Middle-east Arab News Opinion | Asharq Al-awsat

26 IRGC Members Killed in Battles with PJAK | ASHARQ AL-AWSAT English Archive 2005 -2017
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Members of the Party of Free Life of Kurdistan (PJAK) are seen at their base in the Qandil Mountains stretching along the Kurdistan Region and Iran border, May 2014. (Photo: AFP)


Erbil-Anti-Iran Kurdish opposition factions uncovered that they have killed more than 26 members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) during fierce battles in the Kurdish areas of Sardasht and Mariwan west of the country in the past few days.

The East Kurdistan Defense Forces said that the military operation had targeted the IRGC as a response to the killing of 12 members from the PJAK party in the Kermanshan area.

Last Tuesday, several Iranian news agencies reported that the IRGC had killed 12 Kurdish fighters in the western Kermanshan Province and that Iranian soldiers had also seized members of the group in addition to weapons.

However, Commander at the Free Life Party of Kurdistan or PJAK party Bahram Dikrani denied what members of the IRGC were saying concerning the killing of 12 members from the PJAK last week during a battle.

“Those PJAK members were killed with the help of local mercenaries who had poisoned them before laying out their corpses as being killed during a battle,” Dikrani told Asharq Al-Awsat.

He said the party’s forces had escalated their operations against the presence of the Revolutionary Guards as part of the “defense plan against Iranian forces.”

According to the Kurdish commander, the operations launched by the opposition against the IRGC were conducted in two phases.

In the first operation, PJAK forces killed 9 members of the Guards after targeting a center in the Rabat area near the city of Sardasht. The second operation was launched last Monday against a border camp near the city of Mariwan.

Dikrani said that 15 Revolutionary Guards members were killed during the second attack.

Battles in the Kurdish areas came one week after confirmations by the Kurdish Democratic Party that its Peshmerga forces were still engaged in fighting with the Iranian military forces, denying rumors reported by Kurdish media outlets that the military operations between those parties and the Iranian Guards had stopped.