As the U.S.-Iran cease-fire faltered in recent days, all eyes have been on violations in the Gulf. But even before hostiles resumed last week—when a truce between the two countries was nominally in place—breaches continued in the Kurdish regions of Iran and Iraq. It is unclear whether a renewed settlement would encompass these areas.

On June 16, two days after U.S. President Donald Trump announced that the United States and Iran had agreed to a framework to end their four-month war, an Iranian drone slammed into a camp belonging to an Iranian Kurdish group located in Iraq’s Kurdistan Region. The attack hit part of a Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (PDKI) compound where civilian families lived. No casualties were reported.

As the U.S.-Iran cease-fire faltered in recent days, all eyes have been on violations in the Gulf. But even before hostiles resumed last week—when a truce between the two countries was nominally in place—breaches continued in the Kurdish regions of Iran and Iraq. It is unclear whether a renewed settlement would encompass these areas.

On June 16, two days after U.S. President Donald Trump announced that the United States and Iran had agreed to a framework to end their four-month war, an Iranian drone slammed into a camp belonging to an Iranian Kurdish group located in Iraq’s Kurdistan Region. The attack hit part of a Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (PDKI) compound where civilian families lived. No casualties were reported.

The airstrike near Koya was a “clear violation of international humanitarian principles and demonstrates the continued threat faced by Kurdish opposition groups,” the PDKI said in a statement.

Eleven days later, a member of another Iranian Kurdish group, the Kurdistan Freedom Party (PAK), was found dead in a hotel room in Erbil, Iraq. The party alleges that Iran assassinated him. PDKI camps in the Kurdistan Region near Degala and Balisan were attacked on July 1 and 2, respectively. Inside Iran, six of the group’s fighters were killed in a July 1 clash with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the party reported. On July 13, three suspected Iranian drones struck a base belonging to the PAK north of Erbil, shortly after the United States launched a new wave of attacks on Iran’s Gulf coast.

Together, the attacks signal that Iraq’s Kurdistan Region seems to sit outside of the memorandum of understanding between the United States and Iran, which called for “the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts.” Continued fighting in Lebanon nearly scuttled the deal before it was implemented, and strikes in the Gulf and Jordan have dominated media coverage in recent days. But apparent violations in Iraqi Kurdistan have gone largely unremarked by international media or politicians.

“The attacks everywhere have stopped, but the attacks on Kurdistan Region have not stopped yet,” Kamaran Osman said on June 25, when the cease-fire was still in force. Osman is a field researcher with Community Peacemaker Teams (CPT), a local war monitor that tracks attacks by Iran, Turkey, and Iraqi militias in Iraq’s Kurdistan Region.

The Kurdistan Region suffered at least 751 attacks during the three months following the start of the Iran war on Feb. 28, according to CPT. Twenty-two people were killed and 112 injured. Of these, 104 attacks occurred after the April 8 cease-fire between the United States and Iran—mostly aimed at Iranian Kurdish groups that are exiled from Iran and carry out political activities in relative safety from Iraqi Kurdistan. These include the PDKI, the PAK, the Komala Party of Iranian Kurdistan, and the Kurdistan Free Life Party.

The attacks on Iranian Kurds raise the possibility that conflict could continue in Iraqi Kurdistan but in a way that delimits risk from the broader regional conflict by exclusively targeting Iranian groups that operate from Iraqi territory. “It seems like U.S. government doesn’t care about the Kurdish groups. They are not a part of this agreement,” Osman said.

Early in the war, rumors swirled that the United States and Israel intended for Iranian Kurds to serve as the tip of the spear in bringing down the Iranian regime. Iran heavily restricts Kurdish political rights, as well as the Kurdish language, and security forces frequently use heavy-handed tactics to enforce these regulations in what is among Iran’s least developed regions.

