Both men started their revolutionary careers decades earlier, when the tyrannical Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi still ruled Iran. “We were a leftist organization,” Mohtadi said, speaking softly with an almost flawless British accent. “It was the ’60s and ’70s. It was a struggle against the Shah, against oppression, dictatorship, for social justice and against—the United States.” He seemed slightly embarrassed by this. “Sorry,” he said.
I told him not to worry, that I hadn’t expected anything else. The U.S. government had backed the dictatorship he fought to destroy. Pro-American politics had not been an option.
The Shah’s secret police, the SAVAK, arrested Mohtadi and his closest comrades. He suffered three years of confinement and torture in the dictator’s dungeons. Modarresi quietly sipped his coffee while Mohtadi explained this to me, interrupting only to say that he too was arrested, tortured and jailed for four years. Both were later released. And both took part in the 1979 revolution that brought down the state.
The even more tyrannical Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini replaced Reza Pahlavi, and the Iranian revolution, like so many others before it, devoured its children. It had been broad-based and popular at the beginning: liberals were allied with leftists, and leftists with Islamists. It didn’t seem like a recipe for fascism, but that’s what they got. The Islamists came out on top and smashed the liberals and leftists.
Mohtadi was still a critic of the United States, though much milder about it. “There has been lots of oppression,” he said, “and killings and torture and expelling people from their land and sending them to internal exile in Iran and shelling the cities and all kinds of oppression. The problem with the policy of the United States is that for a long time, they neglected the violations of human rights in Iran. Also the European governments, the European countries, they didn’t say anything about the atrocities going on in Iran. They called it a critical dialogue, but it was not a critical dialogue. It was lucrative trade with Iran.”
* * *
Don’t confuse the Komala Party with the Komala Party. Iraqi Kurdistan hosts two exiled leftist parties from Iranian Kurdistan, both with the same name, the same (red) flag and the same founder. Both parties have armed camps and military wings. Both built their compounds on the same road outside the city of Sulaymaniyah. They’re right next to each other, in fact. Stand in the right place, and you can see one from the other. The difference is that one is liberal and the other is communist.
I didn’t know there were two until I set up an appointment to meet Mohtadi, of the liberal Komala Party, and accidentally wound up unannounced inside the communist camp. The communists were good sports about my mistake. They granted me interviews, introduced me to Secretary General Hassan Rahman Panah and fed me lunch. They gave me the grand tour. They didn’t tell me I was at the wrong compound. That news came from Modarresi, when he called to ask why I hadn’t shown up.
On the surface the two parties are more confusingly interchangeable than the Judean People’s Front and the People’s Front of Judea in Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Perhaps not coincidentally, Mohtadi says Life of Brian is one of his favorite movies.
Today’s liberal Komala Party members belonged to the communist Komala Party and the larger Iranian Communist Party until they bitterly divorced in the 1980s.
“They were hard left to the point of Maoist at one point,” says Andrew Apostolou, a Brookings Institution historian who specializes in the region and knows Komala well.
“We took part in the Communist Party of Iran,” Mohtadi said, “but after some years we realized it was a mistake. We criticized that and split from them. It took some years, of course. It was not just like that.” He snapped his fingers.
“You split with them over what, precisely?” I said.
“Over so many things,” he said, his voice heavy with disappointment. “They have lost contact with the realities of the society. They have no sympathy for the democratic movement in Iran. We think the time for that kind of left is over.” Mohtadi disagrees with Iran’s communists on every point that matters: human rights, democracy, economics, the appropriate use of violence, the proper stance toward the West. Komala’s economic views are still leftist, like those of small-s “socialists” in Europe, but Mohtadi flatly rejects systems like Cuba’s. “I know they have social achievements in health care and education and all that,” he said. “But in terms of political oppression and cult of personality, that’s outdated. It’s not acceptable for a modern civil society.”
For his part, Panah, of the communist Komala, said dismissively of his wayward comrades, “We do not speak to each other.”
