How CIA and Mossad Walked an Army Into Iran Without Firing a Single Shot

The Islamic Republic of Iran has spent 47 years preparing for every threat it could imagine.

Invasion from the west, missiles from the sea, sabotage from the air.

It built walls, dug bunkers, trained armies, and executed spies by the hundreds.

It never seriously prepared for the threat that was already inside.

On the 4th of March, 2026, Iran’s western border ceased to be a border.

It happened without a declaration, without a press conference, without a single government on Earth officially claiming responsibility.

1 hour before sunrise in at least three separate locations along the mountainous frontier between Iraqi Kurdistan and northwestern Iran, armed formations crossed into Iranian territory on [music] foot.

By the time the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps confirmed the incursions internally, the men were already gone.

Deeper into the mountains, moving toward positions that someone had spent months identifying, mapping, and preparing for exactly this moment.

No official confirmed it.

No government claimed it.

The CIA said nothing.

The Israeli military said nothing.

And that silence was not confusion.

That silence was the operation.

Here is what we do know.

The weapons these men were carrying did not arrive last week.

The commanders leading them had been trained not last month, but over years in bases across the Iraqi border by instructors whose identities were never disclosed, [music] and whose governments still officially deny they were there.

The coalition that sent them [music] across that border had been assembled not in the chaos of the current war, but in quiet meetings that [music] stretch back further than most people realize.

To a hotel room in Geneva in 1959, >> [music] >> where a Kurdish leader met a future Israeli prime minister and walked away with a promise that would take 60 [music] years to fully cash.

Who are these men? Who armed them? Who trained them? And who finally gave them the signal to move? Why did Israel spend the first days of the war systematically destroying Iranian military posts along the Iraqi border >> [music] >> before a single Kurdish fighter crossed? What did the Kurdish commanders demand from Washington before they agreed to go in? And why did that demand make the CIA deeply uncomfortable? And most importantly, is what is happening in those mountains right now the final blow [music] that breaks the Islamic Republic?
Or is it the spark that turns a war into something far longer and far darker than anyone in Washington has planned [music] for? Subscribe and hit the bell.

My channel covers the intelligence operations the world is still trying to understand.

The answer to all of those questions begins [music] not in 2026.

It begins in the mountains of northern Iraq in the spring [music] of 1965 with a Mossad officer, a Kurdish warlord, and a briefcase full of promises that the Kurds had every reason not to believe and accepted anyway
because they had no other choice.

To understand why Mossad was in those mountains at all, you need to understand a doctrine.

Not a military doctrine, a geographic one.

Israel’s founders had understood from the very first [music] years of the state’s existence that it was surrounded on every side by Arab states that [music] had declared their intention to destroy it.

Egypt to the southwest, Jordan to the east, Syria to the north, Iraq beyond that.

The arithmetic of that geography was simple and terrifying.

Israel was small.

Its enemies [music] were many, and a conventional war fought on multiple fronts simultaneously was a war Israel could not sustain indefinitely.

The answer, developed in the 1950s and given a name by the late 1960s, was called the periphery doctrine.

[music] The logic was straightforward.

If Israel could not neutralize its immediate Arab neighbors through diplomacy or deterrence alone, it could at least complicate their strategic calculations by building alliances with the non-Arab states and peoples on the far side of those neighbors.

Forces that shared Israel’s interest in containing Arab nationalist power, and that could, if properly supported, absorb Arab military attention from the other direction.

The three pillars of the periphery [music] doctrine in its early years were Iran, Turkey, and the Kurds.

Iran under the Shah was an obvious partner, a non-Arab regional power with its own reasons to fear Arab nationalism, and a pragmatic willingness to work with Israel in secret, even while maintaining public distance.

Turkey was a NATO member with its own complicated relationship with its Arab neighbors.

[music] And the Kurds, stateless, dispersed across four countries, fighting for survival against Arab and Persian governments alike, were perhaps the most natural partner of all.

They were not Arabs.

They were not Persian.

They were not Turkish.

They were something older and more complicated than any of those categories, and they had been fighting for the right to exist as themselves for longer than the state of Israel had been alive.

The first serious contact came in 1959, when the Kurdish leader Mustafa Barzani, the dominant military figure in Iraqi Kurdistan, [music] and a man who had been fighting the Iraqi government on and off for most of his adult life, sent an emissary to Geneva.

The emissary met with Golda Meir, then Israel’s foreign minister, and later its prime minister.

The conversation was preliminary, but Meir’s message was unambiguous.

