Guards 'mop up’ Kurdish rebels

Press, 23 August 1979, Page 6

Guards 'mop up’ Kurdish rebels

ZPA-Reuter Teheran Government Revolutionary Guards have killed 60 Kurdish rebels in “mopping up” work in the western province of Kurdistan, Iran’s State Radio has said. The radio said the action was carried out by an 80strong detachment of guards sent to the provincial capital of Sanandaj from the noniurdish province of Zanjan. The radio said that at one point the guards had been surrounded by forces of the banned Kurdish Democratic Party, the Union of Communists (the radio’s term for the Union of Farmers), and the people’s Fedayeen guerrilla group.

It said that 10 guards had been killed in clashes and several injured. Ten were missing, it added. A spokesman for the Kurdish Society in Mahabad, north of Sanandaj, said Kurds were fortifying defensive positions in and around the town. There were no Government forces in the town, they said. The sources said that the Kurdish spiritual leader, Sheikh Ezzeddin . Hosseini, was planning to leave Mahabad to direct resistance from a mountain stronghold. Twenty-nine Kurds have been executed by firing squad for their alleged involvement in a Kurdish rebellion. They had been found guilty of “waging war on God and his representatives.” The special Islamic courts trying the Kurds are under Ayatollah Sadeq Khalkhali, who gained world-wide publicity after announcing he had sent a suicide squad to Mexico to assassinate the deposed Shah. Ayatollah Khalkhali has said he is responsible for some 200 death sentences passed on members of the previous regime since the February revolution.