Salah Rahmani (Death Threats, Failed Attempt)
Mr. Salah Rahmani, son of Abbas, was born in 1966 in the village of Lawn’e Sadat, Kamyaran County, Kurdistan Province. He is married and fathered five children. His family were farmers, and from an early age Mr. Rahmani worked with his parents on their farm. According to Mr. Rahmani, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps attack on his village, in the course of their war against the Kurdish insurgency, in late August/early September 1982 and the violence they used against the residents had a significant impact on him and led to his politicization.
Mr. Rahmani first joined the youth league of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (PDKI), where he learned to read and write, and, in 1982, joined the ranks of their guerilla fighters (peshmerga in Kurdish.) He was a peshmerga for two years in the Iraq-Iran border region after which he returned to Iran to help his family and worked as a minibus driver. He remained active as an underground member of PDKI, disseminating its publications and providing food to peshmergas, until 1996 when he went back to Iraq.
Mr. Rahmani retired from active Party activities in 1998, when the PDKI renounced its armed struggle and removed all peshmergas from Iranian Kurdistan. Mr. Rahmani applied to the United Nations for political asylum and wished to leave for Europe. He was accepted as a refugee but never relocated to a host country. He later became more active, in particular when the party resumed its armed presence inside Iranian Kurdistan, and the Party reactivated Mr. Rahmani as a peshmerga in 2011/12. The PDKI had decided to send peshmergas inside Iran to “exercise political duties.” Mr. Rahmani entered Iran twice, helping peshmerga teams passing through the borders of Iraq and Iran undetected. An operation inside Iran in October 2016 resulted in an Iranian court sentencing Mr. Rahmani to death in absentia.
Mr. Rahmani said that he had been threatened repeatedly over twenty years, but the threats reached a new level in the winter of 2017-2018, when his life was publicly threatened on the pro-Islamic Republic Kurdish-language website Diar U Nadiar. Mr. Rahmani reported these threats to the Erbil local police, but they did not pursue the matter, only telling him “watch out for yourself.”
On March 1, 2018, Mr. Rahmani was the victim of an assassination attempt. At 4 PM that afternoon, a remote-controlled bomb attached to Mr. Rahmani’s Hyundai Santa Fe exploded outside his home in Bnaslawa, near Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan, as he started the car. Although he sustained serious injuries including brain and hearing damage, Mr. Rahmani survived the attack. However, his 31-year-old son Sabah, a baker and married father of two, who was in the car with him, and who was not a target of the attack, lost both of his legs immediately and died the next day from the injuries he sustained.
On March 25, 2018, Akam News, a website close to the state in Iranian Kurdistan, denied the Islamic Republic’s responsibility for the attack and instead blamed internal PDKI factional strife. An article described Mr. Rahmani as a “criminal” who it claims was “useless for the party.” The Islamic Republic frequently blames undetailed “infighting” within opposition groups for the assassinations of opposition political figures.
For his part, Mr. Rahmani stated in an interview from his hospital bed that "my only suspect for this terrorist act is the Islamic Republic, no one else."
Mr. Hassan Sharafi, a PDKI leading figure, confirmed the threats against Mr. Rahmani to Kayhan London, an Iranian exile publication; “Salah Rahmani, one of the veteran members of our party, was threatened many times in the past, in various ways, by the Ministry of Information, and that is why he was very careful. Salah Rahmani did not have issues with anyone, and other than the Islamic Republic, he had no enemy who would commit such an inhumane act.”
In the aftermath of the assassination attempt, Mr. Rahmani and his wife relocated to the PDKI camp in Koye where his security could be protected by the Party. He still lives there today, in constant physical pain from the injuries he suffered during the bombing. He and his wife are raising their two grandchildren as his daughter-in-law remarried.
The attack on the Rahmanis came amidst a wave of violence directed towards the Iranian Kurdish opposition in Iraq, in 2018 in particular. No one was ever arrested for the bombing that killed Mr. Rahmani’s son.
Background
The Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (PDKI) was founded in 1945 with the objective to gain autonomy for Kurdistan, in north-west of Iran. After the Revolution, conflicts between the new central Shiite government and the mainly Sunni Kurdistan, regarding the role of minorities in the drafting of the constitution, specification of Shiite as the official state religion, and particularly the autonomy of the region, ended in armed clashes between the Revolutionary Guards and the peshmerga (the militia of the PDKI). The PDKI boycotted the referendum of April 1, when people went to polls to vote for or against the Islamic regime. On August 19, 1979 Ayatollah Khomeini called the PDKI the “party of Satan'' and declared it “unofficial and illegal.” Mass executions and fighting broke out and continued for several months in the region. By 1983, PDKI had lost much of its influence in the region. Various leaders of the PDKI have been assassinated inside and outside Iran.
SOURCES
Verdict of Branch 1, Criminal Court of Kurdistan Province, October 6, 2019
Kurdistan 24, PDKI resumes armed resistance in Iran, February 29, 2016
Rudaw, Two PDKI Peshmerga injured in bombing in Erbil, March 1 2018
Al Arabiya, Son of prominent PDKI member dies in bombing, March 2, 2018
HENGAW, Two death sentences and 162 years imprisonment for three citizens from Kamyaran, October 24, 2019
Iran International, Second assassination attempt against members of Iranian Kurdish parties in Iraq this week, March 7, 2018
Kurdistan Kurd, Council of Iranian Democrats: We condemn the Islamic Republic’s assassination of two members of the two Kurdistan Democratic Parties, March 8, 2018
Kayhan London, The Islamic Republic’s Terror Machine in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region, March 8, 2018
Akam News, New unsaid facts about the assassinations of Qader Qadri and Sabah Rahmani, March 25, 2018
Kurdistan Human Rights Association, Sabah Rahmani, Victim of Islamic Republic Terrorism, Loses his Life, March 2, 2018
Kurdistan Media, Sabah Rahmani joins the convoy of martyrs, March 2, 2018
Spee Media, Democratic Party issues a statement on the attack on its cadres, March 1, 2018
Danish Immigration Service, Iranian Kurds: Consequences of political activities in Iran and Kurdistan Region Iraq, February 2020
YouTube, IranTune, PressTV lies about Haydar Ghorbani and now he's about to be executed, September 2020
Amnesty International, MDE 13/3101/2020, September 22, 2020
Abdorrahman Boroumand Center, First Interview with the victim, 4/16/2024
Abdorrahman Boroumand Center, Second interview with the victim, 07/07/2024