Kurdish Politics in Iran: Crossborder Interactions and Mobilisation since 1947. Allan Hassaniyan (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021). Pp. 236. Hardcover $110. ISBN 9781316516430

Iran's Kurdish population, numbering approximately 8 million, is second in the Middle East only to Turkey, home to some 15 million Kurds.Nonetheless, Iran's Kurdish ethnonationalist movement is the weakest in the region, including in comparison with Iraq and Syria, home respectively to Kurdish populations of 6 million and 2 million.Allan Hassaniyan, a lecturer in Middle East studies at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, the University of Exeter (UK), has authored a well-written book that explains why the Kurdish movement in Iran remains comparatively underdeveloped.Hassaniyan shows that first Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, by crushing Qazi Mohammad's Mahabad Republic of Kurdistan in 1947, and then the Islamic Republic since 1979 have freely and successfully unleashed their military strength to dampen Iranian Kurdish demands for autonomy.Hassaniyan then draws on firsthand experience living in Iraqi Kurdistan to reconstruct the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps' many attacks against the Iranian Kurdish movement in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) in the mid-1990s.As Hassaniyan reminds the reader, these were not the first attacks on Iranian Kurdish activists in the region.When the Iranian Kurds sought refuge across the border in Iraqi Kurdistan, Mulla Mustafa Barzani (d.1979), a hero to many in Iraqi Kurdistan, turned against the Iranian Kurds by murdering some of their leaders, especially those affiliated with the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI), and handing their bodies over to the Iranian authorities.Hassaniyan demonstrates how Barzani, who sought to garner Iranian support against his foremost enemy, the Iraqi government in Baghdad, employed condemnable methods in his targeting of Iranian Kurdish leaders.Nevertheless, none of the examples listed in this book are new, having been well covered by previous studies such as those by David McDowall, Abbas Vali, and Farideh Koohi-Kamali, among others.The author's claim that his book is the first systematic study of the past seven decades of the Kurdish movement in Iran is therefore problematic.In the 1980s, a fratricidal civil war between the mostly nationalist KDPI and the Marxist, class-oriented Komala significantly weakened the Iranian Kurds.Moreover, this fault was compounded by major differences within each party: in the KDPI this took the form of struggle between progressive nationalist leftists and "feudal" forces, whereas the Komala split between those who saw the Kurdish movement partially as a nationalist struggle and those who viewed it exclusively as a class struggle.In addition, the KDPI sought to engage cautiously with the Islamic Republic, whereas Komala eschewed all such engagement and blamed the KDPI for weakness vis--vis the Iranian state.Hassaniyan concludes that the fratricidal Komala-KDPI war undermined the Kurdish movement.