United States President Donald Trump says Washington had armed Iranian opposition groups and protesters during mass antigovernment demonstrations in December and January, in which thousands of people were killed during crackdowns by government forces.
Trump “confirms” so many things, but few of them are true. None of Iranian Kurdish parties have confirmed receiving arms.
The absolutely only instance I have seen of protesters in Iran being armed with firearms (and I’ve watched a lot of footage), was a day-time protest in the Kurdish-majority mountainous borderland. Since there was a risk of authorities spilling blood, 4 old guys (appearance well over 50 years of age) in traditional clothing were present at a protest in an open area, carrying hunting rifles which looked older than the guys. They could have, theoretically, bought time for others to escape by offering some counter-fire for a minute or two. But on that protest, authorities did not attack. Probably because the whole town was Kurdish and cops decided to stay home.
Also I apologize for re-posting, but:
Kurdish Iranian opposition groups deny claims of receiving weapons from US
Mohammed Nazif Qaderi, a senior official from the opposition Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI), told Rudaw that “those statements made are baseless and we haven’t received any weapons.
/…/
Kako Aliyar, a member of the leadership committee of the Kurdish Iranian opposition party Komala, told Rudaw that "as our own party, no weapons have come to us and we haven’t received anything, we’re not even aware of the matter.
/…/
Amjad Hussein Panahi, head of communications for Komala of the Toilers of Kurdistan, also told Rudaw, “We assure you we haven’t received a single bullet or weapon from any country or place, and we’re not aware of the existence of such a thing; what we have is our own.”
/…/
Hamno Naqshbandi, a member of the general command of the Kurdistan National Army affiliated with the Kurdistan Freedom Party (PAK), said that “Donald Trump’s message is unclear to us. What is there is that we as our army have in no way received weapons from the US or any other country, not even a single bullet."
Wonder how many of those guns are going to end up killing American soldiers.
As is tradition
There is no protester fighting for justice alive or dead that Trump would help. He wants everyone not with him dead…
Iranian civilians.
Americans that refuse his rule.
Everyone. Everyone what opposes his little pp bullshit.
He wants all of us dead. Not calm, quiet, or silent. He wants us dead.
i don’t get the cope in this thread. it’s something the us does do with some regularity, and i thought you guys disliked trump’s fascism anyway.
why the desperation to vilify iran in a war you claim to not even want to fight?
Because this is one of those other cases where BOTH sides are bad. I KNOW! Who could have known that is possible, it’s unheard of!
In World War 2, the allies consisted of the following countries, among others:
- The United States, which had racial segregation and imprisoned every Japanese American at the start of the war
- Britain and France, which maintained brutal overseas empires where they de-facto enslaved native peoples. Britain had an artificial famine in Bengal that killed some 3 million people, and Churchill laughed it off, saying Indians will breed like rabbits in any case
- the USSR, which had purges and gulags
- China, which was at the time a highly corrupt basket case largely governed by warlords
Given this, would you say that BOTH sides were bad? Hopefully not. You might say that there are degrees of badness, and in some cases, as for instance in a major war, you have to choose between degrees of badness, and that the least bad side is the de-facto good side. Okay, now you’re up to speed, welcome to the world.
Or maybe you don’t choose the sides that are running the war (eg USA vs. Iran), but instead choose the side that is fighting it (the working class) against the side that instigated it (the global billionaires who benefit from imperialism and capitalism).
Which of the global billionaires are Iranian? You’re treating this like World War 1, which it objectively isn’t - Iran doesn’t have colonies or a global empire. Even if it was World War 1, revolutionary defeatism would still mean that you should be hoping for Iranian victory.
In fact, the Iranian and Resistance side of this war is explicitly anti-imperialist. Not just in the sense Stalin meant when he said that the Afghanistan’s struggle for independence was objectively revolutionary (in spite of the Emir being a monarchist) due to it weakening the imperialists. It’s that plus the fact that Iran is essentially an independent anti-imperialist social democracy. A religious conservative one, yes, but they have a centrally planned economy with a decent social safety net and good labour protections. The Islamists purged the socialists after the revolution, but both ideologically and for legitimacy, they maintained an economic populist program - i.e. Iran still possesses proletarian revolutionary characteristics along with all the theocratic baggage.
