Rojhilat's Relations With the US, Part 2: Two Leaders on the Road to Washington

Rastinews — "Qasimlo asked the United States for "moral and political support." He stressed that the KDPI had always taken a firm stand against terrorism and hostage-taking, and handed the political officer a paper he had presented at the Paris Terrorism Symposium rejecting terror as a tool for revolutionary liberation movements. He said he could not understand why the US president would receive "a ragtag band of Afghan fundamentalists" and continue to back "unsustainable Nicaraguan factions," yet overlook "genuine democratic groups" fighting for "universally recognized human rights."

Qasimlo said he had 10,000 to 12,000 active fighters and could not "sustain" more for logistical reasons, but could mobilize "many times that number" if the need arose. He claimed he had no real rival among Iranian Kurds — "eighty percent" backed him, he said — and scoffed at any comparison with Iraq: "There is no Kurdish Taha Ma'ruf serving as vice president in Iran, no Kurds holding ministerial posts. Nor are there jash in numbers like those in Iraq."

Qasimlo made a point of saying that in seeking American support he was not asking for money or weapons. "Of course one always wants more, but we have enough," he said. He declined to detail his sources of funding, saying only that "every family in Kurdistan" contributed voluntarily. He described his support base in Iranian Kurdistan as "solid as rock" and said he was "optimistic" about the future. He was prepared to hold out in the mountains for another 25 years, he said, but predicted that if Khomeini died soon, "Tehran could see serious upheaval," and that Iran's economy was in "deep collapse."

He said Baghdad made him particularly uneasy, and he avoided going there unless he had to. He had hated the Shah, "but Khomeini was far worse." He had met Khomeini twice in 1979 and had been "brazenly lied to." Qasimlo went on to describe taqiyya — deception in the service of a higher cause — as an entrenched feature of the Shiite character; the political officer noted that they, too, had recently learned a few lessons on the subject.

Qasimlo acknowledged that the KDPI could not topple the regime on its own and needed an alliance with other Iranian opposition groups. He said the regime enjoyed broad support — from "hundreds of thousands of mullahs who see their entire livelihood under threat" — and that bringing it down would not be easy.

The political officer said American public opinion was sympathetic to the Kurdish cause but poorly informed about it, and suggested Qasimlo could benefit from building ties with journalists. Qasimlo said that during this visit to Baghdad he had helped resolve a visa problem for Washington Post correspondent Jonathan Randal, who had written a book on the Kurds and had interviewed him for fourteen hours. He complained that the Soviets had always regarded the KDPI as an American-backed organization, while the Americans had always viewed the Soviets with suspicion — when in truth the KDPI had no real friend at all. "Our only friend is the mountains," he said.

Of medium height and slight build, Qasimlo's hair has begun to gray, yet he moves with the agility of a much younger man. A gifted storyteller, he laces his conversation with a steady stream of humor."

This was how Dr. Ebdurrehman Qasimlo, Secretary-General of the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI), was described in a diplomatic cable sent by the US Embassy in Baghdad on February 16, 1988 — a document that would later surface in the WikiLeaks archive.

The embassy's political officer had requested the meeting through Swedish Ambassador Arne Thorén, and on February 12, 1988, Dr. Qasimlo was invited to a lunch that lasted six hours. A full account of the meeting, with a short biography of Dr. Qasimlo appended, was cabled to Washington marked "Secret."

Dr. Qasimlo was described as coming across as "remarkably candid, polished and compelling even in English, only the sixth language he spoke well" — after Kurdish, Persian, Arabic, French and Czech. According to the cable, he passed through Baghdad every five to seven months on his way from the mountains of Kurdistan to Europe, and would typically meet with the Swedish and French ambassadors during these stopovers.

Relations between Kurdish forces and European governments were tense at the time: peshmerga loyal to the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), led by Jalal Talabani, were holding three Italians, and Dr. Qasimlo had taken on the role of mediator to resolve the crisis. He told the American official that he had just met with Italian Ambassador Toscano and had promised to do everything he could to secure the Italians' release.

What happened two weeks later showed that Dr. Qasimlo had kept his word to both the American official and the Italian ambassador. The three Italian technicians, employed on the Dokan Dam power plant project near Sulaymaniyah and held by PUK peshmerga since mid-October 1987, were released in the final days of February 1988 and returned home. Mam Jalal himself had insisted the technicians were not "hostages" but guests of the PUK, held to draw world attention to the Kurdish cause and to press for an end to military and economic cooperation between Italy and Saddam Hussein's regime.

Dr. Qasimlo had played a similar role once before, in 1981, when two French engineers were kidnapped by the Iraqi Communist Party at an irrigation project site near Kirkuk. Through intensive efforts, he made good on his promise to French officials that the engineers would be freed — it took about three months. He took on a comparable mission in 1984, when two Canadians and three Frenchmen were kidnapped and later released.

Despite all these efforts on behalf of Westerners — he was, in the words of former French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, "Kurdistan's face to the outside world" — Qasimlo never harbored deep resentment toward the West for abandoning Kurdistan. In conversations with friends and with his wife, Helene Krulich, he spoke of the Kurds being left to the mercy of brutal regimes always with a touch of irony: "What can we do — European interests are bigger than Kurdistan."

