Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has launched 230 attack drones against targets in Iraqi Kurdistan and ordered the evacuation of Marivan, a Kurdish-majority city of 200,000 near the Iraqi border, as a Washington- and Jerusalem-backed Kurdish incursion appears imminent.

As "Hvylya" reports, citing The Atlantic, a media channel close to the IRGC said the drone strikes targeted what it called "terrorist and separatist grouplets" operating from Iraqi territory. The evacuation order for Marivan signals that Tehran expects fighting to reach Iranian soil.

The strikes came after Iraqi Kurdish authorities recently lifted long-standing restrictions on Iranian Kurdish parties' access to arms - a move that had previously been part of their cooperation with Tehran. In response to the escalation, a top Iraqi Kurdish official declared that the Kurdistan Region of Iraq would "completely keep its neutrality" in the conflict.

On the ground, thousands of Iranian Kurdish militants have gathered in Iraqi Kurdistan, organized into a coalition of six political parties with military wings. All are Iranian citizens, according to a Kurdish Iranian analyst who was preparing to embed with the forces. The operation is reportedly led by the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (PDKI), whose leader Mustafa Hijri spoke with Donald Trump by phone on Monday.

Iran's national security adviser Ali Larijani has repeatedly warned against ethnic insurgency in recent days. Pro-democracy activist Amir Hossein Ganjbakhsh noted that "Iran can muster up to 1 million people in military uniform," underscoring the scale of resistance any incursion would face. Behnam Ben Taleblu of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies added that the regime is "well equipped to take on a local armed insurgency."

The evacuation of Marivan and the drone barrage suggest that the war between the US-Israeli coalition and Iran - which entered a new phase after the killing of Iran's leader days ago - is about to extend to a ground front along Iran's western border.

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