September 12, 2007 | By AMIR TAHERI

FOR the last year at least, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the back bone of the Islamic Republic in Iran, has been engaged in a bloody war against Kurdish rebels in four provinces bordering Iraq.
Initially, the authorities in Tehran tried to keep the war a secret, referring to it only occasionally as "operations against evildoers."

However, things changed last February when "evildoers" destroyed a Revolutionary Guard combat helicopter, killing nine officers - including the regional military commander, Gen. Saeed Qahhari. The incident took place in a western Azerbaijan province - where Kurds, though present in big numbers, form only a minority.

The Guard retaliated with a series of attacks against alleged Kurdish rebel positions in the mountainous area around the border town of Salmas, killing 17 "Kurdish evildoers," including their local commander, a naturalized German citizen of Turkish-Kurdish origin, code-named Doctor Meraat. Since then, the Guard has issued cryptic reports about dozens of other "engagements" in which scores of policemen, border patrols and Guard members have been killed or wounded while killing at least 100 Kurdish insurgents.

Recently, a group of alleged insurgents ambushed a police van near Kermanshah, a provincial capital close to the Iraqi border, and killed seven police officers.

What is known in Tehran as "the Kurdish threat" clearly represents a key security concern of the Islamic Republic's leaders as they prepare for a broader regional war. To curb the insurgency, the Guard has set up a special command center at the Hamza Base, near the Iraqi border, and committed one full division plus a unit of airborne Special Forces.

The Guard claims that the rebels are based in Iraqi Kurdistan. Yet all the fighting reported until earlier this month has taken place well inside Iranian territory, often in areas with a non-Kurdish majority.

In June, the Guard started shelling Iraqi Kurdish villages - killing an unknown number of Kurds, both Iraqis and Iranians who had sought refuge in Iraq. Despite protests by the Iraqi government, including one delivered face-to-face by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in his meeting with Iranian "Supreme Guide" Ali Khamenei in Tehran earlier this summer, the Guard has continued its attacks on Iraqi villages. The shelling has forced thousands of villagers, both Iranian and Iraqi Kurds, to abandon their homes for towns deeper inside Iraq.

The areas most affected by the fighting are within the strongholds of Iraqi Kurdish leaders Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani. Each has a history of close ties with Iran going back four decades - but because both allied themselves with the United States in toppling Saddam Hussein in 2003, Tehran suspects them of trying to foment a Kurdish insurgency in Iran as part of a bigger "American plot" to destabilize the Islamic Republic.

Yet the three Kurdish groups involved in the anti-Khomeinist insurgency can hardly be regarded as vassals of either Iraqi Kurdish chief.

The group most active in the recent fighting is a new outfit, the Kurdistan Free Life Party, better known by its Kurdish acronym, PJAK. Judging by its literature, PJAK is an offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) a guerrilla movement of Turkish Kurds that has been fighting for a Kurdish state in eastern Anatolia since the 1970s.

Ironically, Tehran has given the PKK shelter and support against Turkey for years, as a means of bleeding NATO's lone regional member. Some claim that Ankara may have decided to repay Tehran in its own currency by creating PJAK. Others, however, regard PJAK as an effort by PKK to expand its constituency beyond Turkey.

Certainly, however, most of PJAK's leaders are not Iranian Kurds. Some key party figures are Turkish Kurds who have lived in exile in Germany for at least a quarter-century. Moreover, PJAK has been operating in areas in Iran that are close to PKK strongholds in Turkey and Iraq - another indication that the two parties may well be one with two names.

The areas where PJAK is active in Iran are home to substantial numbers of ethnic Kurds. But the majority in most areas consists of Turkic-speaking Azeris. In the Kurdish heartland of Iran - the two provinces of Kurdistan and Kermanshahan, where ethnic Kurds are in majority - PJAK appears to have little support.

There, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (PDK) enjoys the largest support, followed by Komalah, a formerly communist outfit that claims to have converted to democracy after the fall of the Soviet empire.

The PDK, a self-styled social-democratic group, has campaigned for greater autonomy for Iranian Kurds since the 1940s. After the mullahs seized power in 1979, it helped the regime in the hope of obtaining concessions. The mullahs, however, banned it and organized the assassination of two successive generations of its leaders in exile in Vienna and Berlin in 1989 and 2002.

The group has since joined Iranian opposition groups that call for the overthrow of the Islamic Republic, but has not preached armed uprising as a means of achieving that goal. Komalah, however, has waged a guerrilla war against the Islamic Republic for 25 years, paying a high price in human terms.

The Tehran rumor mill claims that the replacement of the senior Guard leaders, including its commander, is a sign that the "Supreme Guide" is unhappy about the spreading Kurdish insurgency along the Iraqi border. As always in the Islamic Republic, however, Tehran's claims of a U.S.-hatched plot to incite the Kurds against the mullahs should be taken with a pinch of salt.

The Tehran leadership may be using the claim to justify building a string of fortifications along the border with Iraq in anticipation of conflict with the United States. If attacked, Iran could then retaliate by entering Iraq from the three Kurdish provinces most loyal to Washington and regarded as the only "safe haven" for U.S. forces there, while inciting the Iraqi Shiites to rise in revolt in the central and southern provinces.

Talk of a Kurdish insurgency also helps Tehran impose what amounts to a state of emergency in parts of the four provinces with large Kurdish populations. This has enabled the authorities to arrest hundreds of opponents - including trade unionists, student leaders, journalists, lawyers and Sunni Muslim clerics - without bothering about legal formalities. At least 20 opposition leaders have been executed since last March, often in circumstances that resemble political assassinations rather than judicial killings.

There's no doubt that the areas where Iran's estimated 4.5 million ethnic Kurds live are in turmoil, posing a challenge to the regime's leadership. The challenge, however, comes from political dissidents, especially working-class activists, not guerrillas operating from bases in Iraq.