Israel supported Kurdish autonomy, and Israel was prepared to [music] demonstrate that support in practical terms.

It took six years for that support to become operational.

In the spring of 1965, David Kimche, a senior Mossad officer who would go on to become one of the most significant intelligence figures of his generation, traveled to Iraqi Kurdistan and met with Mustafa Barzani directly.

Kimche was not a diplomat.

He did not arrive with speeches or communiques.

He arrived with an operational proposal.

Weapons, funding, military training, and the establishment of what would become the Kurdish intelligence service, Parastin.

In exchange, the Kurds would provide Israel with intelligence on Iraqi military movements, access to a population with deep roots across the region, and a sustained insurgency that kept [music] the Iraqi military occupied and off balance.

Barzani accepted.

What followed over the next decade was one of the most extensive and least documented covert military assistance programs in the history of the Middle East.

Israeli advisers, >> [music] >> some in civilian clothes, some wearing Iranian army uniforms, almost none of them fluent in Kurdish, moved into the mountains alongside Peshmerga fighters and began the slow, methodical work of turning a tribal guerrilla force into something [music] more capable and more durable.

They ran what internal Mossad documents later described as Operation Marvad, a training program that covered small unit tactics, ambush technique, mountain warfare, and the fundamentals of intelligence collection.

They helped build Barzani from the ground up, teaching its officers the tradecraft of agent recruitment, source handling, and counterintelligence that Mossad had itself developed over two decades [music] of operating inside hostile states.

They also delivered the weapons Barzani needed, anti-aircraft systems, ammunition, medical supplies, and critically, money, which in the context of a guerrilla insurgency operating in some of the most isolated terrain on the planet, was often more valuable than any weapon.

The CIA watched all of this with interest, and in the early 1970s, under the Nixon administration, Washington joined the operation.

Weapons and funding were channeled through Iran, whose Shah had his own strategic [music] reasons to keep the Kurdish insurgency in Iraq alive as a pressure tool against Baghdad.

The arrangement that emerged was a three-way partnership, Mossad running the training and intelligence side, the CIA providing funding and political cover, and Iranian intelligence acting as the logistics [music] conduit.

All three parties were working toward an overlapping but not identical set of objectives.

All three parties understood that the Kurds were a tool, not a partner.

[music] And the Kurds, who had been navigating exactly this kind of relationship with outside powers for generations, understood it, too.

For nearly a decade, the partnership held.

The Kurdish insurgency in northern Iraq tied down significant Iraqi military resources, provided Israel and the CIA with a continuous stream of intelligence on Iraqi military and political developments, and served as a permanent reminder to Baghdad that it could not simply turn its full attention outward.

It was, by the cold metrics of covert operations, a success.

And then, in March of 1975, it ended in a single afternoon.

The Shah of Iran, having secured the territorial concessions he wanted from Baghdad through the Algiers Agreement, withdrew his support from the Kurdish operation without warning.

The weapons stopped.

The money stopped.

The CIA, unwilling to continue an operation that had lost its primary logistics channel, followed within days.

And the Kurdish forces, which had been fighting effectively without side support, suddenly found themselves facing the full weight of the Iraqi military with no ammunition resupply, no air cover, and no political backing from any of the three governments that had been profiting from their insurgency for years.

The collapse was swift.

Barzani’s forces disintegrated within weeks.

Tens of [music] thousands of Kurdish fighters and civilians fled across the border into Iran.

The uprising that had tied down the Iraqi army for a decade was over.

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, when he learned what the Shah had done, reportedly said four words.

The Shah sold out the Kurds.

It was not a policy assessment.

It was an epitaph.

And in the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan, among the men who had fought and lost and buried their dead and crossed into exile, those four words, or their equivalent in Kurdish, were remembered for a very long time.

This is the part of the story that does not appear in the official briefings about what is happening on the Iranian border right now.

The part that explains why the Kurdish commanders who met with CIA officers in Erbil in the first days of March 2026 did not simply [music] say yes when Washington asked them to cross the border.

The part that explains why they had a list of demands and why that list made the people on the other side of the table deeply uncomfortable.

Because the Kurds had been here before.

They knew exactly how this kind of relationship worked.

They knew what it felt like when a powerful patron decided that the strategic calculation had changed.

And they had no intention of repeating 1975.

But here is the question that nobody in Washington had fully answered by the time the fighters began moving through the Zagros in the early hours of the 4th of March.

The weapons had been delivered.

The training had been conducted.

