Kurdistan

Kurdistan province and its neighbours are the epicentre of Iran's wartime political-prisoner execution cluster. On 21 May 2026, Ramin Zaleh and Karim Maroufpour, both linked to the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (PDKI), were executed at dawn at Naqadeh Central Prison, in West Azerbaijan, without prior notice to their families. Zaleh had been held since July 2024; Maroufpour, aged 29, since March 2021. Hengaw recorded that Zaleh's trial lasted only a few minutes.

The 21 May executions extend a documented pattern across the Kurdish-majority provinces throughout the conflict. On 20 May, two Iraqi nationals were executed on espionage charges, the first foreign nationals executed in the 2026 conflict, while Turkish national Gholamreza Khani Shakarab faced imminent execution on the same charge. Hengaw documented sustained arrests in Piranshahr, Bukan, and Urmia across 13-17 May, concentrated in Kurdish-majority provinces.

The strategic logic for Tehran appears to be that wartime conditions provide cover for executing political prisoners from PDKI, KDP, and Komala networks who would otherwise attract greater international attention. Amnesty International placed Iran's total 2026 executions above 200 in mid-May, against 2,159 in all of 2025; the accelerated pace in wartime is deliberate rather than incidental.

On 24 July, six drones were intercepted near Erbil International Airport in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, five shot down and one crashing into farmland; the airport briefly closed before flights resumed. No group has claimed the attack and no casualties were reported. The incident extends a pattern of unclaimed strikes near Erbil, following the earlier death of a French soldier there, and underlines how both the Iranian province and the adjoining Iraqi region remain exposed to attacks whose authorship is rarely established.