“We’re very friendly with the Kurds, as you know, but we don’t want to make the war any more complex than it already is. I have ruled that out, I don’t want the Kurds going in,” Trump said on Air Force One Saturday on his way back to Florida after attending a military service for six fallen US soldiers.

Israel’s military had been working to open the way for Kurdish forces to take up positions in Iran’s northwest, with the ultimate aim of encouraging armed Kurds to rise up against Tehran.

Trump said he’s “had a good relation” with the Kurds and they have told him they’re “willing to go in” to Iran. “But we really, I’ve told them, I don’t want them to go,” he added.

Airstrikes have targeted Iranian military and law enforcement in the largely Kurdish region next to northern Iraq, where US aerial protection in 1991 helped establish a semi-autonomous Iraqi Kurdish administration in Erbil. The US and its allies relied on the Kurds, the world’s largest ethnic group without a state of its own, in neighboring conflict zones.

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Kurds entering the war against Iran could have wider repercussions and Iraqi Kurd leaders are reticent to commit, according to a person familiar with their thinking.

On Thursday, Ali Larijani, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, said they have already struck Kurdish groups in Iraq and warned the country would not tolerate separatist movements, while Turkey said organizations promoting Kurdish separatism threaten regional stability and the territorial integrity of neighboring states.

While some Kurdish factions are preparing for potential cross-border operations into Iran, Dlawer Ala’Aldeen, founding president of the Erbil-based Middle East Research Institute, said the groups remain fragmented and lack the capacity to directly challenge the Iranian state despite posing a potential pressure point on its borders.