Even in Iraq and Iran, left-wing parties fracture and withdraw into mutually loathing camps. The radicals always denounce the moderates as heretics, sellouts, “capitalist roaders” and neoconservatives.
Both Komala compounds were shelled and gassed with chemical weapons by Saddam Hussein. Saddam did his worst to erase the Kurds of Iraq from the face of the earth. Komala’s members came from Iran, and they opposed the Islamic Republic just as he did. But they were still Kurds.
Komala was defenseless. Komala needed an army, not only to fight the Islamic Republic but also to defend itself in Iraq. So it built one.
* * *
The Iraqi Kurds called their guerrilla movement against Saddam Hussein the Peshmerga (Those Who Face Death). The contemporary Kurds’ professional army, which functions as a constitutionally sanctioned regional guard in the Kurdish autonomous region, is also called the Peshmerga. And the liberal Komala called its warriors the same thing. They protected the base from Iranian infiltrators and death squads, and they crossed the border into Iran during uprisings. “When the time comes, we can organize not hundreds but thousands of Peshmergas,” Mohtadi said. “It is very easy.”
The most recent major Iranian Kurdish uprising was in 2005. It failed to topple the state, but it was huge and made headlines all over the world. “It swept many cities and towns and even villages,” Mohtadi said. “It started from Mahabad. Young people were brutally killed by the authorities, tortured and then killed.”
One of the victims, Shwane Qadiri, belonged to the Revolutionary Union of Kurdistan, which had recently changed its name to the Kurdistan Freedom Party. “He was a member of our party,” says party spokesman Zagros Yazdanpanah. “After that, all of Iranian Kurdistan rose up. Everywhere in all cities there were demonstrations against the Iranian regime. Our people inside are organized. Our people are in hiding; it is very dangerous.”
“There was an uprising in Mahabad and violent clashes between people and the authorities,” Mohtadi added. “That incident was spontaneous. There was no political party behind it. And from Mahabad, spreading it to other cities, we were behind it. We were the most influential political party that organized most of the demonstrations. We even organized its date and its time.”
Yazdanpanah says Komala shouldn’t take all the credit—his party organized demonstrations, too, as did others—but he agrees that Komala’s role was substantial. It sent in its fighters, hoping to seize control of parts of Iran from the regime. The Revolutionary Guards and the police were too much for them, though, and they later had to return to Iraq.
Nadir Dawladi Abadi, a member of Komala’s political bureau, gave me a tour of the training camp where Peshmergas are made. We walked unannounced into a classroom where new recruits studied weapons. Everyone in the room stood up at once and greeted us formally. They did not return to their chairs until I awkwardly gestured for them to sit. I felt like an intruder, but they ignored me as the lecture continued.
To my surprise, there were women there. None wore a hijab, the Islamic headscarf, over her hair, which is required by law in Iran. The students sat in plastic chairs with notebooks and machine guns in their laps. “They are studying RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades],” Abadi whispered to me.
Modarresi later told me new recruits also study what he calls the Komala ideology. The red Komala star, a branding remnant from the
communist days, loomed like a baleful eye on the wall over the whiteboard. The idea of a red star and “ideological instruction” made me wince. Modarresi put me at ease. They aren’t reading Das Kapital or The Communist Manifesto, he said. They’re learning about democracy, human rights, pluralism and civics, concepts that are not taught in schools by the Islamic Republic. I can’t confirm Komala’s classroom curriculum, but the party members are well known locally for being ex-communists despite their continued use of the red flag and star.
“What kinds of weapons do they learn how to use in their training?” I asked Abadi.
“Kalashnikovs, AK-47s, sniper rifles, grenades, RPGs and antiaircraft guns,” he said.
“Can you tell me how many Peshmergas you have here?” I said.
Abadi laughed, shook his head and laughed again. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t even know the answer to that.”