The border posts had been cleared by Israeli airstrikes.

The CIA had its people in [music] Erbil.

The operation was by every external measure in motion.

What exactly had the Kurds been promised? And was it enough to make them fight? Not for Washington, not for Tel Aviv, but for themselves? The 1975 betrayal did not kill the relationship between Mossad and the Kurds.

It changed it.

It made it harder, more transactional, more explicitly conditional on both sides.

The Kurds stopped trusting unconditionally.

Mossad stopped pretending it was offering anything other than a strategic arrangement with defined [music] limits.

And for the next two decades, the partnership existed in a kind of suspended state.

Neither fully active nor fully abandoned, maintained through quiet contacts and the occasional exchange of intelligence.

But never again reaching the operational [music] depth that it achieved during the years of Barzani’s insurgency.

What changed everything was 2003.

When American forces crossed into Iraq in the spring of that year, and the government of Saddam Hussein collapsed in a matter of weeks, the map of the Middle East shifted in ways that took years to fully understand.

For the Kurds of northern Iraq, it was a transformation more profound than anything that had happened to them since the 1970s.

The regime that had gassed Kurdish villages at Halabja, >> [music] >> that had conducted the Anfal campaign, a systematic campaign of mass murder and forced displacement [music] that killed somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 Kurdish civilians in the late 1980s, was gone.

[music] The autonomous Kurdistan region, which had existed in a precarious semi-independence under American air cover since 1991, was suddenly in a position to consolidate, expand, and build something that looked, for the first time in modern history, like the foundation of a functional Kurdish state.

And the CIA moved in.

Not quietly, not [music] tentatively, but with the full institutional weight of an agency that had just watched its primary intelligence collection apparatus in the Arab world fail [music] catastrophically on the 11th of September 2001, and was now determined [music] to rebuild it from the ground up in the most favorable operating environment it had seen [music] in decades.

Erbil, the capital of the Kurdistan region, a city of roughly 1 million people nestled between the Zagros Mountains and the Mesopotamian Plain, became one of the most significant CIA operational hubs in the entire Middle East.

Officers who had previously worked Iraq undercover now worked openly under embassy and consulate [music] credentials, alongside Kurdish intelligence services that were themselves among the most capable indigenous intelligence organizations in the region.

The relationship was not equal.

It was never designed to be.

The CIA brought money, technology, [music] training, and access to American military and political power.

The Kurdish services brought something the CIA needed more than any of those things in the years after 2003.

Human intelligence networks that stretched across the border into Iran.

Because Iraqi Kurdistan shared a long mountainous and extraordinarily difficult to control border with Northwestern Iran, the same border that Kurdish fighters were crossing in the early hours of the 4th of March 2026, and the Kurdish communities on both sides of that border had maintained family, tribal, and commercial ties for generations that no government had ever [music] successfully severed.

That border was not just a geographic asset.

It was an intelligence asset.

And Mossad had understood that longer than the CIA had.

Israel’s relationship with Iraqi Kurdish intelligence had never fully lapsed, even through the lean years after 1975.

By the time of the 2003 invasion, multiple analysts and journalists who had spent years covering [music] the region described what they characterized as a significant Israeli intelligence presence in Iraqi Kurdistan, operating through commercial cover, diaspora networks, and the kind of long
cultivated personal relationships that intelligence services build over decades, and that survive changes in government and shifts [music] in official policy precisely because they exist below the level of official policy.

The Israeli government denied it.

Kurdish officials denied it.

But in 2004, the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published a detailed account in The New Yorker describing Israeli intelligence operations in Kurdish Iraq, including the training of Kurdish agents for operations inside Iran.

A CIA official contacted for the piece acknowledged the general thrust [music] of the reporting.

Israeli and Kurdish officials denied everything.

The denials were not convincing and they were not meant to be.

They were meant to be deniable, which is a different thing entirely.

What Mossad was building in Iraqi Kurdistan in the years after 2003 was not a simple intelligence collection network.

It was an infrastructure.

A layered, patient, long-term investment in human relationships, technical capabilities, >> [music] >> and operational positioning that could serve multiple purposes simultaneously.

Collecting intelligence on Iranian military and nuclear activities, identifying and recruiting assets inside Iran itself, and maintaining the kind of ready access to Kurdish armed groups that could, in the right circumstances, be converted into something [music] operational.

Those circumstances were taking shape.

Slowly, invisibly, and with a precision that the Iranian intelligence services, despite their genuine capability and their aggressive counterespionage programs, consistently failed to detect at the level that mattered most.

