President Trump has said that the US sent “a lot of guns” to protesters inside Iran during demonstrations and clashes that took place in January, though he believes the weapons may have been “kept” by Kurdish groups.
“President Trump told me the United States sent guns to the Iranian protesters,” Trey Yingst, a reporter for Fox News, said on Sunday. “He told me, ‘We sent them a lot of guns. We sent them to the Kurds.’ And the president says he thinks the Kurds kept them. He went on to say. ‘We sent guns to the protesters, a lot of them.’”
Trump told Yingst that he sent the weapons after Iranian forces killed demonstrators, but at the height of the unrest in Iran, Iranian authorities said they seized US-made weapons and ammunition from foreign-backed “militants” and frequently said their forces were fighting against US and Israeli-backed “terrorist groups.”
Trump repeated his claim that Iranian forces killed 45,000 protesters, a number that lacks any evidence or credibility. The Iranian government has acknowledged that more than 3,000 people, including over 200 Iranian security personnel, were killed, while the HRANA, a US-based and US-funded NGO, has said more than 7,000 were killed and says it is investigating more reported deaths, but nowhere near the number Trump claims.
On Monday, Trump told reporters that the US sent guns into the country and that a “certain group of people” kept them without mentioning the Kurds by name.
“We sent guns, a lot of guns. They were supposed to go to the people, so they could fight back against these thugs. You know what happened? The people that they sent them to kept them,” he said. “Because they said, ‘What a beautiful gun, I think I’ll keep it.’ So I’m very upset with a certain group of people, and they’re gonna pay a big price for that.”
In response to Trump’s initial comments, several Kurdish groups denied that they received guns from the US during the protests. Amid the unrest in January, Reuters reported that Kurdish fighters had been entering Iran through Iraqi Kurdistan to fight Iranian security forces.
The Kurdistan Freedom Party, or PAK, a Kurdish Iranian separatist group mainly based in Iraq, was announcing operations against Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and the IRGC had also reported clashes with armed Kurds. The US also reportedly smuggled Starlink terminals into Iran through Iraqi Kurdistan.
The US and Israel were looking to back armed Kurdish fighters on the ground at the start of the war they launched on February 28, but according to Israeli media, the potential offensive fell apart after a series of media leaks and the Kurdish group’s mistrust of the US-Israeli plan.
