Northern Iraq/Kurdistan: Six dead in bomb attack on Iranian Kurds in Iraqi exile

As the Society for Threatened Peoples (STP) was informed by friends in the north of Iraqi Kurdistan, six people got killed in a bomb attack on an office of the Democratic Party Kurdistan Iran (PDKI) on Tuesday. Several people were injured. The office is located in the village of Koya. Members of the PDKI had celebrated a traditional Kurdish-Iranian feast, Yalda Night, when the attack took place. The PDKI, which is an underground organization in exile, has accused the Iranian government of being responsible for the bloody attack.

“Agents of the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) have repeatedly carried out attacks on Kurdish activists in the past, also abroad. Seven million of the ten million Kurds in the country are persecuted based on two grounds: because they are ethnic Kurds and because they are non-Shiite Muslims,” reported Kamal Sido, the STP’s Middle East consultant, in Göttingen on Wednesday. “The Iranian authorities often refuse to issue building permits for Sunni mosques, because the official religion is de facto Shiite Islam.”

The STP and other human rights organizations are accusing the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran of creating a climate of anxiety in the country by means of more and more death penalties as well as long-term prison sentences against members of the opposition. “Apparently, the aim is to make every Iranian citizen – Persians, Kurds, Ahwazis, Baluchis, Azerbaijanis, Turkmen, and Christians – aware of the power of the regime in Tehran,” Sido said. Every year, there are hundreds of executions in Iran. 977 death sentences were carried on in 2015 alone. There are also reports about cruel torture in prisons and police stations.

Yalda Night is a Kurdish-Iranian festival celebrating winter solstice. In the Iranian-Zoroastrian calendar, this corresponds to the night of the 1st of Dey (“creator”). The feast has its origins in Zoroastrianism, which was common in pre-Islamic Iran, and is mainly celebrated by Kurds, Persians, Tajiks and Afghans.

There are Asians, Kurds, Arabs, Baluchis, Turkmen, Assyro-Aramaeans, and other smaller ethnic or religious minorities living in Iran. The non-Persian nationalities represent far more than half of the approximately 77 million inhabitants. They are not recognized as independent peoples with their own language, culture, and history, but deliberately referred to as “ethnic groups”. They all suffer from oppression and discrimination.

Header Photo: UN Photo/Bikem Ekberzade