Inside Iran, the Kurdish population of the northwestern provinces had never been reconciled to the Islamic Republic.

The regime that came to power in 1979 had promised [music] minority rights and delivered repression.

Kurdish political parties had been outlawed.

Kurdish language instruction had been restricted.

Kurdish political leaders had been assassinated.

Some inside Iran, some in exile in Europe, >> [music] >> in a series of killings that Iranian intelligence carried out with a precision that left no doubt about the identity of the perpetrators, >> [music] >> even when the evidence was insufficient for prosecution.

The most notorious was the Mykonos restaurant massacre in Berlin in 1992, where an Iranian hit team assassinated four leaders of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan in a Greek restaurant while they were meeting to discuss the future of their movement.

A German court later found that the operation had been authorized at the highest levels of the Iranian government.

The Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan, the KDPI, had been operating in exile in Iraqi Kurdistan since the early 1980s.

So had Komala, the Kurdistan Organization of the Communist Party of Iran.

And a dozen smaller factions, each with its own ideology, its own leadership, and its own complicated history of cooperation and conflict with the others.

Together they represented something that outside powers had consistently struggled to leverage effectively.

A population of several million people inside Iran with genuine grievances against the regime, genuine armed capability along the border, and genuine motivation to act if they could be convinced that this time the outside powers backing them would not disappear when the strategic calculation changed.

Mossad’s approach to this population was not to try to unify it.

Unifying fractured Kurdish political movements was a task that had defeated everyone who had attempted it for 50 years, and Mossad had no particular reason to believe it could succeed where others had failed.

Instead, the approach was more targeted and more patient.

Identify the specific individuals within specific organizations who had the access, the capability, and the motivation to be useful, and build relationships with those individuals that were personal enough and durable enough to survive the inevitable shifts in organizational politics and leadership.

This was slow work.

It was the kind of work that produced no visible results for years at a time, and then, in the right circumstances, >> [music] >> produced results that looked, to anyone who did not understand what had been built, like something that had appeared overnight.

And then, there was the southeastern front, the one that almost nobody in the Western press was talking about in the first week of March [music] 2026, but that Iranian intelligence had been tracking with growing alarm for the better part of a decade.

Sistan Baluchistan is the largest province [music] in Iran by area and one of the most neglected.

It sits in the far southeast of the country, sharing a long and poorly controlled border with Pakistan [music] and Afghanistan.

Its population is predominantly Baluch, a Sunni ethnic minority in a Shia state, speaking a language unrelated to Persian, with a history of armed resistance against the central government that stretches back [music] generations.

The province has some of the highest poverty rates in Iran.

It has some of the lowest levels of government investment, and it has been the base of operations for Jaish al-Adl, the Army of Justice, a Sunni militant organization that has been carrying out attacks against Iranian security forces in the province since 2012, when it emerged from the remnants of an earlier group called Jundallah.

Jundallah itself had a complicated history with outside intelligence services.

In 2007 and 2008, >> [music] >> allegations surfaced that the CIA was supporting the group to conduct operations inside Iran.

Those allegations were later investigated and found to be false, but the investigation revealed something more interesting.

The contacts with Jundallah had not been American.

They had been Israeli.

Mossad [music] officers operating under CIA cover identities had met with and recruited members of Jundallah in cities including London, presenting themselves as American intelligence officers to conceal [music] Israeli involvement.

When the deception was uncovered, it caused what one account described as a serious rupture between the CIA and Mossad.

And President George W.

Bush was reported to have been furious.

The operation was shut down.

>> [music] >> The relationship with Jundallah was severed, at least officially.

But the strategic logic that had produced [music] it, that Iran’s Baluch southeast represented a persistent vulnerability that a sufficiently patient intelligence service could exploit, >> [music] >> did not disappear.

It went quiet.

And Jaish al-Adl, which emerged in 2012 as a successor organization, continued to operate with a level of capability and a degree of external support that Iranian intelligence consistently attributed, >> [music] >> at least in part, to outside assistance.

By the winter of 2025 to 26, as mass protests swept through Iran and the regime security forces were stretched thin trying to suppress them across 31 provinces simultaneously, the southeastern border was no longer a secondary concern.

It was a second front.

And someone had spent years making sure it would be ready when it was needed.

What happened in late December of 2025 accelerated everything.

The protests that erupted across Iran in the final weeks of that year were not the first time the Iranian population had taken to the streets against the Islamic Republic.

