Better Know The Players As Iran Unrest Extends To Minority Groups

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The Kurdish involvement in the current protests began in the small city of Malekshahi in Ilam province on Jan. 3. A subsequent violent raid by security forces on wounded protesters inside Ilam hospital provoked outrage beyond the local community and attracted international attention.

Protests continued in Ilam, while in nearby Kermanshah province, particularly the impoverished area of Daradrezh, they erupted over economic deprivation and political discrimination.

A strategic approach to protest

Shiite Kurdish communities in Ilam and Kermanshah continue to experience exclusion rooted in their Kurdish identity. That's despite sharing a Shiite identity with Iran's ruling establishment in Tehran – a factor that has historically afforded greater access to government than for the Sunni Kurdish population.

Following the killing of protesters in Ilam and Kermanshah, Kurdish political parties issued a joint statement calling for a region-wide strike.

Notably, Kurdish leaders did not call for protests but for strikes alone. During the“Women, Life, Freedom” uprising, the government treated Kurdish cities as security zones – framing the protests as a threat to Iran's territorial integrity and using that justification to carry out mass killings and executions.

By opting for strikes this time, Kurdish leaders sought to demonstrate solidarity while reducing the risk of large-scale violence and another massacre.

The result was decisive: Nearly all Kurdish cities shut down.

Baluchestan, in Iran's southeast, followed Kurdistan a day after. Beginning with Friday prayers on Jan. 9, protests erupted, also driven by long-standing ethnic and religious marginalization there.

Iranian Azerbaijan, an area in the country's northwest, joined later and more cautiously. This delayed, small protest reflects Azerbaijanis' current favorable position within Iran's political, military and economic institutions.

Historically, from the 16th century to 1925, Shiite Azari-Turks dominated the Iranian state, with Azerbaijani functioning as a court language.

The Pahlavi monarchy marked a rupture, banning the Azerbaijani language and curtailing local autonomy. But since 1979, the Islamic Republic has partially restored Azerbaijani influence, allowing clerics to address constituents in their native language and reintegrating Azerbaijan into central government in Tehran. The current supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, is of Azerbaijani descent.

A history of repression

Ethnically based political movements emerged across Iran immediately after the 1979 revolution, which many minority groups had supported in hopes of greater inclusion and rights.

But these movements were quickly suppressed as the Islamic Republic crushed uprisings across Iranian Azerbaijan, Baluchestan, Khuzestan and other peripheral regions.

Kurdistan was the exception, where resistance, military confrontation and state violence, including massacres, continued for several years.

This repression and the impact of the Iran–Iraq War, during which wartime mobilization overshadowed internal grievances, muted ethnic minority demands throughout the 1980s.

But these demands resurfaced in the 1990s, especially sparked by a sense of cultural revival and cross-border identity formation after the Soviet Union's collapse. In Iranian Kurdistan, a large part of the armed struggle was transformed into a civil struggle, while Peshmerga forces maintained arms and military training across the border in the Kurdistan region of Iraq.

The Iranian government has increasingly viewed this awakening as a strategic threat and has responded by decentralizing security and military authority to enable rapid crackdowns on protests without awaiting approval from Tehran.

Diverging protest demands

This history of repression explains why the protests in Iran now were at least initially more centralized than previous uprisings. Ethnic minority regions are not indifferent to change; they are skeptical of its outcome.

Many Persian-majority urban protesters seek social freedoms, economic recovery and normalization with the West, particularly the United States. But ethnic communities carry additional demands: decentralization of power, recognition of linguistic and cultural rights, and genuine power-sharing within the state.

For over four decades, ethnic minority demands have been labeled as separatist or“terrorist” and met with arrests and executions by the Islamic Republic.

This rhetoric has also influenced major Persian-dominated opposition groups – spanning the ideological spectrum from left to right and operating largely in exile – that perceive ethnic minority demands as a threat to Iran's territorial integrity.

Fears of the shah's return

Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the last shah of Iran, is positioning himself as the leader of the opposition and a transitional figure. But ethnic communities have reason for concern.

Pahlavi's office has published a road map for a transitional government that sharply contrasts with his public claims of not seeking to monopolize power. The document envisions Pahlavi as a leader with extraordinary authority. In practice, the concentration of power he proposes under his leadership closely resembles the authority currently exercised by Iran's supreme leader.