Mahabad

Overview

Mahabad is a predominantly Kurdish city in West Azerbaijan Province, northwestern Iran, near the border with Iraq. Its history is closely associated with Kurdish demands for self-government. The city was the seat of the Republic of Mahabad in 1946, an early exercise in Kurdish self-rule whose institutions became a landmark in Kurdish national identity. Mahabad has also been a site of confrontation between Kurdish communities and the Iranian state, including the suppression of autonomy demands in 1979 and later prosecutions and protest crackdowns.

Geography

Mahabad lies in Iranian Kurdistan, within Iran’s West Azerbaijan Province. Its position near Iraq places it within a wider area inhabited by Kurds on both sides of the border. The city and surrounding Mukriyan area have been important to Kurdish political organization. Mukriyan, including Mahabad, Bokan, Sardasht and Oshnavieh, is the traditional support base of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan, or PDKI. Mahabad also has a substantial Sunni population. Its electoral district is among the Sunni-majority districts of West Azerbaijan that have elected Sunni representatives to Iran’s parliament.

Modern history

The PDKI was established in 1945. The following year, it established and led the Republic of Mahabad, based in the city. Soviet troops stationed in northern Iran during the upheaval following the Second World War helped make the republic’s emergence possible. President Qazi Muhammad sought autonomy within Iran, although the republic’s governing institutions made it an early and enduring symbol of Kurdish sovereignty. Its creation reflected a period in which Kurdish political groups could organize locally while central authority was weakened.

The republic lasted approximately eleven months before the Iranian government overthrew it in 1946. Mustafa Barzani served as a general in its army; after its collapse, he and fellow Kurds took refuge in the Soviet Union. Kurdish nationalist activity subsequently gained a stronger center in Iraq around Barzani. Iranian authorities publicly executed Qazi Muhammad in a Mahabad square on March 31, 1947. His execution, following the destruction of the republic, became part of Mahabad’s lasting political significance for Kurds.

After the 1979 Iranian Revolution, Kurdish demands for autonomy again brought Mahabad into conflict with the central government. Government troops captured the Sunni-populated city by September 1979 during the Islamic Republic’s campaign to suppress those demands. The fighting showed that the change of government in Tehran had not resolved disputes over Kurdish self-government. Mahabad remained both a local political center and a symbol of the republic that had briefly governed there three decades earlier.

Security

Iran’s security apparatus has used Mahabad’s Revolutionary Court to prosecute Kurdish journalists and people accused of opposition activity. Intelligence officers arrested journalist Ghasem Ahmadi in the city on March 6, 2013. Ahmadi edited Rozhaf, a previously banned Tehran University publication. Branch 1 of the Mahabad Revolutionary Court sentenced him to four years in prison that year. The following day, intelligence officials arrested Kurdish journalist Khosro Kordpour in Mahabad. They arrested his brother Massoud on March 9 when he asked why Khosro had been detained.

Authorities held the Kordpour brothers in solitary confinement in Urmia for four months before transferring them to a Mahabad prison. The government accused them of cooperating with terrorist groups, but the case chiefly concerned their journalism and interviews about human rights in Kurdistan Province. Branch 1 of the Mahabad Revolutionary Court tried them on August 5, September 16 and October 28, 2013, on charges of “assembly and collusion against national security” and “activities against the system.” On November 10, the court sentenced Khosro to six years in prison and Massoud to three and one-half years.

Security forces also arrested brothers Salar and Saman Ghazali on September 17 and held them in a Ministry of Intelligence detention center for 75 days before transferring them to Mahabad Prison. In mid-December, Branch 1 of the Mahabad Revolutionary Court tried them over alleged membership in a Kurdish opposition party and propaganda against the state. The cases illustrate the wider pressure on Kurdish political activity and expression, alongside the discrimination and repression faced by Sunni communities in Iran.

Protests erupted in Mahabad in 2015 after the death of Kurdish woman Farinaz Khosravani amid reports that she had been threatened with sexual assault. Police fired on demonstrators, and protesters were killed. During nationwide protests in 2022, Iranian security forces again used severe violence in Mahabad. Demonstrations and clashes followed the killing of a protester, and security forces fired on crowds. Mahabad’s experience formed part of a broader crackdown that fell heavily on Kurdish and Sunni communities.

Present day

Mahabad remains significant in Iranian and regional politics. At a conference in the city in 2017, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Ground Forces commander Mohammad Pakpour accused Israel of conspiring behind the Kurdistan Region’s independence referendum. His accusation linked a contemporary Kurdish vote in Iraq to the Iranian regime’s longstanding concern about Kurdish self-government. Masoud Pezeshkian, born in Mahabad on September 29, 1954, to a Kurdish mother and an Azerbaijani father, later became a prominent figure in Iranian politics. More recently, an Intelligence Department office in Mahabad was reportedly bombed during US-Israeli strikes on Iranian sites.