Shirin is unsure about what to make of the recent protests that have rocked Iran, including the 35-year-old's hometown of Sanandaj in the heart of Iranian Kurdistan. The region is afflicted with one of the highest unemployment rates in the country. “The atmosphere in Sanandaj is intimidating, with so many armed security forces standing by the side of the streets,” she told Al-Monitor on the popular messaging app Telegram, which had 25 million daily active users inside Iran before the authorities reportedly moved to start filtering it. “People’s patience is wearing thin; they have lost the ability to meet their basic needs.”

Simmering discontent with mismanagement of the economy, high unemployment and the government’s declared intention to soon remove some of the critical subsidies that the poor have come to rely on for survival — all while spending huge sums of money on adventures in Syria, Lebanon and Yemen — are voiced by some protesters in confrontations that have left at least 22 people dead.

While Kurds in the main urban centers in western Iran have taken to the streets to voice their anger, many of their ethnic brethren in small towns and cities have refrained from joining the protests. They say the regime uses Kurdish separatism as an excuse to militarize the Kurdish areas and use brute force to crack down on protests. This fear appears to have some merit in the light of a reported Jan. 3 confrontation between Kurdish militants and Intelligence Ministry agents.

The Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI) has claimed that its forces inside Iran, known as “urban peshmerga,” clashed with security forces in the village of Ziwa, near the town of Piranshahr on the border with Iraqi Kurdistan. The KDPI claims that six members of the Iranian security forces were killed in the incident. The following day, on Jan. 4, the Tasnim news agency, which is close to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), quoted a “security official” who linked the clash to the recent wave of protests. The official said the confrontation in Ziwa was carried out by “armed counter-revolutionaries” whose aim was to carry out “explosions, killing and to prolong the recent riots in the country.”