‘We have been preparing’: Why the boots on the ground in Iran could be Kurdish. 17 hours ago. Orla GuerinSenior international correspondent, northern Iraq. Getty Images. For a sixth day, the US and Israel are battering targets in Iran, waging war from the air. Could there soon be boots on the ground? Maybe. But not American ones.. Iranian Kurdish opposition groups in exile in northern Iraq have told the BBC they have plans to cross the border – and have had them for decades – but they flatly deny claims that their fighters have already done so.. “We have been preparing for this for the past 47 years, since the age of the Islamic Republic,” said Hana Yazdanpana, of the Kurdistan Freedom Party (PAK), which claims to have the biggest armed force.. But she insisted that “not a single Peshmerga has moved”. The Kurdish word peshmerga means “those who face death”.. Follow live updates. Passengers describe ‘surreal’ scramble to reach first government flight out of Middle East. How Iran is using cheap drones to cause chaos across the Middle East. Full coverage of the Iran war. Yazdanpana told us that six opposition groups – which recently formed a coalition – were co-ordinating with each other politically and militarily. “No-one moves alone,” she told us. “We will know if our brothers are going to move.”. She does not expect fighters to advance this week. First, the US needs to pave the way.. “We can’t move if the air above us is not cleaned,” she said. “And we need the regime’s weapons depots to be destroyed. Otherwise, it would be suicidal. The regime is very brutal, and the most advanced weapon we have is a Kalashnikov.”. She wants the US to impose a no-fly zone to protect Kurdish fighters. “We have asked for this many times,” she said. “I was the one who sent the emails saying ‘we need it urgently’.”. The White House has denied a report that US President Donald Trump was considering arming the Kurds – many of whom were trained by US forces in the past to fight against the Islamic State (IS) group in Iraq.. But as the chatter about a possible advance by Iranian Kurdish forces increases, so do Tehran’s attacks on them. We saw the aftermath of strikes on two different groups, including a ballistic missile attack which tore through a PAK base, killing one fighter.. Matthew Goddard/BBC. Some groups have emptied their bases and moved their forces to try to shield them from attack.. Joining the battle against the regime would be a huge risk, and it’s unclear what Trump may be offering in return.. The Kurds, which are the fourth largest ethnic group in the Middle East, are scattered between Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey. They have a long history of being persecuted and betrayed. As the Kurdish saying goes, “we have no friends but the mountains”.. Can the US be trusted to keep any promises it may make? Many Kurds in Syria – staunch US allies in the battle against IS – were angered recently when Trump sided with the transitional government in Damascus against th
