Salvation Force
Kurdish Sunni Islamist militant group led by Muhammad Uthman Siraj al-Din Naqshbandi
The Salvation Force (Kurdish: سپای ڕزگاری, Sipay Rizgarî; Persian: سپاه رستگاری, Sepāh-e Rastegāri) was a Naqshbandi Islamist militant group composed of Kurds, active in the Avroman region of Iranian Kurdistan during the 1979–1983 Kurdistan conflict and Iran–Iraq War. Like other Kurdish rebel groups in Iran, they aligned with and were armed by the Iraqi side. For the period of its existence, it was led by its founder Sheikh Muhammad Uthman Siraj al-Din Naqshbandi, of the prominent Sheikhs of Tawilah family.
History
Background
Muhammad Uthman Siraj al-Din Naqshbandi, the group's founder, was born in Iraqi Kurdistan and was an Iraqi citizen. He fled to Iran in 1959 after getting into conflict with the political authorities of Iraq under Abd al-Karim Qasim, and established positive relations with the Iranian political authorities of the Pahlavi period. He became friends with Minister of the Court Amir-Asadollah Alam, and his sons took up roles in the Iranian government. He then made use of his relations with the Iranian government to consolidate his influence in the Avroman region. Iraqi Prime Minister Abd al-Karim Qasim was overthrown by the Ba'ath party in 1963, paving the way for contacts to be established between Muhammad Uthman Siraj al-Din Naqshbandi and the Iraqi authorities.
Formation and early activities
Following the victory of Ruhollah Khomeini in the Iranian Revolution, Muhammad Uthman Siraj al-Din Naqshbandi fled to Iraq and mobilised a force of 5,000–6,000 Kurds, creating the Salvation force. Muhammad Uthman Siraj al-Din Naqshbandi thereafter declared that the newly-established Islamic Republic was a non-Muslim entity, stating that the Kurds of the Salvation Force would repeat the Muslim conquest of Persia, while referring to the group with the nickname "Army of Umar ibn al-Khattab".
The public source identifies “Salvation Force” as kurdish Sunni Islamist militant group led by Muhammad Uthman Siraj al-Din Naqshbandi. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Salvation, Force and Kurdish.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q120724861. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1979, 1983, 1959 and 1963.
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This entry incorporates text from “Salvation Force” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.