We walked the grounds. Several members of the party joined us so they could listen in. I snapped pictures of everyone with my Nikon. Then, unexpectedly, they all wanted pictures of me. Out came cell-phone cameras and giddy smiles. I posed with them for 10 minutes. Apparently, they didn’t receive many visitors from the West.
“How much longer do you think the Iranian regime will survive?” I asked Abadi after they put their cameras away.
“Ask your government,” he said and chuckled. Big laughs all around.
“What would you think if the United States invaded Iran?” I said.
“There are many points of view about that,” Abadi said. “But in general, the people of Iran are happy to see that.”
“A war?” I said. “Really?”
“Invasion, yes,” he said. “The people of Iran are thinking politically. The people have had many bad experiences since the 1979 revolution. They want the American people to topple the regime, not to occupy the land.”
He did not only mean that the Kurds of Iran want a war, as the Kurds of Iraq wanted a war. He also meant that most Persians wanted an invasion.
This was not the official Komala line. “We are not for a military attack by the United States,” Mohtadi said later. “Support the internal opposition against the regime. That’s the best way to change. We are for regime change.”
Abadi’s claim, that Iranians as a whole would support an invasion of Iran, is a bit dubious. Some would certainly support it. But the regime points to the threat of invasion as an excuse to remain in power, and there is a danger that American intervention would merely drive potential rebels back into the government’s arms. Even among the antiregime activists, there are many—including Abadi’s boss, Abdulla Mohtadi—who say they want revolution and not an invasion.
The Komala Party’s members, or at least its senior leaders, are among the most experienced armed revolutionaries in the world. They’ve already toppled one Iranian government, badly as it may have turned out for them in the end. As they plot another insurrection, they hope this won’t be a rerun of the last one. “We are for democratic values,” Mohtadi told me. “We are for political freedoms, religious freedoms, secularism, pluralism, federalism, equality of men and women, Kurdish rights, social justice. We are for a good labor law, labor unions. There is an element of the left in our political program.”
They sounded like European-style social democrats. I asked if I could describe them that way. “We won’t be angry,” Modarresi replied with a laugh.
* * *
When are acts of violence against a state justified? What kind of violence is moral, and what kind is not? These are the questions Komala grappled with.
The old-school Komala Party, Hassan Panah’s communist group down the road, thought any act of violence against an oppressive state was justified, including attacks on civilians who live in and visit the country. For the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), the Marxist-Leninist guerrilla militia waging a terrorist war in eastern Turkey, Turkish soldiers, cops and civilians werw legitimate targets. So were Kurdish civilians opposed to the PKK’s program and methods. So were foreign tourists visiting the Turkish beaches. The PKK opened a branch in Iran, where it pretended to be something else. There it called itself the Party of Free Youths in Kurdistan, or PJAK. Panah’s Komala supported both the PKK and PJAK.
An ancient Middle Eastern saying holds that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” It may seem that Panah’s party subscribed to this maxim, despite the fact that its Islamist “friends” in the Iranian revolution of 1979 liquidated the left when they came to power. But Panah wouldn’t even speak to Abdulla Mohtadi or anyone else in the liberal Komala Party. And Panah’s party, like Mohtadi’s, was heavily armed. The communists holed up in their own lonely compound were, if not terrorists themselves, at least armed supporters of terrorists. At the end of the day, this may be a distinction without much difference.
Running an ethically sound revolution requires hard moral as well as political work, and Mohtadi would have none of Panah’s apologetics for scoundrels, even if it meant the Islamic Republic would last longer. “They are very fanatic in their nationalism,” he said of the PKK. “They are very undemocratic in nature. They have no principles, no friendship, no contracts, no values. In the name of the Kurdish movement, they eliminate everybody.”
Mohtadi and his party also stood foursquare against the Iranian Mujahideen Khalq, a small and ideologically bizarre armed group that fused Marxism, Islamism, Iranian nationalism and a personality cult around its leaders. They appear on most countries’ lists of terrorist organizations, including those of both Iran and the United States. Mohtadi knew all too well what happens to revolutions with totalitarians in them. Even his old comrade Panah knew that when they worked together in the 1970s.
