The Israeli intelligence community reportedly engaged in an initiative to topple the Iranian regime by transferring weapons and ammunition seized from Hamas and Hezbollah directly into the hands of Kurdish opposition forces, a June 4 report published by Mako stated.
The transfer of arms, which included light weapons and anti-tank missile launchers, was coordinated by Israel and the United States, according to the report. The weapons delivered to the rebels were previously reportedly confiscated from Palestinian and Lebanese terror organizations during wartime operations. The IDF has reportedly seized hundreds of thousands of military items from adversaries in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria, including assault rifles, heavy machine guns, and anti-tank missiles.
A June 7 report published by Maariv stated that the outgoing deputy head of the Mossad, “A.” received a budget of approximately one billion shekels (about $340 million), alongside a dedicated team composed of hundreds of personnel, to spearhead the project of bringing down the Iranian regime. The Maariv report added that the initiative ultimately triggered institutional drama, as the strategic outcomes fell short of internal expectations, leading to a sudden dismissal within the senior leadership.
Beni Sabti, an Iran expert at the Tel Aviv-based Institute for National Security Studies, who after escaping Iran to Israel in 1987, served in the IDF, primarily as a researcher, mostly in projects relating to Iranian culture and influence on cognition, decision making, and media, and who led flagship projects including the establishment of the IDF Spokesperson’s platforms in Persian, told JNS on Tuesday, “To transfer weapons that were caught by the hands of one army to another organization is a common thing in many countries.”
He noted that global powers historically favored this method to mask their involvement in foreign insurgencies and proxy warfare.
“The U.S. and many others did this in the past, because this does not leave traces of the country that is assisting,” Sabti explained.
The absence of Israeli manufacturing stamps or official serial numbers provided, in theory, a critical diplomatic shield for Jerusalem.
“Thus Israel can always deny that it delivered weapons to the Kurds or to any other body,” Sabti stated.
“These weapons were indeed enough to stand opposite units of the Revolutionary Guards that fight in a regular manner against the Kurds in western Iran,” Sabti said.
He added that the Kurds of western Iran “are skilled in war and they are men of mountains and utilize the advantages of the region against elements of rule and harm them many times.”
A very major fracture
Sabti pointed out that numerous Iranian citizens across digital networks actively requested military hardware to confront the state repression apparatus, adding that they did not lack motivation or faith in their struggle, but rather light weapons and machine guns against the heavily armed and murderous state security bodies and militias.
According to Sabti, the Kurds maintained the most potent and violent opposition network since the inception of the Islamic Republic in 1979. He recalled that during the early stages of the Islamic Revolution, the central government was forced to deploy nearly the entirety of the Revolutionary Guards to the Kurdish provinces to crush insurrections and suppress separatist ambitions.
“As such, any major rebellion by the Kurds armed with weapons would at least cause a very major fracture within the Iranian forces and distance the units from the main cities, which would enable greater freedom of protest by the public against the regime, and increase the chances of success for the protests considerably,” Sabti argued. “Even through protests without weapons, Kurdish protesters were able to liberate some cities from IRGC personnel, meaning that Kurdish involvement has been highly effective.”
Professor Uzi Rabi, senior researcher and the head of the Program for Regional Cooperation at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University, stated, “The Kurds can be a lever of pressure on the Iranian regime.”
He cautioned, however, against overestimating the independent kinetic impact of the minority group in its isolated geographical strongholds.
“They cannot be a hammer that topples the regime,” Rabi said. “They are able to harass, to wear down and to split security attention. But if the move will not connect to a broad Iranian protest, it will remain a peripheral front that the regime will frame as separatism and as a foreign plot.”
The Kurds constitute approximately 10% of the Iranian population, rendering them the third-largest ethnic group in the country after Persians and Azeris.