There had been the Green Movement in 2009, the protests of 2019, the uprising triggered by the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022.

[music] Each time, the regime had survived by combining selective concession with overwhelming force.

Each time, the outside world had watched and done relatively little.

But the protests of January 2026 were different in scale, in geography, and in the ferocity of the regime’s response.

By the 9th of January, millions of people [music] had taken to the streets in all 31 provinces.

The regime responded with live ammunition.

Hospitals in Tehran and Shiraz were overwhelmed with gunshot wounds.

The human rights organization IHRNGO documented the deaths of at least 3,428 protesters [music] in the peak days of violence between the 8th and 12th of January.

Eyewitnesses reported seeing bodies in morgues that filled entire rooms.

And something else happened during those [music] protests that the regime noticed and could not fully explain.

In the Kurdish cities of western Iran, in Abdanan and Melekshahi, security forces abandoned their posts entirely, leaving the cities temporarily under the control of protesters.

The Kurdish Freedom Party assaulted the IRGC headquarters in Kermanshah.

Armed Kurdish [music] groups attempted to cross the border from Iraq and Turkey, while the IRGC was occupied suppressing civilian demonstrations hundreds of kilometers away.

The coordination was not accidental.

[music] The timing was not coincidental.

And somewhere in the intelligence assessments being written in Tel Aviv and Langley in the weeks that followed, the analysts looking at what had just happened in the Kurdish regions of Iran were writing down the same conclusion.

The infrastructure was working.

The network [music] was active.

And the moment the strategic conditions aligned, the moment Iranian military attention was fully absorbed, Iranian leadership was decapitated, and Iranian air defenses were destroyed, the men who had been positioned along that border for the better part of a
year would be ready to move.

On the 22nd of February, 2026, [music] 6 days before the first bombs fell on Tehran, five Iranian Kurdish opposition parties formally united under a single coalition.

The Coalition of Political Forces of Iranian Kurdistan issued a public statement declaring its intention to overthrow the Islamic Republic and assume authority over the Kurdish regions of Iran.

Six days later, the war began.

[music] That timing was not a coincidence.

And in the next part, we will show you exactly why.

Because what happened in those 6 days between the coalition’s formation and the opening strikes of Operation Roaring Lion was not political theater.

It was the final activation of a network that had [music] been decades in the making.

And the people who built it had been waiting for exactly this moment.

On the 28th of February, 2026, at approximately 2:00 in the morning local time, the first Tomahawk missiles crossed into Iranian airspace.

Within 90 seconds, radar installations across western and central Iran went dark simultaneously.

Within 4 minutes, the air defense network that the Islamic Republic had spent billions of dollars constructing, and that its commanders had publicly described as impenetrable, was no longer functioning as a network.

It was functioning as a collection of isolated, blind, and largely non-communicating components.

Each one still physically intact in some cases, but severed from every other component it depended on to do anything useful.

The strike on Tehran came next.

Then the nuclear sites.

Then the leadership compound on Pasteur Street.

But while the world was watching the bombs fall on the Iranian capital, something else was already in motion along a border that nobody was covering in terrain that no news camera could reach, directed by an intelligence apparatus that had spent years making sure this moment would not be wasted.

The Israeli Air Force did not spend the opening days of Operation Roaring Lion striking only the targets that made international headlines.

Alongside the strikes on Tehran, on Natanz, on the IRGC command infrastructure and the ballistic missile storage facilities, the Israeli targeting list included a category of objectives that received almost no public attention in the first 72 hours of the war.

Iranian military outposts, border police stations, IRGC forward positions along the mountainous frontier between northwestern Iran and Iraqi [music] Kurdistan.

These were not high-value targets in the conventional sense.

They were not nuclear facilities.

>> [music] >> They were not command centers.

They were small, lightly staffed installations scattered across some of the most remote terrain in the country.

The kind of positions that exist not to fight a conventional war, >> [music] >> but to control movement, monitor cross-border activity, and serve as the first line of response against exactly the kind of infiltration that was now being planned.

Israel was [music] not destroying them because they posed a military threat.

Israel was destroying them because they stood between Iraqi Kurdistan and the interior of Iran.

And removing them methodically, precisely, one installation at a time was the operational equivalent of cutting a fence line before you move a herd through it.

One intelligence source quoted by CNN in the first days of March put it in terms that left no ambiguity.

In recent days, the Israeli military had been striking Iranian military and police outposts along the border with Iraq, in part [music] to lay the groundwork for the possible flow of armed Kurdish forces into northwest Iran.

