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Generally Iran covers the old Persian empire, so Iran is populated mostly by Persians, but of course there is a smattering of other ethnic groups (Jews, Arabs, etc.). Iraq is mostly Arab, but there are significant numbers of other ethnic groups (for example, the best known Shia religious leader. Ali Al-Sistani, is Persian and was born and raised in Iran). The Kurds, who occupy northern Iraq and a big chunk of Turkey, are not Arab and are ethnically related to the Persians.
The Kurds have had a bad atbreastude about the Arabs since about the seventh century AD, when the Kurds were conquered as part of a general expansion of Arabs from the Arabian peninsula outward, eventually covering most of north Africa, and places as far away as southern Spain and Sicily. The side effects of that expansion drive a big part of the animosities that still fracture the area (and specifically Iraq) to this day.
Also not to be confused as being the same ethnic group are the Turkomen, most of whom live in Turkey but significant numbers also live in Iran and, IIRC, the Kurdish portions of Iraq. Around the 12th century, give or take a hundred years, the Turks started marching their way across Persia and the Arab peninsula, which created the historic tensions between the Turks and, well, pretty much everybody.
After that bloodletting was finished, the Mongols swept through and did their own round of conquering from about the 13th through the 15th centuries. A few hundred years later, the Ottoman empire represented yet another round of conquering, war, rest, and grudges that last for fifty generations or more.
Which kind of explains why groups in the region are quick to take up arms and fiercely fight for what they believe is rightly theirs: anybody who didn't have such an atbreastude was wiped out long ago.
Bo Raxo
