Iran continues to face obstacles in silencing its armed opponents in Iraqi Kurdistan, where authorities recently offered Tehran assurances to prevent Iranian Kurdish militants from causing tension with Tehran. 

At 4 p.m. March 1 in Binaslawa town just outside Erbil, Salah Rahmani, a veteran peshmerga forces commander with the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI), got into his car outside his house with his 32-year-old son Sabah. Shortly after the vehicle was started, a blast from a bomb stuck on the vehicle echoed across the town popular with Iranian Kurdish exiles. While Rahmani suffered minor injuries, his son — who worked in a bakery and has a 3-year-old daughter — died from his wounds the following morning. Rahmani, a peshmerga since 1980, is known for his fighting qualities earned from years of battling the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). 

While Iran has not claimed responsibility for the attack, Kurdish opposition groups that have been targeted in the past concluded quickly that Iranian agents or their hired assassins were behind the bombing. "This is not their first assassination, and it won't be their last one,” Rahmani, bruised and believed to be the target of the car bomb, told NRT on March 2 as he buried his son in Koya town, where the main KDPI base is located. 

"We as the KDPI have no enemy except the Islamic Republic. Therefore, any attack such as this on our party is from the Islamic Republic," Mustafa Hijri, secretary-general of the KDPI, told NRT during the funeral.