Thus, Iran is both waging an objectively anti-imperialist and therefore revolutionary struggle against the empire, which is to say against global capital, they are also fighting to maintain the gains of the revolution. Iran’s defeat would entail privatization and looting of its economy and immiseration of its working class, to say nothing of enabling Israeli expansionism and genocide across the region. Thus, any principled communist or socialist has the duty to support Iran’s struggle against the empire, mashallah.
bOtH sIdEs!
Because this is one of those other cases where BOTH sides are bad.
The thing with moral relativism is that it puts the two subjects on the same level. But are they?
One side represses legitimate but dangerous riots with violence, the other kills schoolgirls at their desks during class hours.
by the us government’s open admission, apparently not.
and they are being fine anti imperialists lately. why vilify them at precisely this moment?
In all the videos I saw of the Iranian regime killing protesters, the protesters were all unarmed.
This smells like progranda to me.
Both can be true:
The US tried to arm protesters via the Kurds to provoke a civil war paving the way for destabilization of Iran in the long run and possible intervention (with the Kurds not being willing to pass on the weapons as they got betrayed by Trump not that long ago).
And at the same time the peaceful protesters in Iran were murdered by the theocracy fearing for its power… possibly enhanced should the regime have gained knowledge of the planned US weapon deliveries.
Sure, but that’s not what the article seems to be claiming and that’s what I’m calling out here.
If it’s propaganda, it’s the dumbest least effective kind, since Trump would only be making the people he’s at war at look better.
Which, saying it sounds like something he would do.
I’m not sure how it qualifies as propaganda though because it doesn’t accomplish anything propaganda would, considering the source
A tactic that can sometimes be used is to use a smoke screen. To muddy the waters and flood the zone with disinformation, making people unsure about the truth.
I’m no propaganda expert but I think they might just be trying to make it seem like the US isn’t as stupid as everyone can plainly see, while also trying to justify a stronger barage of attacks.
I’m not sure if you noticed, but the number of civilians Trump claimed on Easter that the Iranian regime has killed more than doubled without a source, from 30,000 to hundreds of thousands. And while any number of unarmed protesters being gunned down in the street is bad (see ICE), Increasing the number seems to be a useful justification for a preventive strike against a school.
I don’t think Trump is smart enough for that
For sure, but a regime is more than one person.
Yeah, this wasn’t some civil war scenario. Iran was simply mass-murdering the people.
Yes, but it’s left-wing propaganda, so you’re supposed to let it slide.
…which of these two governments is left wing, exactly?
The propaganda that the Iranian government was only being protested because western colonial powers were prompting it is left-wing propaganda. That it also happens to serve the interests of right-wing religious fascists in Iran doesn’t mean it doesn’t also serve the interests of the left.
You may be surprised to learn that the far left support any government, no matter how repressive, if it stands up to the US and “westerners” in general.
I’m very left. We don’t support Iran’s regime. They are murderous monsters. And are against everything we stand for like feminism and LGBTIQ rights
That doesn’t mean it’s ok to unilaterally and in contravention to international law start bombing the shit out of Iran. Two wrongs don’t make a right.
Also it’s not an actual solution. The US destroyed Iraq’s pretty bad regime, then left a power vacuum that made things even worse for their people and created ISIS.
In Afghanistan they created just a temporary relief until they gave up and things returned back to how they were.
This time it caused a lot shit for the whole world and there isn’t even a plan for after.
Libya is an even better example of a situation of were Western attacks claiming to be meant to “Overthrow a murderous dictator and bring in Democratic values” made things vastly worse.
The fact that you think the US has any form of “far left” presence beyond fringe college clubs and CIA honeypots says everything
Not that I necessarily disagree with your first point, I just don’t see it as evidence of the existence of a far left. The Iranian people have been protesting the Iranian government on their own for ages.
I’m not talking specifically about the US far left. I’m talking about Lemmy / Mbin / Fediverse leftists who celebrate Iran as an opponent to the US and then retcon that the government of Iran must not have legitimate internal opposition. Some of them are probably based in the US as well. I’m not clear on where technocrit is from.
