Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said one of its members was "martyred" during intense clashes with Kurdish fighters near the border with Iraq early on May 4. The IRGC claimed to have inflicted heavy losses on the infiltrating militants but did not release casualty figures.

The clashes took place in the mountainous area of Dara Nakhi, near the Kurdish town of Mariwan close to the Iraqi border. The IRGC identified the Kurdish attackers as "armed gangs" and "counter-revolutionary elements," monikers Iranian authorities routinely apply to Kurdish groups struggling for autonomy. Most of those fighters are based in a rugged mountainous range stretched on the long Iran-Iraq border.

Over the past four decades, Iranian Kurdish groups have led their own cause for varying levels of autonomy in an armed struggle against the Islamic Republic. They recently intensified their hit-and-run skirmishes. On April 22, the IRGC confirmed that two of its members were killed in similar clashes near the same town of Mariwan. The violence, according to a local commander, "once again disclosed to the local Kurds the malicious nature" of those groups.

Earlier in April, Osman Haj Hosseini, a veteran IRGC commander in the town of Piranshahr, was gunned down in his car. A wing of the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran claimed responsibility for the killing, according to Hengaw, which is an opposition news outlet monitoring developments in Iranian Kurdistan.