“We were not against revolution,” Mohtadi said. “We were not against overthrowing the regime of the Shah. What we were against was violence by small groups of guerrillas who were separated from the mass movement. There were two different groups, religious and secular leftist guerrilla groups, who were influential at that time. People thought they were the way out of the dictatorship. Many, many intellectuals and students and political activists joined them. But we wrote pamphlets criticizing their methods.”
These aren’t academic questions in the Middle East. Opposing this or that faction or group isn’t about political posturing, as it often is in the West. Dilemmas over the use of force don’t apply strictly to the struggle inside Iran. The Islamic Republic sent spies into Iraq. Gunfights between government agents and party members have broken out on the roads in the province. Occasionally, Mohtadi told me, his people awkwardly ran across Tehran’s men in the city markets of Iraqi Kurdistan’s northeastern city of Sulaymaniyah. There they could pretend they didn’t see or didn’t know each other.
Most worrying is when the regime’s secret police sneaked into the compound.
Nadir Abadi showed me to a small one-room building on the Peshmerga training grounds. Three men lounging inside on the floor stood up to greet us. “These people recently came out of Iran,” he said. “They want to become Peshmergas. We have to investigate them first, so they have to stay here two or three months. After their identities are cleared, they will join the training courses.”
“I’m curious how you investigate them,” I said, “but I suppose you can’t tell me.”
“We have contacts with underground activists who do such kind of things,” he said. “We can learn about them from them. It’s not that complex.”
But it did take several months. And what, I asked, do they do when they catch someone they think is a spy?
“We don’t have jails here,” Abadi said. “We thought about executing them. But we don’t want to do that. So we make them sign a paper and confess their guilt and promise not to do it again. Then we send them back to Iran.”
It may sound like a weak response in such a tough neighborhood, assuming the claim is true. But unless the regime figured out a way to evade Komala’s intelligence agents, the seemingly weak response apparently worked. It had been y
ears now, Abadi said, since they caught anyone on-site who worked for the Islamic Republic.
Some armed political parties in the region sucker gullible reporters into portraying them as more moderate and reasonable than they really are. A member of Hezbollah’s political bureau tried it with me before their media-relations department threatened and blacklisted me. But Brookings’ Apostolou didn’t think the party was playing the fake-moderate game. “They are not linked to the PKK, PJAK or the Mujahideen Khalq,” he told me.
“We were against the guerrilla-warfare movement that swept the world in the 1970s,” Mohtadi said. “We had our theories against that. We believed in political work, raising awareness, organizing people.”
Komala’s model of the ideal guerrilla movement was Iraq’s Kurdish Peshmerga. These men (and, yes, women) were and are a genuine “people’s army” backed almost unanimously by civilians. (The PKK, meanwhile, car-bombed its Kurdish opponents.) The Peshmerga fought honorably against Saddam Hussein without resorting to the terrorism and authoritarianism that corrupt so many Middle Eastern militants of both the left and the right.
Komala’s stance on erstwhile enemies like the United States was also complex and cautious. Mohtadi bristled when I offhandedly, without meaning offense, referred to the party’s previous position as anti-American. “We were not anti-American,” he said. “We were against the policies of the United States at that time.”
I’ve heard this sort of thing before from people who don’t really mean it. At least a dozen Lebanese supporters of Hezbollah have told me, a tad unconvincingly, that their “Death to America” slogan expresses merely a policy disagreement with the United States. There may be a small point in there somewhere. The Arabic language is flush with hyperbole. But if the U.S. government opened sessions of Congress by shouting “Death to Hezbollah” or, worse, “Death to Lebanon,” I doubt Hezbollah would take it in stride.
Tower of the Sun: Stories From the Middle East and North Africa Page 7