster as Lake Orumieh Shrinks,” September 2011; Milliyyet Research Center, “Lake Urmia Crisis: Climate Change or Environmental Injustice?” ↩
Fair Observer, “The Dirty Secrets About How Reza Shah Destroyed Iran,” historical analysis of forced sedentarization policies ↩