The war with the Iranian regime is far from over

Her long dark hair was swept back into a tight ponytail. Her eyes were defiant yet oddly demure. Sarezh Halgourd spoke clearly, if somewhat shyly, casting her eyes down as she answered my questions. After a minute or so, we were advised to move to a better spot, out of the roiling heat.

She stood up and, with barely a grunt, swung the almost four foot-long PKM machine gun onto her shoulder. Its belt of 7.62×54mmR bullets gleamed golden in the sun.

If the sight seemed incongruous, Sarezh didn’t notice. She wanted to speak; and she wasn’t alone.

It was mid-June, near the base of a mountain on the outskirts of Erbil, the capital city of Iraqi Kurdistan. The female Iranian Peshmerga fighters of the Kurdistan Freedom Party, Parti Azadi Kurdistan (PAK), were feeling betrayed.

“Trump’s deal exists only to solve the problem of the oil price,” Sarezh told me that morning, just days after the ink dried on the so-called Memorandum of Understanding between Iran and the US at Versailles. “Our struggle against the Iranian regime continues. We will not stop fighting to return to our homeland.”

Standing back, wearing a patterned bandana over her mouth and carrying an AK-47, was Sharo Hawrami, who chipped in with her own thoughts.

“The struggle against this violent regime will be successful. The Iranians will not stop, but neither will we.”

At the time, that sounded like defiance in the face of an impending détente between Iran and America, the world’s hegemon. Six weeks on, the words seem prophetic.

For years, Trump denounced his predecessor Barack Obama’s nuclear deal, the 2015 JCPOA, which, he correctly pointed out, did nothing to address Tehran’s murderous regional behaviour while also handing the Iranians billions of dollars in unfrozen assets and sanctions relief. Obviously, he said, this would be used for violent and nefarious purposes.

Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018. Well, guess what? The deal he was looking to make this June – and touting, inevitably, as a triumph – didn’t even survive the summer.

If the reporting is to be believed, Trump’s purported deal was an unequivocal capitulation to the Iranians. It made a mockery of every criticism Trump ever levelled at Obama, and it laid bare as nonsense his endless boasts of being a master negotiator.

Even the supposed key point of the Versailles memorandum – resolving Iran’s nuclear programme – was left deliberately vague, deferred to a “final deal” the two sides were given sixty days to negotiate. That window was due to run to mid-August. It didn’t make it past three weeks. By early July, Tehran’s negotiators were still insisting they’d start charging tolls on the Strait of Hormuz once the interim period ended; Washington was still insisting this strait would never happen. It was, simply, yet more chaos.

To make matters worse, by committing to ending hostility “on all fronts,” the memorandum sought to hobble Israel by preventing it from dealing with the perennial threat on its border, the psychopathic Hezbollah. Israel, which was never a party to the Versailles talks, made its view of that clause clear almost immediately: it had no intention of honouring commitments it hadn’t signed.

And there was the cash. Under the deal’s reported framework, Iran was set to gain phased access to roughly $24–25 billion in frozen assets, with some estimates suggesting that figure could eventually exceed $100 billion as sanctions were gradually lifted. There was also a reported $300 billion private-sector investment and reconstruction fund for Iran, though that money was to come from private investors rather than directly from the U.S. government. Trump has since reimposed the very sanctions on Iranian oil he had only just lifted.

For that, at least, we can be grateful. I know what Tehran will do with the unfrozen billions it still hopes to receive, because just last month I was staring at the results with my own eyes.

The residential compound of the PAK base is where these women used to sleep and bathe, not fight. But it didn’t stop the Iranians launching ballistic missiles at the site. What had been a grid of compact residences was now a wasteland of shredded concrete, shattered glass and blackened steel ribbons.

The walls were pockmarked with shrapnel. One of their comrades, the Peshmerga told me, was martyred. Three were wounded.

When it comes to lashing out violently at anyone who opposes them, whether in the mountains of Kurdistan or the streets of London, the Iranian regime is relentless.

Tehran has now renewed and intensified its drone and missile campaign against PAK, Komala and the other Iranian Kurdish opposition groups scattered across Iraqi Kurdistan. On 13 July, three drones hit a PAK camp near Erbil. Nine members of one branch of Komala were killed in a strike on July 17. Two days later, PAK accused Iranian forces of using white phosphorus munitions in a drone strike, citing eyewitness accounts, medical examinations of nine wounded Peshmerga fighters and the extensive fires the strike left behind. Dana Gas, the first major energy company operating in the region, suspended its operations after drone strikes on Erbil itself. Much of this has happened because negotiations bought the regime time to regroup and rebuild.

Don’t be surprised: the mullahs respect nothing. This regime is not merely atavistic; it is sadistically medieval. The Islamic Republic is not a conventional nation state, it’s not even a conventional autocratic state. It’s something far more dangerous, a revolutionary theocracy – and it is becoming more extreme with time, not less.

The Islamic Republic’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, built the regime around the principle of perpetual revolution. Tehran will never stop trying to export its revolution abroad because its theological foundations demand that.

It will never stop using proxies to project power and dominate the region because its geopolitical doctrine depends upon them – particularly its concept of “forward defence,” by which Iran fights abroad via proxies to prevent it having to fight at home.

It will never stop attacking Israel because, both ideologically and politically, it simply cannot. As a Persian Shia power in a predominantly Arab Sunni Middle East, confronting Israel gives the regime support among Arab populations and lessens its de facto regional isolation.

The mullahs do not respect women’s rights, civil rights, human rights or, ultimately, life itself. Their record over four decades makes that point bloodily irrefutable. They are, in the end, unreformable.

Any settlement or deal or treaty that assumes this regime can be moderated, reconciled, or transformed through concessions alone rests on a profound misunderstanding of what the Islamic Republic has repeatedly shown itself to be. It took just three weeks for the Versailles memorandum to prove that misunderstanding.

The Peshmerga were right. The Islamic Republic cannot be reasoned with, only defeated. On the ground in the Middle East, from the PAK compound to the tanker lanes of Hormuz, the message is clear. We should take heed: this war is far from over.