Later, he organized his forces to fight the Iranian army in the region and managed to expand the area under his control to the nearby towns and cities such as Mahabad, Khoy, Miandoab, Maku and Piranshahr in a series of battles.

In March 1921, Simko defeated the Iranian army under Zafar al-Dowleh (later Brigadier General Hasan Muqaddam) at Tasuj, north of Lake Urmia.

[16] In the battle of Savujbulak, Reza Shah, dispatched Khaloo Qurban to counter Kurdish expansion, but he was defeated and killed by Simko's forces in 1922.

[8] In 1930, the commander of the Iranian Army, General Hassan Muqaddam sent a letter to Simko, who was residing in the village of Barzan, and invited him for a meeting in the town of Oshnaviyeh.

After consulting with his friends, Simko along with Khorshid Agha Harki went to Oshnaviyeh and were invited to the house of the local army commander, Colonel Norouzi, and were told to wait for the Iranian general.

[20] According to an article published by The New York Times on July 10, 1922: It is said that Simko commanded 85,000 men and was assisted by Mustafa Kemal Pasha, former Turkish [Ottoman] War Minister, with the fighting lasting several days.

[23] In the words of Kurdologist and Iranologist Garnik Asatrian:[24] In the recent period of Kurdish history, a crucial point is defining the nature of the rebellions from the end of the 19th and up to the 20th century―from Sheikh Ubaydullah’s revolt to Simko’s (Simitko) mutiny.

The chimerical idea of this imagined unity has become further the fundament of Kurdish identity-making, resulting in the creation of fantastic ethnic and cultural prehistory, perversion of historical facts, falsification of linguistic data, etc.

While some Marxist political activists (see Nābdel 1977) and ethno-nationalist intellectuals of different Iranian groups (Ghassemlou 1965; Hosseinbor 1984; Asgharzadeh 2007) have introduced this confrontation as a result of Reza Shah’s ethnocentric policies, no valid documents have been presented to prove this argument.

Recent documentary studies (Borzū’ī 1999; Zand-Moqaddam 1992; Jalālī 2001) convincingly show that Reza Shah’s confrontation with Baluch Dust Mohammad Khan, Kurdish Simko and Arab Sheikh Khaz‘al have merely been the manifestation of state-tribe antagonism and nothing else.