Iran’s jihadi gambit

A history of support for Kurdish extremists comes back to haunt Tehran

Bahram Fatehi’s tea house in Paveh was bustling with clients smoking shisha when the religious fanatic who would later stab him to death first walked in.

For months prior to that fateful late summer evening in 2013, the hardscrabble mountain town in the heart of Iranian Kurdistan had been buzzing with rumors that local Kurds were sneaking into Turkey and heading to the Syrian battlefront. Several had left backbreaking jobs on the region’s farms and orchards to join US-backed leftist rebel groups, but many others were pledging allegiance to extremist outfits such as the Islamic State and al-Qaeda.