Since the first day of the US-Israeli military campaign against Iran, Tehran has maintained an uninterrupted campaign of missile and drone strikes against separatist Kurdish organizations based in Iraq – a campaign that continued even after the ceasefire took effect. This reflects not an improvised retaliation or short-term escalation management, but the maturation of a longer strategic transformation unfolding across organizational, political, and operational dimensions. Conducted through both the direct capabilities of the Iranian armed forces and Iran-backed militia networks in Iraq, these operations point to the emergence of an increasingly pressure-centric doctrine, one that is steadily reshaping Tehran’s approach to the Kurdish insurgent challenge.

Prior to the current conflict, Iran’s strategy toward separatist Kurdish armed organizations rested on three interconnected pillars: leadership decapitation, opportunistic cross-border strikes, and punitive retaliation. The decapitation component was most clearly illustrated by the assassinations of Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI) leaders Abdulrahman Ghassemlou in Vienna in 1989 and Sadegh Sharafkandi in Berlin in 1992. These operations reflected a classic counterinsurgency logic aimed at disrupting organizational continuity through the elimination of senior leadership figures as they also served a broader political function: fostering internal mistrust, weakening organizational cohesion, and encouraging fragmentation within the groups themselves.

The punitive and reactive dimension of Iran’s approach was similarly systematic, though structurally distinct. Following armed incidents inside Iran attributed to these organizations, Tehran typically responded by targeting their bases in northern Iraq with missile or artillery strikes after a calculated interval. The underlying logic was deterrence through calibrated punishment – an event-driven strategy designed to impose costs without sustaining continuous military pressure. In this sense, Iran’s posture retained a distinctly reactive character: a cyclical action-reaction framework activated once specific security thresholds were crossed, rather than a sustained coercive model aimed at degrading the organizations’ long-term operational capacity.

The pivotal rupture came in 2022. The social and political unrest that followed the death of Mahsa Amini – particularly acute in Kurdish-majority provinces such as West Azerbaijan Province, Kurdistan Province, Kermanshah Province, and Ilam Province – fundamentally reshaped Tehran’s threat perception of separatist Kurdish organizations. The geographic concentration of unrest in these regions reinforced the belief within Iran’s security establishment that these groups possessed not only military capabilities but also meaningful political and ideological penetration inside the country.

In response, Tehran simultaneously intensified diplomatic pressure on the Iraqi central government to constrain and dismantle these organizations while sharply escalating direct strikes against their bases in northern Iraq. The resulting surge in operations throughout 2022 and 2023 gradually moderated by 2024. Moreover, when Kurdish armed organizations largely remained on the sidelines during the 12-day conflict of 2025, Iran’s threat perception temporarily receded, producing a brief operational pause.

Yet the calculus shifted decisively at the start of 2026. The renewed activism of separatist Kurdish organizations within emerging protest movements – particularly in Kermanshah Province and Lorestan Province – once again intensified Tehran’s security concerns. More consequentially, an organizational development on February 22 fundamentally altered Iran’s threat assessment: the announcement of a formal cooperation framework among the KDPI, PJAK, PAK, Komala, and Hêzên Azadiya Kurdistanê (Habat) under the umbrella of the “Coalition of Political Forces of Iranian Kurdistan.” In Tehran’s eyes, this was not merely an exercise in organizational coordination. At a moment of mounting American and Israeli pressure on Iran, the coalition was interpreted as a preparatory platform for advancing the separatist project in alignment with external powers – pushing Iran’s security establishment into a heightened state of strategic alert.

War as a turning point

When open hostilities erupted on February 28, the public willingness of these organizations to align themselves politically with the United States and Israel – including openly appealing for external support – became the immediate catalyst for Iran’s accelerated campaign. From Tehran’s perspective, these groups had demonstrated that they were no longer simply armed separatist actors operating along the periphery, but political-military networks seeking strategic coordination with foreign powers while directly challenging Iran’s territorial integrity.

This perception was further reinforced by the concentration of U.S.-Israeli strikes in western Iranian regions with significant Kurdish populations. Within Iran’s security establishment, this fueled the belief that the external military campaign could eventually intersect with an internally activated insurgent dynamic, elevating the threat perception from the organizational level to the existential-territorial level.

It is in this context that the statement delivered by Ali Larijani, then-Supreme National Security Council Secretary, at the outset of the conflict – warning that “any separatist attempt during this period will be punished with maximum severity” – should be understood not merely as rhetorical signaling, but as the public articulation of a strategic doctrine already taking shape.

A new strategic concept?

Taken together, these developments suggest that Iran has moved beyond its historically reactive and decapitation-centered posture toward a qualitatively different strategic concept grounded in attrition and sustained pressure. The defining feature of this emerging approach is that it no longer seeks merely to punish organizations in response to specific triggering events. Instead, it subjects them to continuous military pressure at their operational bases, gradually eroding their capabilities over time.

This shift is evident in Iran’s evolving target selection. Rather than focusing primarily on senior leadership figures or symbolic infrastructure nodes, strikes are now directed more systematically at the organizations’ broader operational presence. In effect, the logic of sustained pressure has begun to displace the earlier logic of decapitation. The objective does not appear to be the outright elimination of these groups or the unilateral seizure of territory. Rather, Tehran seeks to degrade their operational capacity before mobilization cycles can fully emerge and to structurally constrain their ability to generate actionable threats from within Iranian territory.

Yet this strategic transformation also contains important continuities. The organizations most heavily targeted by Iran – namely the KDPI, Komala, and PAK – reflect longstanding historical threat perceptions. More analytically significant, however, is the notable exception within this pattern: PJAK, despite being a formal member of the coalition, has largely avoided direct targeting. This omission represents one of the most consequential features of Iran’s evolving approach. It suggests a deliberate effort by Tehran to preserve its relationship with PJAK while repositioning the organization within the emerging strategic landscape.

This dynamic cannot be understood merely as tactical relationship management. By targeting other coalition members while effectively exempting PJAK, Tehran is simultaneously generating suspicion toward PJAK within the Kurdish coalition itself, thereby introducing a structural vulnerability into the coalition’s internal cohesion. Viewed through this lens, Iran’s approach reflects a calculated strategy aimed not only at military containment but also at fragmenting the coalition’s collective-action capacity from within. PJAK, in this sense, functions less as an untouched exception than as a potential instrument in a broader strategy of intra-Kurdish fragmentation.

Seen within this broader framework, Iran’s ongoing campaign against armed Kurdish organizations represents not an improvised tactical response, but the operational expression of a long-maturing strategic transformation. The shift from decapitation and reactive punishment toward attrition and sustained pressure indicates that Tehran no longer views these organizations merely as cross-border security irritants to be periodically suppressed. Increasingly, they are framed as structural threats to territorial integrity, domestic political stability, and regional equilibrium.

That this campaign has continued even through a ceasefire is itself revealing. The strategy no longer appears tied solely to wartime exigency or immediate escalation dynamics. Rather, it increasingly bears the characteristics of a durable reorientation embedded within Iran’s broader regional security doctrine.