The Secret Plan to Weaponize the Kurds (Part 1) - with Itai Anghel

**Dan Senor** (0:00)
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**Itai Anghel** (0:21)
You are listening to an Ark Media podcast.
When the Mossad plan was revealed, I was shocked. I was not shocked from the idea of working alongside with the Kurds. It has a lot of potential. I was surprised learning how the preparation for this audacious operation was so thin. I mean, it is a guerrilla. It is not an army. They do not have fighter jets or tanks. So boats on the ground is not enough. I mean, you have to provide overwhelming air support, but nothing happened. This is when the Kurdish guy told me, Let's wait for the Israelis and for the Americans to get serious.

**Dan Senor** (1:13)
It's 11 a.m. on Monday, August 3rd in New York City. It is 6 p.m. on Monday, August 3rd in Israel. Days after, President Trump announced again that a last-minute U.S.-Israeli joint strike on Iran has been called off. For most of the past century, the Kurds have had one reliable geopolitical function. When someone needs brave, disciplined fighters to take on a common enemy, the Kurds are who they turn to.
But when the battle ends or supporting them becomes politically inconvenient, their allies tend to disappear. They are the largest stateless nation on Earth. More than 40 million people split across Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran, bound by a national identity that ignores every one of those borders. Their history produced a proverb as bleak as it is accurate. No friends but the mountains. Governments come and go. American and Israeli promises come and go. The mountains are the only one ally that endures. That cycle repeated itself against ISIS, while Iraqi and Syrian armies fled. Kurdish men and women held their ground. Roughly 11,000 of them died doing so. Kurdish women became a particular threat to ISIS fighters who believed dying at a woman's hand would cost them martyrdom and the 72 virgins who would allegedly await them.
And then in the recent war with Iran, the Kurds were handed a new potentially historic role. Reportedly, Israel's own plan to help topple the regime in Tehran ran through Kurdish fighters as boots on the ground. Although mocked in some circles, on paper, there was a logic to it. Capable fighters, a regime they already despise, and a documented, almost devotional affinity for Israel in Jewish history. But the operation never happened the way it was supposed to. Was it a lack of will, arms, or Turkish political pressure? Our guest today, Itai Anghel, spent the better part of a month among Kurdish fighters, from northern Syria to Kurdish guerilla caves on the Iraq-Iran border. Trying to understand this often misunderstood people and peoplehood, that month happened to be during the peak of the demonstrations against the Iranian regime, followed by a brutal crackdown which claimed the lives of tens of thousands of Iranians by the regime. So what actually happened with the Kurds? To answer this question, we are going to tell this story from two perspectives. Part one, today, in which Itai will give us the Kurdish perspective, and part two, in which Ark Media contributor Nadav Eyal will share the planners perspective, the Mossad, the IDF and the War Cabinet. That part will drop on Monday. Itai Anghel is an award-winning senior correspondent and documentary filmmaker for Uvda, Israel's leading investigative and current affairs program on Channel 12
He received the Sokolov Prize, Israel's highest journalism award, and was nominated for an International Emmy Award for his documentaries on the war in Ukraine. My conversation with Itai right after this short break.
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