From Fox News to the Noose: How a Claim About Kurds Became a Useful Narrative, by Mina Khanlarzadeh – 9 April 2026

From Mina’s Substack

In an earlier essay, I argued that the Islamic Republic governs through the geopolitical alibi: the habit of recasting domestic repression as a foreign-made crisis, so that uprising becomes infiltration and massacre becomes national defense. This essay traces how that alibi traveled abroad, and how a single statement by Donald Trump became usable, within hours, to three different political actors for three different purposes, but through one shared mechanism: displacing responsibility onto Kurdish groups, whether for the failure of a political promise or for the very origin of the violence.

On January 8 and 9, 2026, the Islamic Republic crushed widespread protests amid a nationwide internet and phone shutdown. The uprising had begun in late December, and by January 1, Reza Pahlavi, son of Iran’s last shah, had entered the scene publicly. On January 2, he called for mass protest, insisting that the Islamic Republic could not suppress the streets if the numbers reached a million or more. Meanwhile, after four protesters were killed in Malekshahi, in the Kurdish province of Ilam, on January 3, and after Malekshahi hospital was attacked on January 4, Kurdish political parties called on January 6 for a strike across Kurdish cities on January 8. The point of the strike, rather than street protest, was protection: after the violence in Malekshahi, Kurdish parties sought to register dissent without exposing people to mass killing. Pahlavi then echoed the Kurdish call but redirected it toward widespread street protest on January 8. Even after the state’s violence that day, he repeated the call on January 9.

Days later, on January 13, Donald Trump posted that “help is on its way.” Months after the massacre, and more than a month into the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, Trey Yingst reported on Fox News on April 5 that Trump had told him the United States had sent weapons to protesters in Iran through Kurdish intermediary groups, but that those weapons were never delivered. The next day, Trump repeated the claim himself, dropping the explicit reference to Kurdish groups while keeping the same structure: weapons had been sent, and they had been seized before reaching their intended recipients. That second version made it unclear which Kurdish groups he had meant—whether in Iran or Iraq, or whether he had meant Kurdish groups at all.

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Mina Khanlarzadeh (Ph.D., Columbia University; B.Sc., Physics, Sharif University of Technology) is a historian whose interdisciplinary work engages global political thought, literary and translation studies, gender studies, and the history of science.

From Fox News to the Noose: How a Claim About Kurds Became a Useful Narrative, by Mina Khanlarzadeh – 9 April 2026

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