An Israeli source added that those strikes were likely to intensify in the coming days.

[music] This was not improvisation.

This had been planned.

And the planning had not started on the 28th of February.

According to ITV News, weapons had been smuggled into western Iran to arm thousands of Kurdish volunteers since the beginning of 2025, a full year before the war began.

Kurdish sources told the outlet that American and Israeli forces had been asked to provide air cover when any ground operation began.

The infrastructure for what was now happening had been assembled quietly, [music] patiently, and invisibly across 12 months in which the world was watching Gaza, watching Lebanon, watching the slow collapse of the axis of resistance, and not watching the mountains.

On the 3rd of March, 2026, 3 days into the war, President Donald Trump placed a direct phone call to Mustafa Hijri, the leader of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan.

It was not the first contact between the Trump administration and Kurdish leadership since the war began.

On the 1st of March, Trump had spoken with Masoud Barzani and Bafel Talabani, the leaders of the two dominant political parties in Iraqi Kurdistan, >> [music] >> in calls that both sides described as covering sensitive topics without elaborating further.

But the call to Hijri was different.

Hijri led not an Iraqi Kurdish party, but an Iranian one, an organization whose declared purpose was the overthrow of the Islamic Republic, and whose fighters were positioned along the border waiting for exactly the kind of American signal that a presidential phone call represented.

The CIA, meanwhile, had established what multiple sources described as an operational presence in [music] Erbil, near the Iranian border.

Not a diplomatic presence, not an advisory presence, an operational one.

The kind of forward positioning that intelligence services use when they need to coordinate in real time with assets on the ground, rather than through the slower channels of cable traffic and secure communications from distant headquarters.

The weapons that had been moving since 2025 were now being distributed.

[music] Kurdish commanders were receiving their final operational instructions.

And the Israeli strikes along the border were continuing, >> [music] >> extending deeper into the frontier zone with each passing day, clearing terrain that Kurdish fighters would need to move through.

All of this was the visible layer of the operation.

The layer that sources were willing to describe, that journalists were able to report, that governments could deny while the evidence accumulated in plain sight.

There was another layer.

On the evening of the 2nd of March, the Saudi-owned news network Al Arabiya published a report that stopped every analyst covering the conflict.

The report stated, citing its own sources, that Israeli special forces and Mossad operatives had conducted a ground operation inside Iran during the overnight hours.

No further details were provided.

The Israeli military did not respond to the report.

[music] Israeli authorities issued no comment.

No independent news outlet was able to confirm the specifics.

>> [music] >> But the report was consistent with a pattern that intelligence analysts covering Israel had observed across the preceding decade.

Israel had conducted ground operations inside Iran before.

Not announced, not confirmed, but visible in their effects.

The assassination of nuclear scientists, the destruction of [music] the centrifuge assembly facility at Karaj in a drone strike in 2021.

The explosion at the Natanz enrichment plant in 2020.

Each of these operations had required human assets on the ground conducting reconnaissance, placing devices, confirming targets.

None of them had been officially claimed.

All of them had been attributed to Israel by intelligence assessments that were later, in some cases, confirmed.

What Mossad and Israeli special forces were reportedly doing inside Iran in the opening days of March 2026 was [music] different in scale, but not in kind.

The targets were not individual scientists or specific facilities.

The targets were the IRGC’s remaining command and control nodes in the western provinces.

The local commanders, the communication infrastructure, the logistics depots [music] that stood between a leaderless central government in Tehran and the ability to mount any coherent response to what was coming through the mountains.

Strip away the command layer, destroy the communications, remove the local officers who know the terrain and know the units [music] under their command, and then send thousands of armed fighters through the gaps that have been opened.

That was the architecture of what was unfolding.

And it had been designed piece by piece, operation by operation, relationship by relationship over a period of time that made the word spontaneous not just [music] inaccurate, but almost comically wrong.

But there was a problem, and it was not a small one.

The Kurdish commanders who had been in contact with the CIA, who had received the weapons, who had positioned their forces along the border, these men had not said yes unconditionally.

They had said yes provisionally, subject to conditions, [music] subject to guarantees that the Trump administration had not yet formally provided and that, according to multiple sources familiar with the negotiations, it was deeply reluctant to provide.

The Kurds wanted political assurances, not verbal ones, not the kind of assurances that could [music] be walked back in a press conference 6 months later when the strategic situation had changed.

They wanted something on paper.

Something that committed the United States to a defined political outcome in a post-Islamic Republic of Iran.

