U.S. President Donald Trump spent Easter making what Middle East Eye characterized as “a series of explosive admissions” about the Iran war—revealing that the United States covertly armed protesters inside the country weeks before launching military strikes, even as American negotiators were sitting across the table from senior Iranian officials in Europe.
Trump disclosed to Fox News’ Trey Yingst on April 5 that Washington supplied weapons to Iranian demonstrators who took to the streets late last year, driven by worsening economic conditions resulting from U.S. sanctions. The operation, however, seems to have gone awry. The arms, sent through Kurdish intermediaries, never reached their intended recipients, MEE reports. “We sent them a lot of guns. We sent them through the Kurds, and the president says he thinks the Kurds kept them,” Yingst told Fox News, paraphrasing Trump’s account.
Trump’s admission reveals that the U.S. was far more heavily involved in seeking to destabilize the Iranian government at the very moment the U.S.’s own diplomats were engaged in back-channel talks with Tehran, MEE continues. Those protests were ultimately crushed, resulting in hundreds being killed. Trump told Yingst that Iranian authorities killed more than “40,000 civilians” in the crackdown, but, MEE notes, there is no evidence to back up this claim.
Iranian Kurdish leaders interviewed by MEE all denied receiving any weapons from the U.S. Siamand Moeini, a senior figure in the armed Kurdistan Free Life Party (PJAK), denied the Fox News report. “We as PJAK, as I know, have not received anything. As for others, I cannot answer,” he told MEE.
Hana Yazdanpanah, a foreign relations coordinator for the Kurdistan Freedom Party (PAK), said that they still have their “old Kalashnikovs that we fought ISIS [the Islamic State group] with for five years and the weapons they abandoned after its defeat.”
“We have received no single weapon from the U.S. at this time,” she added.
The Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (PDKI), based in northern Iraq, also denied receiving and sending weapons to “our people in Rojhalat [Iranian Kurdistan].”
“A proof of this is that we cannot send arms through Iraq to our people,” said Mustafa Mawloudi, PDKI deputy secretary-general, adding that this would create legal problems. He also stressed that protesters cannot demonstrate with weapons: “That would be a war, not a protest.”
