After the collapse of the Mahabad Republic, the Kurds struggled to reunite the nationalist movement in Iran. With the KDP, who represented the Kurds politically, leaderless, it took until 1955 for them to reassert their dominance after spending years relying on the Tudeh Party. This newfound independence, however, brought the Iranian government to enact oppressive policies on KDP members. It was so bad that some were forced to seek refuge in Iraqi Kurdistan (Ahmadzadeh and Stansfield, pg. 15). The Kurds refused to give up though. In 1967, the KDP led by Ahmad Tofiq organized the Revolutionary Committee. The committee, although eventually defeated, held small military victories over the Iranian military (Ahmadzadeh and Stansfield, pg. 16).

In the wake of political unrest in Iran in 1978, the KDP set up the Zagros committee to send Kurds to participate in the protests against the Pahlavi regime known as the Islamic Revolution. Following the fall of the Pahlavi regime and the rise of this new form of government, the Kurds searched for democratic rights (Ahmadzadeh and Stansfield, pg. 17). However, negotiations between Kurds and Iranian authorities failed thus resulting in escalation five weeks after the revolution took place where 450 people died in the Bloody Newroz of Sanandaj. Even after the assault, the Kurds attempted to democratically settle their disagreements via boycotting the referendum that named the new Iranian government. However, it did not last long as while they were attempting to draft a new constitution, the Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini declared jihad against the Kurds thus putting a large target on their heads. In the wake of increased Iranian casualties, the war lasted only a few months after Dr. Qasimlu, who was General Secretary of the KDP, accepted Kohmeini’s declaration of solving the Kurdish question on August