Shahin (Falcon) is a Kurdish group that claimed responsibility for a small bombing at the Turkish Consulate in Tabriz, Iran, in March 1992. The blast caused minor damage and no injuries were reported. <P><br />In an anonymous call to an Iranian news agency, a man identifying himself as a spokesman for the group claimed the bombing, and said it was in response to Turkish treatment of Iraqi Kurds and the use of a Turkish airbase by the United States military. <P><br /><br />This bombing was part of a wave of violence and protests which swept through Kurdish-inhabited areas in both the Middle East and Europe. The violence began during Kurdish New Year's celebrations (observed on March 21st) and included several bombings in Turkey, Germany, and France. All of the violence was directed toward Turkish targets, including banks, courts, and diplomatic offices.  <P><br /><br />Although the Kurdish population is spread across several nations (most notably, Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria), Kurds are more or less a homogenous ethnic group. However, differing political aspirations between Kurdish nationalist groups and dissimilar relationships between communities and their specific countries of citizenship have led to the proliferation of varied political and militant groups within the Kurdish population. Oftentimes these different groups and communities have widely conflicting aims or grievances. <P><br /><br />To that end, the motivations behind the Tabriz bombing, and the ideology behind the Shahin group are somewhat muddled. While the bombing explicitly targeted Turkey, Shahin's claim of responsibility singled out Turkish treatment of Iraqi Kurds as particularly egregious. During the 1991 Gulf War thousands of Iraqi Kurds fled the fighting to Iran and Turkey, with many being turned away at the Iraq-Turkish border. Shahin's statement of claim would lead some to believe that the perpetrators behind the Tabriz bombing were aggrieved Iraqi Kurds who perhaps had been rejected entry to Turkey. <P><br /><br />However, Shahin's statement also expressed anger at U.S. military use of a Turkish airbase. Iraqi Kurds are generally seen as staunchly pro-American, which detracts from the theory that Shahin was made up of angry Iraqi Kurds. <P><br /><br />It is more likely that Shahin was simply made up of determined Kurdish individuals (either Iraqi-Kurd refugees or native Iranian-Kurds) who were caught up in the nationalist fervor and protests that accompanied Kurdish New Year.  Supporting this theory was the fact that the blast was extremely minor, and not indicative of the work of a sophisticated terrorist outfit. <br />