TEHRAN — Kurdish rebels and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps have engaged in armed clashes along the mountainous Iranian border with Iraq in recent days, raising tensions in the region, Iranian state television reported.

On social media, there are videos that purport to show the shelling of positions held by the rebels, the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan. While both groups claim to have killed over a dozen of their opponents, there are no reliable figures as yet, Iran’s state news agency, IRNA, reported.

The Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan has been striving for decades for independence in the Kurdish areas of western Iran. While many of Iran’s approximately six million Kurds feel strong connections to the nation, they speak a separate language and are mostly Sunni Muslims in a Shiite country. The Kurdish regions, like all Iranian border regions, are poor compared with Iran’s larger cities.

The rebels have clashed periodically with the Iranian armed forces, at times ambushing military patrols. Some of their leaders were assassinated in Europe in the 1980s and ’90s. A German court concluded in 1992 that Iran was involved in at least one of those assassinations.