In the mountains of northern Iraq, just 30 miles from the Iranian border, CBS News met Thursday morning with fighters — many of them women — from an armed Kurdish Iranian opposition group who say they’re poised to take on and help topple the Islamic Republic’s hardline clerical rulers.
The Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (PDKI) is banned as a terror group inside Iran and based in exile across the border in Iraq. For years it has trained for the day the Iranian regime can be ousted from power. But as President Trump appears to step back from threats of a U.S. military intervention on behalf of Iran’s protesters, the Kurdish group’s leader told CBS News that time has not yet come.
President Trump said Wednesday that he’d heard on “good authority” that the “killing in Iran is stopping” and that there was “no plan for executions” in the country following a brutal crackdown to end two weeks of widespread protests. Sources inside Iran have told CBS News the Iranian authorities’ crackdown may have killed upwards of 12,000 people, and possibly many more.
People gather during an anti-government protest in Tehran, Iran, Jan. 8, 2026.
Anonymous/Getty
His remarks appeared to signal a step back from repeated warnings of an unspecified U.S. intervention to protect protesters, and then a threat on Tuesday to order “very strong actions” if Iran hanged protesters.
That may not have been the signal from Washington that the PDKI forces training across the border in Iraq were hoping for.
Commander Sayran Gargoli told CBS News the protests had given them hope that the oppressive regime that came to power with the 1979 Islamic Revolution might finally be toppled, but only “if the people who are demonstrating on the street get international help.”
PDKI leader Mustafa Hijri has lived in exile for more than four decades, and he’s watched as Iran’s rulers quash several rounds of major unrest. As the latest protests seem to suffer the same fate, he said he couldn’t say for sure whether this uprising might prove pivotal.
“It depends on if the widespread killing will continue or not. If it continues, for sure the demonstrators will not be able to continue. On the other hand, there are other possible scenarios, like America gets into negotiations with the regime of mullahs and forces them to accept its conditions. In this case, the regime will manage to extend its existence for some time.”
Mustafa Hijri, leader of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (PDKI) armed Iranian opposition group, speaks with CBS News in northern Iraq, where the group is based in exile, Jan. 15, 2026.
CBS News/Rob Taylor
He said he hoped for a U.S. intervention, and specifically, strikes on Iran that “hit the centers of suppressing forces who are shooting people on the streets, and their so-called ‘justice’ institutions that serve the government. We want to see those institutions gone.”
“The majority of the people in Iran are unhappy with this regime, and they stand against it,” Hijri said.
But in the absence of such help from abroad, Hijri told CBS News that sending PDKI forces across the border — and calling into action the thousands of forces he says the group has lying in wait inside the country — could backfire dramatically.
“I believe that it is not in the benefit of the demonstrators at the moment to have armed forces move back in the country, because it becomes a convenient excuse to the regime to kill the people,” he said. “This is why we haven’t reached the moment to make such a decision. But when the day comes, and we come to a conclusion that the return of our peshmerga [Kurdish] forces will not become additional reason to suppress the demonstrators, then we might do that.”
Members of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (PDKI), an armed Iranian opposition group based in exile, are seen during an exercise in the mountains of northern Iraq, Jan. 15, 2026.
CBS News/Rob Taylor
Hijri said the PDKI wants Kurds, who form about 10% of Iran’s population, and other ethnic minorities to be allowed to live “under democratic law, and that their children are allowed to learn in their own languages, and that the government officially recognizes” their right to do so.
The opposition fighters, Hijri said, “have been trained, and they are there, ready for when the party needs them.”
But as Iran’s hardline leaders increasingly appear to have survived yet another significant challenge to their grip on power, at least for now, the PKDI, and millions of Iranians still inside the country, can only keep waiting.
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