Something that acknowledged Kurdish political rights, Kurdish territorial claims, Kurdish participation in whatever government emerged from the wreckage of the regime that was currently being destroyed from the air.

Washington had never given that kind of commitment to a proxy [music] force.

Not in Iraq, not in Syria, not anywhere.

The entire architecture of American covert action was built on the assumption that political commitments could be deferred indefinitely, that the operational relationship could be maintained without resolving the political questions that the operational relationship was ultimately supposed to serve.

The Kurds had been burned by exactly that assumption before.

In 1975, in 2003, in 2019, when Trump ordered a partial withdrawal from Syria and the Kurdish forces that had served as the primary American [music] ground partner against ISIS found themselves suddenly exposed to a Turkish military offensive that Washington had effectively enabled by stepping aside.

They were not going to be burned again.

And yet, the men were moving.

>> [music] >> The border had been crossed.

The operation that everyone had officially declined to confirm was already, by every available indicator, underway.

Which meant one of two things.

Either Washington had given the Kurds what they asked for, quietly, privately, in a form that had not yet been made public.

Or the Kurdish commanders had made a calculation of their own.

That the moment was too rare, the Iranian regime too weakened, and the opportunity too historic to wait for a piece of paper that might never come.

Which of those two things was true would determine [music] everything about what happened next.

And then there was Syria.

In October of 2019, Trump announced a withdrawal of American forces from northeastern Syria with less than 24 hours of warning to the Kurdish commanders who had fought alongside those forces for years, losing 11,000 fighters in the campaign against ISIS.

Within days, Turkish forces crossed the border.

Kurdish civilians fled.

[music] The safe zone that American presence had maintained ceased to exist.

Jim Mattis, Trump’s own Secretary of Defense, resigned partly in response to that decision, describing it in his resignation letter as an abandonment of allies who had fought beside American soldiers and earned American commitments through their sacrifice.

Trump had been the one who ordered that withdrawal.

And Trump was now the one calling Kurdish leaders and asking them to cross into Iran.

The Kurdish commanders in Erbil were not naive men.

They understood geopolitics.

They understood that outside powers act in their own interests, and that a proxy relationship is always, at its core, a transaction.

What they were asking for in the negotiations with CIA officers in the first days of March 2026 was not friendship.

It was not gratitude.

It was something more durable and more specific.

A written political commitment from the United States government acknowledging Kurdish rights in a post-Islamic Republic Iran defining the territorial and administrative arrangements that Washington would support and establishing a mechanism >> [music] >> for enforcing those arrangements that did not depend entirely on the continued
goodwill of whoever happened to be in the White House.

Washington had never offered anything like that >> [music] >> to anyone.

The entire logic of American covert actions since the 1950s was built on maintaining maximum flexibility committing to operational cooperation while deferring the political questions that operational cooperation was supposed to resolve.

Giving the Kurds what they were asking for would mean doing something the CIA and the State Department had spent 70 years carefully avoiding.

Making a binding political promise to a non-state [music] actor about the shape of a future government in a country that did not yet exist in its post-revolutionary form.

The reluctance was not irrational.

A formal commitment to Kurdish political rights in a post-Islamic Republic Iran would alarm Turkey, complicate relations with Baghdad, [music] and create expectations that Washington might not be able to meet.

In a region where broken promises had a longer history than kept ones, that last point was not a minor concern.

It was the entire problem.

And yet the [music] men were moving.

On the 4th of March in the early hours before sunrise, Kurdish armed formations crossed the Iranian border at multiple points along the frontier between Iraqi Kurdistan [music] and northwestern Iran.

By the time the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps confirmed the incursions internally, the fighters were already in terrain that IRGC border units had never needed to seriously defend before.

Because before the 28th of February, there had been an air defense network, a functioning command structure, and a supreme leader in a compound in Tehran issuing orders.

None of those things existed anymore in the way they had a week earlier.

Iraq’s national security advisor issued a statement that same day saying Iraq would not allow groups to infiltrate or cross the Iranian border to carry out operations from Iraqi territory.

The Kurdistan region’s interior ministry announced it was sending Peshmerga security reinforcements to the border strip with Iran.

Both statements were noted.

Neither statement changed [music] what was already happening in the mountains.

Because the Kurdistan region had its own government, its own security forces, and its own calculation about what this moment represented.

The official position of Baghdad was one thing.

What was happening in the passes of the Zagros was another.

And the men making decisions in Erbil had not spent 50 years waiting for Baghdad’s permission to pursue Kurdish interests.

