Excerpts from the oral memoirs of Mohammad Multaji

A Narrative of a Trip to Kurdistan

Compiled by Faezeh Sassanikhah
Translated by Fazel Shirzad

2020-12-15

After taking a training course, we were to be sent to Kurdistan for a two-month mission. We had already been familiar with Kurdistan and Sanandaj through photos and news; we had seen photos of the beheaded bodies of the Revolutionary Guards and news of Komala and Democrat crimes against the captured Revolutionary Guards. I was coming from the shrine to the water tower. People were gathered on the sidewalk, looking at a wall newspaper. It was a photo of the guards who had their heads cut off in Gonbad and Kurdistan.

Well, my family also heard this news and witnessed the funeral of the martyrs of the Revolutionary Guards. Although my mother, sister, and wife cried a lot, they did not disagree with my leaving. It was not at all unlikely that they would not see me again. It was so dangerous that when I found the phone in Saqqez a few days later and called home; as soon as my mother heard my voice, she passed out and was taken to the hospital. We waited in front of the operation building for the bus to come and go to the airport. I saw someone put his head on the wall and cry. I asked the others what happened. They said he would like to come, but Rostami did not allow him because of something.

We went to the airport and got on the plane C30. When he reached Sanandaj, the plane flew for about ten minutes and did not sit down. When I asked for the reason, they said that there were counter-revolutionary forces around the airport and that they were shooting.

We finally landed. All the walls of the airport were bulleted. Parts of the city were in the hands of the army and the IRGC, and parts were in the hands of the counter-revolutionary force.

We went to a mountain[1] and settled in the middle of the city. The IRGC had chosen a good place. It overlooked the city. We took turns guarding. Operations and strike teams would go inside the city, conduct operations, and then return to the top of the mountain.

We went to Saqez by bus from Sanandaj. Looking at the faces of the people on the bus, I felt that the eyes of some, especially the youth, were not looking good on us. Of course, with the encounters I had with the people of the city in the following days, I realized that the elders were satisfied that the city would fall into the hands of the military and that security would prevail in it.

There was a sandwich shop in front of the IRGC building. We became friends. As we talked, I concluded that the people are with us heartily, although the enemy's propaganda had somewhat damaged the perspective of people towards the IRGC.

Sanandaj was calmer than Saqqez. The common people had a normal life. There were a lot of people in front of the IRGC building during the days; Not because of a conflict or protest against the IRGC, people used to come there to solve tier problems. One had not evacuated the landlord's house, for example, one had not received his salary, one had captured another's land, etc. They wanted to talk to martyr Rostami. In that situation, our building was both a checkpoint and a court.

In the building prison, we had several Komala and Democrat prisoners. Some of these people changed their views completely when they saw the attitude and personality of the IRGC forces for a while. We became friends. The enemy had inculcated in their minds that this was a capitalist revolution and that they had come to silence the people of Kurdistan by bayonet force and to shed blood;

But they were surprised when we talked to them about our financial situation and our lives. When I said that before joining the IRGC, I was a taxi driver or worked in a factory, they realized their mistake. The enemy had propagated that these were those capitalists and that they did not of suffering from difficulties, oppression, and hardship.

Rostami had recommended that we sometimes talk to Kurdish prisoners to dispel their misconceptions. When we talked, we found that how the enemy has disrupted the mind of these kind and warm-hearted people and incited the struggle against the fledgling Islamic Revolution; it made me unhappy.

The Kurds are simple and hospitable people. Living conditions and the surrounding mountains also make them generally have well-trained bodies. They are also Shafi'i[2] in terms of religion and are closest to Shiite beliefs. They have been in deprivation since the years before the revolution because the Pahlavi regime did not get along well with the Kurds. After the victory of the revolution, the counter-revolutionary forces did not allow organizing the services and encouraging some Kurds to oppose the new government of the Islamic Republic, through a lot of propaganda and deceptive slogans such as workers 'and farmers' rights, Kurdish people, and Kurdish language teaching in schools and books.

Many of the leaders and key members of the armed groups were not Kurds either. They were Marxist students and leftist groups who found inciting ethnic issues as a way to strike at the Islamic Republic. The Revolutionary Court, which was set up to sentenced the arrested heads, dealt mostly with Tehran prisoners. Strangely, they paid attention to the propaganda. A friend said: "In Sanandaj, Mr. Khalkhali and Mahmoud Kaveh had captured several of counter-revolutionary leaders. A court was set up and they were sentenced to death. As they were going to be shot, one of them said that he wanted to go to the toilet. He replaces the mountaineering shoes he wore with plastic slippers to show that they would kill the workers with a photograph later taken off the corpses and printed.[3]