The Kurds find themselves suspended in Washington’s favorite foreign-policy paradox

Photos: AP Images

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or a brief moment last week, the Kurds found themselves in a uniquely Washingtonian position, as they were simultaneously invited into a war and politely asked to stay home. According to reports circulating through diplomatic and security circles, President Trump held a call last week with leaders of several Iraqi and Iranian Kurdish groups, including groups that have spent decades fighting the Iranian regime from bases tucked into the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan.

The White House confirmed the call, albeit in characteristically careful language.

“The president has held many calls with partners, allies, and leaders in the region, in the Middle East,” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on Wednesday, admitting nothing more than that POTUS spoke “to Kurdish leaders with respect to our base that we have in northern Iraq.”

By Thursday, Trump sounded enthusiastic about the idea of Kurdish forces joining the fight.

“I think it’s wonderful that the Kurds want to do that,” the president said in an interview with Reuters. “I’d be all for it.”

Forty-eight hours later, however, the Kurds had been firmly benched.

“We’re not looking to the Kurds going in,” Trump said in a gaggle with the White House Press Corps over the weekend. “We’re very friendly with the Kurds, as you know, but we don’t want to make the war any more complex than it is. I’ve told them I don’t want them going in.”

Which leaves the Kurds occupying a strange geopolitical limbo. Encouraged on Thursday. Ruled out by the weekend. Somewhere in between lies what might best be described as Schrödinger’s Kurds, simultaneously entering the war and not entering it until the policy is fully observed.

Of course, there may be a method to the apparent contradiction. Trump has long practiced what might be called live beta-testing foreign policy. He starts by floating an idea, and then watches the reaction ripple through allies, adversaries, and cable-news panels. Then, he recalibrates as needed.

First, the call with Kurdish leaders sends the message to Tehran that the United States has options for turning Iran’s own internal fault lines into pressure points, and Thursday’s public encouragement reinforces that possibility. The more recent reversal in which POTUS dismissed the Kurds sends an entirely different message to regional players who would prefer that the Kurdish question remain unopened for now. In diplomatic terms, the maneuver translates roughly as: We could do this, we’re just choosing not to. For the moment.

Pentagon officials have also tried to tamp down speculation that Washington is preparing to arm Kurdish groups inside Iran.

“None of our objectives are premised on the support or the arming of any particular force,” Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said this week. “So what other entities may be doing, we’re aware of, but our objectives aren’t centered on that.”

Which, translated loosely from Pentagon dialect, appears to mean: Someone is arming somebody, and while we may know about it — or may even have something to do with it — we prefer to leave the matter comfortably suspended between pause-able ambiguity and plausible deniability.

Naturally, this has done little to slow down the churn of the rumor mills. Over the past two weeks, stories have ricocheted across the region claiming that Iranian Kurdish factions are quietly receiving weapons. From whom? Perhaps Washington, or from American allies, or from mysterious sources that appear to operate suspiciously close to American allies. But in the Middle East, whispers about covert arms shipments tend to travel faster than the trucks that supposedly carry them.

When I reached out to the spokesman for one of the major Kurdish political parties to ask whether the United States is secretly providing weapons, he refused to answer so emphatically that it left me with the distinct impression that something is happening behind the scenes. Precisely what remains a mystery.

Speaking to me from Erbil, Kurdish journalist Mohammed H., who has been traveling along the border separating Iraqi and Iranian Kurdistan monitoring the situation along the frontier, dismissed reports that Iranian Kurdish forces are already mobilizing or receiving weapons.

“Nothing of this front yet, nothing,” he said flatly. “It’s fake news.”

According to Mohammed, Kurdish fighters from several Iranian Kurdish factions remain exactly where they have been for years: in the mountains just across the border, watching events unfold.

“They are ready,” Mohammed insisted. “But they need help. They need support. Not just someone saying ‘good job.’ They need weapons. They need rockets, Javelins.”

The terrain, he explained, favors precisely that kind of warfare. Iranian Kurdish parties, he noted, have been fighting the regime for decades and maintain experienced fighters who know the terrain intimately.

“They have more than thirty or forty years in those mountains. They have tunnels. They’ve had clashes. They know the land.”

And they are not a small force. Kurdish populations inside Iran number roughly ten million people, with several organized political and military groups operating from bases across the Iraqi border.

While the Kurds wait for Washington to decide whether they are invited into the war or politely excluded from it, Tehran appears to be acting as though the decision has already been made.

Even Kurdish leaders themselves appear to be lowering the temperature. Bafel Talabani, the head of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, was one of the leaders who received a phone call with President Trump. Over the weekend he appeared on Fox News, where he seemed eager to tamp down speculation that Washington is currently arming Kurdish fighters to march into Iran, stressing that relying on the Kurds as “the tip of the spear” might not be he way to go.

That hasn’t stopped the tension from escalating on the ground. Kurdish journalist Mohammed H. recently filmed a suicide drone striking near a hotel housing offices tied to the US and Turkish consulates. Mohammed believes the drone’s real target was Talabani’s headquarters just 200 yards away; he suspects it was directly correlated to his appearance on Fox News.

“After those comments,” Mohammed said, “Iran sent them a message: Be careful.”

In Erbil, meanwhile, US air defenses reportedly intercepted two Iranian drones earlier the same morning.

Saman P., an Iraqi Kurd who works as a fixer in Sulaymaniyah, about 90 minutes from the Iranian border, told me a suicide drone struck just two minutes from where he had been driving. “The kids are terrified,” he said quietly. “The airspace is closed, and we can’t get out of the country.”

For now, the Kurdish fighters remain in their mountain tunnels, watching the same contradictory signals coming out of Washington that everyone else is trying to decode.

Which means that, at least for the moment, the Kurds remain suspended in a familiar state of quantum geopolitics. Until then, the Kurds remain in the mountains where Mohammed left them, subjects within a Schrödinger-esque thought experiment: ready for a war they haven’t been invited to fight, uncertain whether they’re meant to stay out of it, waiting on weapons not yet promised, navigating signals Trump himself may not have yet finalized.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1103)