“I think it’s wonderful that they want ⁠to [go on the offensive]. I’d be all for it,” U.S. President Donald Trump told Reuters on March 5. Reports suggested that Israel was also invested in the plan. However, hopes for a U.S.-Kurdish alliance in Iran soured into acrimonious and unverified allegations by Trump that Kurdish groups had appropriated U.S. weapons intended to arm Iranian protesters.

No Iranian Kurdish groups have waged a sustained armed struggle against Tehran in recent years, and they reacted to the war more cautiously than the United States and Israel hoped. These groups presumably realized that Iranian retaliation would be harsh and unsparing for the civilian population in Kurdish areas.

The Iranian regime brutally suppressed protests following the 2022 death of Jina Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman who died at the hands of the country’s morality police. Two months before the Iran war began, at least 257 Iranian Kurdish civilians were killed during protests, according to the Berlin-based Hengaw Organization for Human Rights.

Yet Iran argues that the Kurdish groups still present a major threat—precisely because they could take up arms in the way that Trump initially encouraged. “Any action to make the northwest borders insecure will be met with a decisive and regrettable response,” the IRGC said in a statement on June 30, referring to the killing of the six PDKI fighters.

In 2023, Iran signed a security agreement with Iraq to disarm Iranian Kurdish groups in Iraq, restrict them to monitored camps, and limit their political activities in the region. The Kurdistan Regional Government is subject to the deal.

With the conflict with the United States occurring at a lower tempo than in the spring, Iran likely wants to deal once and for all with the perceived threat posed by the Iranian Kurdish groups. Tehran is poised to begin negotiations with Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi to strengthen the 2023 agreement and has insisted that the national and regional governments expel Iranian Kurdish groups from Iraq entirely.

Iran has paired this demand with regular attacks on the group’s bases in Iraqi Kurdistan. In 2018, the IRGC killed 11 PDKI officials in a missile attack on Koya, and more strikes followed in 2022. Iranian Kurdish groups in Iraqi Kurdistan have been hit 232 times since the Iran war started, according to CPT.

Before and during the conflict, however, these groups were not the only airstrike targets in the Kurdistan Region—and Iran was not the only perpetrator. Iran-backed militias inside federal Iraq also regularly targeted the Kurdistan Region, including oil fields run by foreign companies, military bases, the U.S. Consulate in Erbil, and even the home of a prominent Iraqi Kurdish politician.

Zaidi, who took office in May, has made disarming the militias a top priority and scored some early successes. Iraq has also offered security guarantees to international oil companies operating in the Kurdistan Region to encourage them to increase production and help alleviate the financial squeeze caused by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

The United States has made it clear that a resumption of militia attacks would ripple through the region, endanger the agreement with Iran, and threaten U.S. support for Zaidi’s government. “You can’t have the end of hostilities and conflicts in a region as long as Iranian proxies are launching missiles and drones from Iraq,” U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters during a visit to the United Arab Emirates on June 23. “I do think it’s covered by the MOU, and it is an issue that will be gotten to at the appropriate time in these negotiations.”

However, Iran’s targeting of Iranian Kurdish groups appeared insufficient to trigger the same response from the United States, reinforcing a sense among Kurds that they do not benefit from agreements between larger powers. It took cease-fire violations in the Gulf to collapse the MOU.

It also fits with observations that the Trump administration is turning its back on its Kurdish allies, even more than its predecessors. In January, the United States greenlit a military offensive by Syria’s transitional government against Kurdish authorities in northeastern Syria. That perceived betrayal remains fresh in the Kurdish consciousness.

Iraqi Kurds may feel like they narrowly avoided calamity during the Iran war, with their interests largely protected by domestic political developments in Baghdad and U.S. red lines that disincentivize both Iran and Iran-backed militias from attacking critical infrastructure. That appears to be holding for now.

But the Iranian Kurds were never covered by the MOU and continue to come under attack. They will likely bear the brunt of Tehran’s anger even if a peace agreement with the United States is reconstituted. “Kurdish people don’t feel great about the outcome,” Osman said. “Kurdish people will pay for the cost of this war.”