Two drones, one clear message
The first drone hit the Komala Party of Iranian Kurdistan’s base in the Khalifan region of northern Iraq just after nightfall on Saturday. The second one took out the guard post. By the time the dust settled over Balisan, in Erbil province, the pattern was unmistakable: Tehran had come for the exiles again.
“Moments ago, one of the bases of the Komala Party of Iranian Kurdistan in the Khalifan region was once again targeted in a drone strike,” the group said in a statement overnight. “Fortunately, no casualties have been reported.”
That claim was backed up independently. Ali Ranjbari, the head of Komala’s relations office, confirmed to Rudaw English — the largest Kurdish-language news network in Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan Region (often called the KRG) — that two drones launched from Iran had struck the compound, that nobody was hurt, and that buildings were damaged. A separate security source in the Kurdistan Region confirmed the attack to Rudaw as well. Iran’s semi-official Mehr News Agency also reported the strikes, attributing them to Tehran’s campaign against what it calls separatist groups.
Who Komala are — and why Tehran wants them gone
Komala is one of the oldest Iranian Kurdish opposition movements — a left-wing group that fled Iran in the aftermath of the country’s 1979 Islamic Revolution and has kept political headquarters and residential camps in northern Iraq ever since, alongside groups like the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (PDKI), the Kurdistan Free Life Party (PJAK), the Kurdistan Freedom Party, and the Khabat organization.
Iran has treated their presence on Iraqi soil as an intolerable threat for decades. It has pursued them across the border with assassinations, artillery, ballistic missiles and drones — in September 2018 Iranian missiles flattened PDKI’s headquarters near Koya, and another major wave followed the 2022 protests sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini in Iranian police custody. In 2023, Baghdad and Tehran signed a security agreement that was supposed to disarm the groups and move them away from the border. It never really stuck.
A new phase since the Americans left
What makes Saturday’s strike different is its timing. The United States completed its withdrawal from Iraq on September 30, ending a military presence that had, whatever its purpose, constrained how freely Iran could operate on Iraqi soil. Since then, Kurdish opposition groups say they have been hit repeatedly — including strikes on PDKI positions in Koya and Khabat, both near Erbil.
The Kurdistan Regional Government says more than 1,000 drone and missile attacks have targeted its territory since February 28 — the date the United States and Israel launched their opening strikes on Iran in a war that is still raging. That regional figure covers opposition camps, diplomatic facilities and infrastructure, not just the Kurdish groups.
Even Erbil is worried. KRG President Nechirvan Barzani recently condemned the Kurdish opposition groups for behaving “irresponsibly” — a thinly veiled admission that their presence is drawing Iranian fire onto Kurdish cities.
The fighting is spreading inside Iran too
Over the border in western Iran, clashes between the IRGC and PJAK fighters have escalated in the Shaho mountain range in the Hawraman region in recent days, according to Rudaw. Iranian forces have deployed heavy weaponry and drones to bombard areas where Kurdish militants hold positions. The Kurdistan Human Rights Network reported continued shelling and drone attacks around Daleh Marz village in Sarvabad county, with witnesses describing explosions from suicide drones and reconnaissance aircraft circling the mountains.
Why this matters
Iran’s war is no longer just about the Strait of Hormuz, where Tehran’s forces have menaced more than a dozen commercial vessels in the last two weeks, or about the Saudi-Yemen front Tehran has offered to mediate. A third front is taking shape in Iraq — and Iraq, caught between Washington and Tehran, has almost no control over it.
For the Kurdistan Regional Government, the strikes are a sovereignty crisis: it cannot protect the refugees living on its territory, and it cannot stop Tehran from treating Erbil province as a bombing range. For Washington, the attacks are a test of what its withdrawal actually bought — if Iranian drones can operate freely over northern Iraq eighteen days after the last American troops left, the security vacuum is already being filled.
And for the tens of thousands of Iranian Kurds who have lived in these camps for decades, Saturday’s double strike was a reminder of the oldest lesson in their exile: the border that protects them from Tehran is only as real as someone is willing to enforce it.
