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‪In Iran, due to the demographic hegemony of the Soran Kurds (mainly in Kurdistan and in the Kermanshah region), human and social science research has neglected the Kirmanj Kurdish-speaking people of West Azerbaijan, on the border with Turkey. It overlooks three differences between these populations and those of southerly regions. The first is the permanence of the tribal phenomenon, which was undermined further south, in the Soranian-speaking regions, by the centralisation efforts of the Pahlavi monarchy (1925-1979). The second is that after the Iranian revolution of 1979, Islamism did not manage to develop in the Kirmanj-speaking districts, contrary to what was happening further south, so that political support relied on tribal affiliation until the early 21st century. In Urmia, however, the regional capital which is now bi-ethnic (Sunni Kurdish and Shia Azeri), the rural exodus was then disarticulating the Kurdish tribe, reinforcing ethno-confessional solidarities. Since the 2000s, the Islamic Republic has attempted to respond to the politicisation of Sunni Kurdish identity by promoting a clientele of new tribal chieftaincies and rival branches of Sunni Sufism, as supposedly divisive. Can these allow Tehran to fight against the development of a Sunni Kurdish identity in Urmia? To this question, the present study aims to answer through a combination of historical geography and sociological inquiry.‪