Under drone fire, exiled Kurds wait to confront Iranian regime. 11 hours ago. Orla GuerinBBC News, Northern Iraq. Like many exiled Iranian Kurds, Shaho Bloori, 53, hears the call of home from both the living and the dead.. Two of his sisters remain in Iran, and 18 of his relatives lie buried there, killed by the regime. That includes one of his brothers, who he tells us is “forever young” – a protest singer, executed at the age of 21.. It wasn’t enough for Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guard Corps to hang him, he says, and riddle his body with bullets, they heaped more suffering on his mother, after his death.. ‘When she went to wash his body [for burial], there were 16 bullet holes,” he says. “They told her: ‘You must not cry. If you do, we will not let you clean him and bury him.'”. He wants justice not revenge, if the regime falls; there is no sign of that yet.. “We must stop the hanging,” he says. “Even if someone is guilty of hanging my brother, I don’t want them to be executed. We need freedom, not another regime like the Islamic regime.”. If Iranian Kurdish fighters based in Iraq do cross the border into western Iran – to open a new front against the Islamic Republic – his first mission will be to honour those who are gone.. “I will go to my mother’s grave, then my fathers, and my brothers,” he says. “I will go to all the friends and family I will never see again, and lay flowers and tell them: ‘I remember you always, and I cry for you.'” At this, he is silenced by his grief and his memories.. Matthew Goddard/BBC. We meet Bloori, 53, in northern Iraq at a tented camp for Iranian Kurds where he is training a new generation of Peshmerga – “those who face death”. He’s perched on a boulder under a warm spring sun. Two Peshmerga come to stand guard behind him.. The commander – who is white haired and softly spoken – belongs to a small dissident group called Komala of the Toilers of Kurdistan. It’s part of an alliance of Iranian Kurdish organisations formed recently to oppose the regime.. Thousands of fighters are “organised in the mountains, and ready to go home”, Commander Bloori tells us, adding “that will be soon”.. US President Donald Trump, by contrast, has publicly blown hot and then cold on the idea of the Iranian Kurds joining the US and Israel’s war against Iran. For now, it looks unlikely.. The Kurds are stateless, and spread mainly across four countries – Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey. They are the fourth largest ethnic group in the Middle East, and have a shared history of persecution, and of internal divisions.. Follow live updates. ‘Fingers on trigger’: Deadly warnings for Iranians being urged to take action. What happens if Iran shuts the Strait of Hormuz?. Full coverage of the Iran war. Matthew Goddard/BBC. The authorities in this autonomous region are Iraqi Kurds, who desperately want to stay out of the war next door. They also want to keep Iranian Kurdish fighters away from the cameras.. But we managed to reach the camp on our se
