During the five-week war waged by Israel and the United States against Iran, one name was repeatedly pushed into the media and political spotlight: the Kurds. The announcement of a coalition among Iranian Kurdish political forces before the war, Donald Trump’s calls during the war with Kurdish leaders in Iraq and later with Mustafa Hijri, a senior leader of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan, his remarks about armed Kurdish groups entering Iran, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ drone attack on Iranian Kurdish party camps in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq all came together in a short span of time and produced a single image: Kurdistan as a possible theater of proxy war.
That image meant different things to different actors. Media close to Israel presented it as evidence of an expanding front against the Islamic Republic. Some anti-war voices repeated the same image with the opposite moral sign, reading it as yet another expression of an imperialist and Zionist project. The judgment differed, but the center of the narrative remained the same: the Kurds.
At the same time, far from Kurdistan, in the western desert of Iraq, another story was taking shape. According to a Wall Street Journal report published after the war, Israel had established a military base in a dry and remote area: an airstrip, special air-force units, search-and-rescue teams, and a logistical support center. The first reports of unusual activity and helicopter movements came from a local shepherd. When the Iraqi army was sent to investigate, airstrikes forced its troops to retreat. One Iraqi soldier was killed and two were wounded. In its complaint to the United Nations, Iraq attributed the attack to the United States.
The day after the report was published, open-source analysts used Sentinel-2 satellite imagery to identify a runway about 1.6 kilometers long in a dry lakebed roughly 180 kilometers southwest of Najaf and Karbala. There was no evidence that this base was connected to Kurdish forces. Its significance lay elsewhere: while the Kurds were being pushed into the foreground, another military geography was operating more quietly, and perhaps more effectively.
This is the starting point of the argument. The question is how a dominant narrative took shape in ways that weakened our ability to see other layers of the war. The Kurds mattered in this war, but the political importance of Kurdistan should not become a cover for ignoring other battlefields. In war, the loudest news is not always the most important. Sometimes the loudest sound is precisely what turns the eye away from somewhere else.