Meanwhile, in the southeast, the second front was stirring.

Sistan Baluchistan, >> [music] >> that vast, impoverished, and chronically neglected province in Iran’s far southeast, had been quiet in the first days of the war.

Quiet in the way that a pressure vessel is quiet before the valve gives.

The IRGC units stationed there had been reduced as commanders pulled forces northward and westward to respond to the more immediate crises closer to Tehran.

The border with Pakistan, always difficult to control, had become even more permeable as the attention of the security apparatus was absorbed elsewhere.

Jaish al-Adl had not issued a public statement [music] since the war began, but according to Israeli Hayom, Washington was in active contact with Baluch militia leaders in southeastern Iran as part of a coordinated push that extended beyond the Kurdish operation in the northwest, the Baluch front, if it activated simultaneously with the Kurdish crossing, would create exactly the scenario that American planners had described as the operational goal.

Iranian security forces stretched thin across two separate fronts, unable to concentrate against either, while the urban populations of Tehran and Isfahan [music] and Shiraz watched the regime’s military capability dissolve in real time, and made their own calculations about whether this was finally the moment to act.

That was the theory.

The theory was coherent.

The theory had been developed over months by people who understood the Iranian security architecture in detail, and who had spent considerable effort creating the conditions for exactly [music] this sequence of events.

But theories of regime change have a history of colliding with realities that the theorists [music] did not fully model.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was not a conventional military force that would simply dissolve when its senior commanders were killed and its supply lines were cut.

It was an ideological organization with deep roots in specific communities, with a parallel economy that gave it financial independence from the state, and with a significant population of true believers who had spent their adult lives in an institution that defined their identity and [music] their purpose.

These men were not going to surrender because Khamenei was dead and the Assembly of Experts building in Qom had been bombed.

They were going to fight.

In the streets of Tehran, if necessary.

In the neighborhoods where the Basij had its deepest roots.

In the kind of urban, decentralized, impossible to target from the air resistance [music] that had been the IRGC’s contingency plan for exactly this scenario.

One American analyst quoted in the first week of March put the timeline for any meaningful internal change at a minimum of 1 week, even under optimistic assumptions about the effectiveness of ongoing strikes against IRGC leadership.

Intelligence assessments circulating in Washington described the Revolutionary Guard as actively preparing its affiliated units for a sustained internal confrontation.

Not a conventional defense, but a street-level struggle for control of the country’s institutions, its communications infrastructure, and its population centers.

The Kurds entering from the northwest could stretch those forces.

>> [music] >> The Baluch front in the southeast could stretch them further.

The CIA’s contacts with elements of Iran’s regular army, the conventional [music] military that answered to the state rather than the supreme leader, and that had a very different institutional culture from the IRGC, could, if those contacts produced results, create fractures within the security apparatus itself.

Trump had hinted at exactly this possibility in an interview, saying that new leadership was emerging from within the Iranian system, >> [music] >> and that some of it would be very good.

But none of this was certain.

None of this was controlled.

And the people running the operation knew it.

What was certain on the 5th of March 2026 was this.

The most powerful intelligence partnership in the world, 60 years in the making, [music] built on a foundation of betrayal and rebuilt on a foundation of shared strategic [music] interest, had activated the most ambitious covert ground operation it had ever attempted.

[music] Thousands of Kurdish fighters were inside Iran.

Israeli special forces and Mossad operatives were reportedly already there.

The Baluch southeast was moving.

The CIA had its people in Erbil.

The border posts were gone.

The air defense network was gone.

The supreme leader was gone.

Everything that could be put in place [music] had been put in place.

Every relationship that had been built over six decades, every weapon that had been delivered over 12 months, every border post that had been eliminated over 5 days of air strikes, all of it had been leading [music] to this.

And now, the operation was beyond the point where intelligence services and political leaders and carefully drafted contingency plans had any real control over it.

It was in the hands of the men in the mountains.

In the hands of the IRGC commanders who were still alive and still fighting.

In the hands of the Iranian civilians watching from their windows as the country their grandparents had built around a revolution was being unmade violently from multiple directions simultaneously.

Whether what emerged from all of this would be a free Iran, a fractured Iran, or something darker and more chaotic than either, nobody in Washington, nobody in Tel Aviv, and nobody in the Zagros Mountains could say with confidence.

The operation was running.

The outcome was unknown.

And somewhere in the passes of the mountains that have defined this part of the world for longer than any of the states now fighting over it have existed, armed men were still moving east.