Illustration depicting Iran attacked by US-Zionist missiles. Photo: The Cradle.
By Peiman Salehi – Mar 9, 2026
Wars involving large and diverse states often produce a familiar assumption among outside observers: sustained military pressure will eventually expose internal fractures. Since the launch of the US-Israeli attacks on Iran, similar expectations have circulated across policy commentary and media analysis.
Many analysts predicted the war might activate Iran’s ethnic fault lines, particularly in the western provinces where Kurdish communities live near the Iraqi border and where several armed Kurdish opposition groups operate.
Yet developments inside Iran have so far defied that assumption.
Rather than triggering centrifugal pressure, the attacks appear to have reinforced a broader sense of national cohesion across many parts of the country – including regions that foreign analysts frequently portray as vulnerable to separatist unrest.
The misreading of Iran’s diversity
Iran’s ethnic composition has long been interpreted through an overly mechanical framework. The country is not a homogeneous nation-state. Large Azeri, Kurdish, Arab, Baluch, and Turkmen communities live across the country, and several provinces also contain substantial Sunni populations.
Yet diversity in Iran has never automatically translated into separatism. Ethnicity and national identity overlap in more complex ways than many foreign analyses suggest.
Azeris, for example, have long been deeply embedded in the political and military core of the state, while Kurdish regions, despite periods of tension, have also maintained economic and social integration with the wider Iranian political system. Even members of Iran’s highest leadership, including newly appointed Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, come from families with Azeri roots.
These overlapping identities complicate the narrative that ethnic difference alone constitutes a structural weakness.
Nevertheless, the strategic focus on Iran’s Kurdish west during the current war reflects a longstanding belief among some policymakers that ethnic divisions can be activated during moments of crisis. According to data cited by the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), drawing on figures from the conflict monitoring organization ACLED, roughly one-fifth of US and Israeli strikes in Iran during the opening phase of the conflict were concentrated in Kurdish-majority provinces in the country’s west.
The same report noted that several targeted sites included police facilities, border guard posts, and regional security infrastructure. In practice, this pattern suggests that military planners believed pressure on these areas might generate not only security disruption but political fragmentation as well.
Militancy without mass traction
Reports surrounding Kurdish opposition movements reinforced this expectation. A syndicated AP dispatch noted that several Iranian Kurdish dissident groups based in Iraq’s Kurdistan region had indicated they were preparing for possible operations if the conflict expanded.
At the same time, reporting from Erbil described how Iranian strikes targeted camps belonging to exiled Kurdish opposition groups in northern Iraq.
Iranian officials warned that any attempt by separatist factions to exploit the war would be met with decisive retaliation. Iraqi federal authorities and officials in the Kurdistan Regional Government also stressed that Iraqi territory should not become a launchpad for attacks against neighboring states.
Regional actors clearly understand the stakes. A destabilized frontier could quickly drag neighboring states into a wider confrontation.
Even Turkiye’s Defense Ministry publicly acknowledged it was closely monitoring developments involving PJAK and other Kurdish militant organizations and warned that any escalation of separatist activity could threaten broader regional stability.
These statements show how seriously multiple governments have treated the possibility that the conflict might trigger unrest across Iran’s western borderlands.
Yet the presence of armed groups does not automatically translate into a viable insurgent opening.
The analytical mistake lies in confusing organizational existence with political traction. Groups such as PJAK, Komala, and the Kurdistan Freedom Party do exist, and some have attempted to reorganize their networks during periods of regional tension.
But the social base required for a sustained uprising inside Iran is another matter. Iranian Kurdish society is politically diverse. It includes nationalists, reformists, religious movements, leftist activists, and communities that are critical of the central government yet remain wary of militant strategies backed by foreign powers. Armed organizations can exploit instability. They cannot manufacture broad social legitimacy.
War, memory, and national cohesion
Foreign military pressure has also altered the political environment in ways that many outside observers underestimated. Iran entered the war amid significant economic strain linked to sanctions inflation and earlier protests.
However, external military attacks tend to reshape the relationship between state and society. Even citizens who criticize the government often distinguish between domestic political disputes and foreign intervention.
The US attack on a girls’ school in the southern Iranian city of Minab became a powerful symbol in this context. AP reporting indicated that the strike on the school triggered condemnation and calls for investigations into possible violations of international humanitarian law. Images of schoolchildren killed during bombardment quickly circulated across Iranian social media.
Whatever Washington’s stated narrative about weakening the Iranian state, the perception that civilians, especially children, had become victims of the conflict dramatically shifted the emotional tone of the war inside Iran.
When war is framed internationally as pressure on a government but experienced locally as violence against society, political reactions can change quickly.
Rather than generating support for external intervention, such incidents often reinforce national solidarity.
In Iran, this reaction has been shaped by historical memory and cultural narratives. The eight-year Iran-Iraq war, from 1980 to 1988, remains one of the most powerful collective memories in the country’s modern political culture.
During that conflict, volunteers from different ethnic and religious communities mobilized to defend the country against what was widely perceived as foreign aggression.
This legacy continues to influence how many Iranians interpret external military pressure today. Cultural symbolism also plays a role. In Shia historical tradition, the story of Imam Hussein’s stand against injustice in the Battle of Karbala remains a powerful moral reference point. Although rooted in religious history, the narrative has long been integrated into broader political language about sacrifice, resistance, and endurance.
Iranian officials have framed the current conflict in similar terms.
Ali Larijani, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, recently warned Kurdish opposition factions not to treat the war as an opportunity to pursue separatist ambitions.
He suggested that projects aimed at fragmenting Iran – particularly ideas about detaching Kurdish regions from the country – have collapsed under the realities of the conflict.
US-Israeli War on Iran Is Not About Nuclear Weapons. It’s About Imperialism.
The limits of fragmentation strategies
None of this means the danger of unrest has disappeared.
Kurdish militant organizations remain active across the border, and external actors may still view them as potential instruments of pressure. A prolonged war could reshape local dynamics in unpredictable ways. Yet the opening phase of the conflict has already demonstrated the limits of strategies built on the assumption that ethnic diversity alone can fracture the Iranian state.
If anything, the opposite dynamic may be unfolding.
External military pressure has temporarily reinforced the perception of a shared national frame across Iran’s diverse communities. The first week of war has shown how poorly the political sociology of Iran is still understood in many external analyses.
A country can be ethnically diverse without being politically fragile in the way outsiders imagine. Local grievances do not automatically translate into separatist revolt, and militant organizations do not necessarily represent the political will of the communities they claim to defend.
In the early days of the war, the concentration of strikes in Iran’s west appeared designed to test whether the country could be fractured along its ethnic seams.
So far, the outcome has been the opposite. Pressure intended to activate Iran’s internal divisions has instead reinforced the broader national frame that many observers expected would fracture under sustained external attack.
