Shelling Near Iranian Border Is Forcing Iraqi Kurds to Flee

"We want this shelling to be halted, because it's causing damage to the border population and is disproportionate to the level of threat that some of the armed groups or terrorist groups are causing to the interests of the Islamic Republic" of Iran, he said at a news conference Sunday in Baghdad.

An official at the Iranian Embassy in Baghdad said that within the past three months, Kurdish rebels have staged suicide attacks and committed other violence that killed at least 10 members of the Iranian security forces. "This is why Iran wants to solve this security matter on the borders," he said.

But the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, insisted that the accounts of shelling were "rumors and not true" and that "everything that we have done is inside the Iranian territory, not inside Iraq."

"No Kurds have been wounded or affected by that," he said.

Iraqi and U.S. soldiers do not regularly patrol the steep slopes and narrow rocky paths that make much of the border region nearly impassable. The de facto authorities here are the Kurdish guerrilla groups -- considered terrorist organizations by the Turkish and Iranian governments -- whose grenade-strapped fighters stand lonely sentry on the mountain switchbacks.

The young men and women who hail from the Kurdish diaspora in Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria fight for greater Kurdish influence in those countries. The most prominent among the guerrilla groups is the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, which focuses its efforts against Turkey. Its affiliate organization of Iranian Kurds is called the Party for a Free Life in Kurdistan, or PJAK.

"They are targeting the area under the pretext that the PKK and PJAK are there, but they're not hitting the positions," said one PKK official on condition of anonymity. "Iran's actual goals, which they will not announce, is to strike the U.S. and destabilize Iraq."

At a safe house on a desolate slope in the Qandil range, the head of the PKK, Murat Karayilan, said he believed the recent campaign arose because Iran, Turkey and Syria have aligned against what he calls the "Kurdish freedom movement." Karayilan, a stout, mustachioed man in olive-drab fatigues and a thick leather belt, has taken control of the rebel group in Iraq while its highest leader, Abdullah Ocalan, languishes in an island prison in Turkey.

While Karayilan now is pushing for more rights for Kurds across the Middle East, he suggested that his organization's long-term goal is to establish semiautonomous regional entities in those countries similar to the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq. Many politicians in Iraqi Kurdish territory, however, say they are hostile toward the PKK and would like to drive out the rebel group but cannot spare the soldiers.

This year, Turkey sent tens of thousands of troops to the Iraqi border, raising fears of a major invasion, in what Turkish officials said was a response to PKK attacks in southern Turkey. The shelling by Iranian troops, Karayilan said, serves as a vote of solidarity with Turkey in the campaign against the rebels and the larger Kurdish community. But the timing, he indicated, also reflects an attempt to delay an important Iraqi referendum, scheduled for later this year, on whether to include the oil-rich city of Kirkuk as part of the Kurdish region.

"The third aim of these attacks is to try to give a message to the United States of America and the other international forces," he said. "The Iranians are against the Kurds but at the same time they are very much against the Americans as well."

Iran's deputy foreign minister for Arab affairs, Mohammad R. Baqiri, told reporters in Baghdad on Sunday that an Iranian committee had been formed to look into the border response. But he also accused the U.S. military of supporting Iranian Kurdish rebels in Iraq and said that "if a terrorist group wants to launch attacks from the territories of the other country . . . we should discipline those people who conduct those operations."