Three Days Before the Death in Vienna…

In the course of what were billed as "negotiation talks" — but were in fact a dialogue the Iranian state had launched to "eliminate" him — Dr. Qasimlo made direct contact in the first half of 1989 with April Glaspie, the US ambassador in Baghdad. His goal was to have his name removed from Washington's "Dangerous Marxists List" and to clear the way for a trip to the United States. Dr. Qasimlo eventually won over Glaspie, the first woman to serve as a US ambassador in the Middle East, and when he traveled to Europe in June 1989 his passport carried a US visa for the first time.
But first he had to attend the Socialist International Congress in Stockholm. He attached great importance to this congress; his party, the KDPI, had sent a senior delegation to it at every session since the 1983 congress in Peru. Dr. Sadegh Sharafkandi, who would succeed him as party leader, was also on his way to Berlin to attend the same congress — where, in an assassination more than a year in the planning that I have called the "Mykonos Trap," he would be murdered along with three companions.

After moving from Stockholm to Paris, Dr. Qasimlo was excited about his upcoming trip to the United States and shared that excitement with friends and his wife. He gave his wife, Helene Krulich, the English texts of the speeches he planned to deliver during his US meetings, so she could correct them. On the evening of July 10, 1989, the night before he left for Vienna, he celebrated his joy over the US trip with a dinner at home. But on July 13, 1989, in a house at 5 Linke Bahngasse Street in Vienna's third district, he became the target of Iranian gunmen, along with the party's European representative, Abdulkadir Azeri, and Fadil Resul, who had organized the meeting.

According to some claims, three days before the assassination, US officials met with Austria's interior minister and warned him that an attack against Dr. Qasimlo could take place on Austrian soil. Years later, at a conference held for Dr. Qasimlo at the French Senate in Paris on February 17, 2020, Aziz Mameli, a former KDPI European representative, revived these claims. He said that two days before the assassination, the Americans had sent a letter to the same Austrian minister, reiterating their warning.

Despite the US warning, Dr. Qasimlo tried until the afternoon of July 13 to meet with the interior minister in Vienna. His appointment, however, was mysteriously canceled without explanation, and he went to the meeting with the Iranians empty-handed. When he became the target of bullets at the "negotiating table," the passport in his pocket still carried a US visa.

The Effort Continues With Dr. Sharafkandi
Dr. Sadegh Sharafkandi, who became KDPI Secretary-General after Dr. Qasimlo, also placed great importance on relations with Europe and the United States. He had earned his doctorate in Paris in the 1970s and was a calm, affable leader and scientist, fluent in French and English. Before he was assassinated in Berlin on September 17, 1992, along with three colleagues — Fattah Abdoli, Homayoun Ardalan and Nouri Dehkordi — he too had made efforts in Paris that same summer to travel to the US.

Two years ago, I knocked on the door of Fattah Abdoli's widow, Kejal Khanim — herself a former Peshmerga and comrade-in-struggle — for my book "The Mykonos Trap." I grew very excited when she laid out before me the documents and notebooks she had carefully kept for years inside a black bag; I did not know where to begin.

For days I worked through the information in Abdoli's diary, fixated above all on a note reading "appointment at the US Embassy on July 7," trying to unravel its secret. What I found was limited, but one thing was certain: Dr. Sharafkandi, together with European representative Fattah Abdoli, had contacted the US Embassy in Paris about traveling to Washington, and had even been given the "green light." But the passport he carried for travel around Europe was issued under a different name, and he first needed a travel document in his own name.

Just as Dr. Qasimlo, who never returned from Vienna, could not go to Washington, Dr. Sharafkandi, who never returned from Berlin, could not set out for Washington either…

On February 26-27, 2026, I tried to reach Khalid Azizi, one of the KDPI's current senior figures, by phone for an interview about the coalition formed by Rojhilat's parties. He told me he was in Europe at the time and would be flying to the US early the next morning, so the interview was not possible. I was disappointed, yet also glad that the goal Dr. Qasimlo and Dr. Sharafkandi had left unfinished at the last moment was finally about to be realized. Indeed, by the time Azizi landed in Washington on the morning of February 28, the first US missiles had already reached Tehran.

Two important political figures in Rojhilat's recent history, Dr. Qasimlo and Dr. Sharafkandi, both tried to travel to the US, tell the story of the Kurdish people's struggle against the Iranian state, and ask for "moral and political support." Ever since the war with Iran began, I have recalled those unfinished efforts with a lingering sense of sorrow.

Sources:
- A European Woman in Kurdistan, Helene Krulich, Avesta Publications
- Abdurrahman Qasimlo, Études Kurdes - Institut Kurde de Paris, Avesta Publications
- The Mykonos Trap: Behind the Assassination of Dr. Sadegh Sharafkandi, Perwer Armed, Dara Publications

**Photo: Dr. Sadegh Sharafkandi, Fattah Abdoli and other party comrades at Dr. Qasimlo's grave in Paris (July 13, 1992).