Trump’s admission gives credence to Iranian assertion that the January protests were backed by foreign actors to create chaos.
President Donald Trump has said the United States tried to covertly arm Iranian protesters through Kurdish intermediaries weeks before the current war was launched, even as Washington was engaged in talks with Tehran.
“We sent guns to the protesters, a lot of them,” Fox News quoted Trump as saying late on Sunday, adding that the US president believed that the Kurds kept the guns for themselves.
The comments come amid the US-Israel war on Iran, which was launched on February 28, weeks after demonstrations erupted over the high cost of living. The protests, one of the largest in decades, were triggered by the worsening economic situation following decades of US sanctions.
Media reports, including by Israel’s Channel 12, during the protests in January, also claimed that demonstrators were being armed by “foreign” actors.
Trump also claimed that, during the protests, Iran “slaughtered” some 45,000 civilians, Fox News reported. His claims could not be independently verified.
Iranian authorities say 3,117 people were killed during the weeks of protests, rejecting United Nations and rights groups’ claims that state forces were responsible. Iranian officials have said hundreds of police officials were killed and government properties damaged by the protesters, whom they dubbed “rioters”, “saboteurs” and “terrorists”. It has since executed several people on charges of participating in the protests at the behest of foreign enemies.
The US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) said in late January that it had verified 6,872 deaths and was investigating more than 11,000 additional cases, while a UN special rapporteur has suggested the death toll could exceed 20,000.
Al Jazeera could not independently verify the claimed figures.
‘Not even a single bullet’
Several Iranian Kurdish opposition groups denied Trump’s claim of arming them, Rudaw, a broadcaster based in the semi-autonomous Kurdish region of Iraq, reported.
Mohammed Nazif Qaderi, a senior official from the opposition Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI), told Rudaw that “those statements made are baseless and we haven’t received any weapons. The weapons we have are from 47 years ago, and we obtained them on the Islamic Republic’s battlefield, and we bought some from the market.”
“Our policy is not to make demonstrations violent and use harsh methods, rather we believe we must make our demands in a peaceful and civil manner without weapons,” Qaderi was quoted as saying.
Other Kurdish Iranian opposition parties, including the Komala Party of Iranian Kurdistan, and the Kurdistan National Army, which is affiliated with the Kurdistan Freedom Party (PAK), also denied Trump’s claim, Rudaw reported.
“Donald Trump’s message is unclear to us. What is there is that we as our army have in no way received weapons from the US or any other country, not even a single bullet,” Hamno Naqshbandi, a member of the general command of the Kurdistan National Army, told the outlet.
In early March, several parties also denied media reports that their forces had crossed into Iran to fight Tehran, the Kurdish outlet reported.
A Fox News report had then quoted an unnamed US official alleging that “thousands of Iraqi Kurds” had launched a ground offensive into Iran.
At that time, just days after the US-Israel war on Iran began, the US was in talks with opposition Kurdish forces in a bid to arm them and foment an uprising in Iran, according to multiple media reports.
Kurdish rebels have for years opposed Tehran and carried out numerous attacks in Iran’s Kurdistan province as well as other western provinces. They operate along the Iraq-Iran border, with Iraqi and Iranian Kurdish minorities sharing close cultural ties.
The US spy agency CIA also has a history of working with Kurdish groups in neighbouring Iraq, which the US invaded in 2003.
The Kurds are a group of people indigenous to the Mesopotamian plains and nearby highlands, which today stretch across southeastern Turkiye, northeastern Syria, northern Iraq, northwestern Iran and southwestern Armenia.
Kurdish armed groups in Turkiye and Syria have signed deals to end the armed rebellion, while the Iraqi Kurds run the semi-autonomous region.