ERBIL, Kurdistan Region— Head of the elite military Quds Force in Iran’s Kurdistan province has urged voters across the Kurdish regions to turn out in force at the ballot box next week.
The country prepares to hold its 12th presidential election on May 19 in what is predicted to be one of the most closely-contested general elections since Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979.
“The people of Kurdistan will record a high turn out in the elections despite the many problems that have existed and still exist and will demonstrate the fact that the political awareness and maturity is at the highest levels in this region,” said Muhammad Hussein Rajabi, commander of the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards in the country’s Kurdistan province.
“In this very sensitive and dangerous period of the existing world and regional order, they should vote for the candidate who could best solve the country’s problems,” Rajabi said addressing a televised gathering in the provincial capital Sanandaj Thursday.
Rajabi’s comments came as response to an earlier declaration from six Kurdish oppositions groups based in the Kurdistan Region in Iraq who called for a boycott of the elections.
Rajabi also said that the security in the Kurdish areas was “sustainable” and would not be undermined in the face of what he described as “regional instability.”
There Kurdish armed groups including the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran have resumed their armed struggle against Tehran and said more forces will be mobilised inside Iran’s Kurdish regions near the Iraqi borders following deadly clashes last summer.
Election campaigns for the post of the country’s presidency and city councils kicked off last month with the incumbent President Hasan Rouhani leading the so-called moderate camp against the conservative hardliners including Ebrahim Raisi, a potential successor to Iran’s supreme leader and former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Iran’s exiled Kurdish opposition groups have jointly called on Kurdish voters to boycott the elections in the country describing the vote as “a masquerade” staged by “a regime that has deprived the human and just rights” of the people in Iran’s Kurdistan.
Around 76 percent of the Kurdish electorates voted for Rouhani in the 2013 elections whose campaign promises included recognition of broader Kurdish cultural and educational rights. But critics have slammed Rouhani’s administration over the past years for what they have described as a continuation of state-sponsored discrimination against Kurdish population in the country.
With nearly 10 million Kurds living mostly in the western and northwestern parts of the country, the Kurdish vote is expected to have a determining impact on the outcome of the elections in what appears to be a tight race between the two presidential frontrunners.
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