The term you’re looking for is “tankies”
I think there’s more nuance. Tankies love Russia and North Korea. If you don’t like those two but you think Venezuela, Iran, and Iran’s proxies are just fine, you may not be a tankie, but you are leaning that way.
Is technocrit a tankie? If so, he or she hides enough of it to get lots of support from lemmy.world leftists. The same people who are happy to bitch about hexbear and lemmy.ml seem to find little wrong with technocrit and tropicaldingdong.
What is left wing about that? Sounds like Russian propaganda. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear something like that from AfD or FPÖ … and they hate Muslims but they also repeat everything Sputnik writes.
My Iranian American friends tell me they don’t trust aljazeera as a source because they are anti-Iranian. I’m not sure how true that is, but I do know the contents of the videos I saw. And only the Iranian regime had guns.
Here’s how these things happen: there is dissatisfaction with the government-- in this case, yes general unhappiness with the theocracy, but acutely with severe economic strain brought about by draconian sanctions. This situation, engineered in part by external forces, is then amplified and aggravated by those same external forces. This doesn’t mean that the majority of those on the streets were agents of the US/Israel, but there were absolutely those agents there. Israel explicitly admitted as much at the time. That situation was absolutely the beginning stage of the war.
Good? I’m confused, does anyone other than the most tankie of tankies dislike the Kurds?
No, not great. Destabilizing a region is not good for the folks who live there.
You’re right, much better that a stateless people that are constantly massacred just lie down and take it.
Given the track record of the impact this has had on the locals whenever the US has done this, however justified the dissidents’ cause, I completely agree with you. It has brought us such beauties as Suharto, Pinochet, and the silent holocaust. Glad we could find some common ground here.
Yes, giving arms to the Kurds, who have repeatedly provided armed forces to assist us in fighting ISIL and other military operations=Pinochet 🙄
Look, each time, in the past, arguments like this existed, and each time we sent arms, the region ended up in a fucked state. But let’s not learn from history.
It’s not even about liking them or not. I would like them to have autonomy, but they’d have to be kind of stupid to fall for US “friendship” again. They have been used as pawns when convenient, and then abandoned later.
Wait, tramp is credible now when it happens to validate your claims? He’s a clown.
He’s a clown that’s what makes it probable he said the quiet part out loud which no other POTUS was dumb enough to admit in the open.
You got a point though, with all that bullshit coming from him we can’t decide what might be true between all those lies and shouldn’t chose based on our world view.
You’re justifying their executions if you claim they are being armed by foreign enemies. This helps no one but arms manufacturers.
You’re justifying their executions
Only if you’re incapable of holding two thoughts in your head at the same time.
Think of your average American.
Your average American would be wrong, too.
…and then realize half of them are stupider than that.
I didn’t listen too hard because a Trump supporter provided the information… but someone told me recently (yesterday) that Trump tried to arm a militia group who’d worked with the US in the past. Supposedly that group was supposed to arm the civilians but they kept the weapons for themselves.
Honestly, would be fucking crazy either way. Because, in that case, it sounds like Trump spooked the Iranian government into its atrocities.
Edit: they were talking about Iranian Kurdish opposition factions
Edit 2: this article brings it up https://nypost.com/2026/04/05/us-news/president-trump-reveals-us-attempted-to-funnel-weapons-to-iranian-protesters-claims-regime-slaughtered-45k/
My understanding was that the Syrian Kurds received the arms.
The Resistance in Iran is supposed to like the Iranian Kurds, but idk how they feel about the Syrians.
This is stuff I don’t actually understand however, I’m just parroting what I heard my Iranian American friends say.
A guilty comprador seldom admits guilt.
Meanwhile the Iranian Kurds states never receiving any such arms nor are they taking part in the US war
The Kurds should trust the US again. How does the saying go?
Trust them eight times and get betrayed every single time, trust them again and get betrayed just for old times sake - Unknown western diplomat
“Being an enemy of America is dangerous, but being its friend is fatal.”
Well… Technically, he didn’t say they were successfully armed. He said there was an attempt made but he thought the arms didn’t make it to the protesters.
Edit: Still seems like a big deal for it to be confirmed in any sense.
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Treating Trump as a source of any kind of truth is extremely shaky.
Akshually, Iran is one of the countries that had almost as much US meddling as Latin America since the 50s.
Good point!
