The Secret Plan to Weaponize the Kurds (Part 2) - with Nadav Eyal

**Dan Senor** (0:00)
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**Nadav Eyal** (0:17)
You are listening to an ARK Media podcast.
It's a story of infatuation. The Israelis saw the 12-day war was so successful, and the Iranians were so defenseless. And then a few months later, Venezuela happens and the US is so successful. And then there were these demonstrations and this re-open rebellion in Iran against the regime during war with Israel.
And suddenly for Israel, this is a moment like no other. And concept says, look, this problem will never be solved with Iran until the regime falls. We have an opportunity like no other. And the cost of inaction is higher than the cost of action. And these are words uttered by the Prime Minister to President Trump in the final brief. And it's the Prime Minister who handles this, who pushes this. And I think that to a certain degree, the IDF, they did play along, but they didn't really believe that it's going to actually happen.

**Dan Senor** (1:28)
It's 7:30 a.m. on Tuesday, August 4th in New York City. It's 2:30 p.m. on Tuesday, August 4th in Israel. On our previous episode of Call Me Back, we ran part one of this series. It was my conversation with Itai Engel, who spent a month with Kurdish fighters on the grill of flags of Northern Syria to the caves on the Iraq-Iran border, trying to understand the people Israel was counting on to help bring down the Islamic Republic. Itai left us with a portrait of fighters who felt used, then abandoned, then used again, then abandoned again. No friends but the mountains, as the Kurdish saying goes.
Today, we get the other side of that story, the view from inside the rooms where the plan was hatched and where it fell apart. Based on an investigation by ARC media contributor, Nadav Eyal. Nadav's investigation reconstructed for the first time in this much detail what Israel's actual war aim was in Operation Roaring Lion, a war aim that was never officially made public. It involved a Mossad recruited Ahmadinejad waiting in the wings, a 15,000 strong Kurdish force meant to swell to 200,000 marching on Tehran under Israeli air cover, flying the flag of the Shah, not the flag of Kurdistan, and a set of internal quote, 10 commandments governing what that army could and could not do once it crossed the border. Then according to Nadav's sourcing, it all came apart, not just because of Erdogan, but because the Mossad, the IDF and Israel's own war cabinet cannot agree even now on what the plan actually was, whether anyone even objected to it or who is responsible for how it ended. Today, Nadav walks us through that failure and what it may have cost Israel going forward. My conversation with Nadav right after this message.
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Nadav, good to be with you.

**Nadav Eyal** (4:30)
Good to be here again, Dan.

**Dan Senor** (4:32)
So in your report, which was detailed in your newsletter, and I know you did a lot of the writing and reporting with sources on the ground in Israel, you wrote, and I quote here, the war aims of Operation Roaring Lion were never officially published, close quote. And that after talking to more than a dozen sources, you reconstructed it as roughly, and I quote here again, creating the military conditions for a change of regime in Iran. So spell that out for us. What did that actually mean operationally?
And why, I was just very struck by that. Why was it never said publicly? Why did we never hear that?

**Nadav Eyal** (5:07)
I think it's a great question why the Israeli public and the entire world didn't hear that war aim. Usually, these war aims are public. So for instance, Israel's war in Gaza, the war aims were made public at the time, not in this case.