 The absence of a local Kurdish armed force in Iran, and of a large urban population ready to be mobilized against the central government, left Iranian Kurds waiting for an external shock to provide an opportunity, much as the Second World War had.The shock for the Iranian Kurdish national movement came with the eruption of the First Iraqi–Kurdish War in neighboring Iraq in 1961.When the 1958–1961 rapprochement in Iraq collapsed, the KDP‐Iran supported Iraqi Kurds; in the process, the leadership and subsequent social orientation of both Iran's and Iraq's Kurdish Democratic Parties turned conservative.