The Trump administration has enlisted the support of Kurdish activists in Syria, Iraq, and Iran to join the U.S.-led war to unseat Iran’s clerical regime. CNN reports that the Central Intelligence Agency is already arming Iranian Kurds. CNN and other outlets also report that President Trump spoke with Kurdish leaders in Iraq on March 8, 2026, about having their forces join the fight.
Washington’s motives for this move are easy to discern. The Kurdish minority concentrated along Iran’s western border has long sought to break away from Tehran’s control. U.S. and Israeli leaders understand that such disruptive secessionist efforts could further damage the incumbent government’s already weakened position.
There is a major problem with that strategy, however. Secessionist-minded Iranian Kurds do not merely want to undermine their oppressors in Tehran; many of them want to join their equally restless ethnic brethren in Iraq, Syria, and Turkey to establish a new, independent Kurdish homeland. The incumbent governments in those volatile countries feud about a wide array of issues. One objective all these governments have in common, though, is a determination to prevent the emergence of an independent Kurdish nation state, since that development would threaten the internal unity – and perhaps the continued viability–of multiple neighbors.
Previous U.S. administrations have encouraged and even actively supported Kurdish clients when it advanced Washington’s short-term goals. Such initiatives invariably have been followed by cynical betrayals of those clients when the U.S. government concluded that support for parochial Kurdish objectives endangered higher priority U.S. regional objectives.
This cycle of support and betrayal has occurred repeatedly. Most recently, the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations used Syrian Kurds as armed proxies in a long campaign to seize oil-rich territory in northern Syria and help unseat Syria’s dictator, Bashar al-Assad. A small contingent of U.S. ground troops deployed in northern Syria aided that effort. The Kurdish fighters were remarkably successful despite strong opposition from both Assad and Turkey.
But when anti-Assad insurgent forces dominated by Arab Sunni Islamists finally overthrew his secular government in December 2024, the usefulness to Washington of Kurdish fighters and Kurdish control over northern Syria evaporated quickly. In late 2025, the Trump administration terminated its support for the Kurdish faction and warned Syrian Kurdish leaders to end their opposition to the new Islamist regime in Baghdad.
That latest move was at least the fourth example of a U.S. policy reversal and outright betrayal of the Kurds in less than three generations. In 1973, President Richard Nixon made a secret agreement with the Shah of Iran to provide the covert financial and military support to the Kurdish minority in Iraq who had launched an insurgency against Iraq’s young dictator, Saddam Hussein. Those Kurdish insurgents were seeking to establish an independent Kurdistan in northern Iraq. (Saddam had irritated U.S. leaders earlier that year by signing a Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation with Moscow.) Kurdish officials conducted planning sessions in Washington with the CIA, and CIA agents assisted Kurdish Peshmerga militia units to harass Saddam’s forces.
However, in March 1975, the Shah’s regime suddenly signed a peace agreement with Saddam and withdrew Iran’s support for the Kurdish insurgency. U.S. officials were not willing to pressure their more valued ally on behalf of the Kurds. Washington followed Tehran’s shift and withdrew its assistance, causing the rebellion to collapse and exposing the Iraqi Kurds to Saddam’s intensified persecution.
Despite the earlier U.S. betrayal, Iraqi Kurds eagerly accepted Washington’s assistance in finally establishing their de facto autonomous region in northern Iraq following Saddam’s defeat in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Under the guise of a humanitarian mission, Operation Provide Comfort, U.S. troops established a presence in northern Iraq to protect the Kurds. Washington’s decision to impose a no-fly zone also prevented Saddam’s forces from crushing the new Kurdish secessionist effort. Iraqi Kurdistan’s de facto independence became even more entrenched following the U.S.-led Iraq War and the ouster of Saddam from power.
When Kurdish leaders moved to transform the Kurdish region’s de facto independence into legal, internationally recognized independence in 2017, however, the strict limits of Washington’s support became clear. U.S. leaders stood by passively while Baghdad and Iraq’s neighbors crushed the latest Kurdish bid for independence. In October 2019, Trump made a similar major shift in Washington’s policy regarding the Syrian Kurds. Instead of opposing Turkey’s use of force to clear out Kurdish- controlled territory in northern Syria, Washington decided to step aside and allow the operation to proceed.
As they consider Washington’s new blandishments to have Kurdish forces join the war to oust the government in Tehran, Kurds throughout the Middle East should remember this awful history and draw appropriate lessons. They finally need to learn that trusting the U.S. government is hazardous. Washington’s conduct toward the Kurdish population over the decades is certainly not an occasion for national pride on the part of Americans, but U.S. leaders are not uniquely duplicitous. Historically, most great powers have sacrificed smaller allies and clients whenever more central national interests seemed to be at stake. The behavior of the Trump administration and previous U.S. governments is consistent with that norm.
Current Kurdish leaders should expect yet another cynical betrayal if they are naïve enough to believe Washington’s propaganda about the latest war against Iran. An updated version of an old saying would seem appropriate for the Kurds in their dealings with the United States: Fool me once, shame on you; fool me 5 times, shame on me.
