Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan wants the United States to hand over the Kurdish commander whose fighters battered the Islamic State in Syria (ISIS) before President Trump ordered American forces to abandon them.
Erdogan told Turkish state TV that the commander of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), Mazloum Kobani Abdi, is a “wanted terrorist,” reports Axios.
Abdi led the SDF in the U.S.-backed campaign against ISIS; more than 10,000 of his fighters were killed.
Erdogan claims the SDF is allied with Kurdish militants who have sought for decades to establish a separate nation for the Kurds in eastern Turkey and northern Iraq. Those rebels have sometimes used terrorist tactics, including suicide bombings.
“After Trump announced Wednesday that the Turks and the Kurds had reached a ‘permanent ceasefire,’ a group of bipartisan senators led by Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) called on Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to expedite a visa for Abdi to visit the U.S,” Axios says.
Any such visit presumably would avoid Erdogan’s own planned visit to the Trump White House on Nov. 13.
As for Trump’s claim of a permanent ceasefire in northeastern Syria, it appears never to have really taken hold, even though all sides — Syrian government forces, the SDF and the Turkish military, which invaded the region earlier this month — say they’re abiding by it.
“Syria’s state-run SANA news agency said Turkish troops and its allied fighters attacked Syrian army positions outside the town of Tal Tamr,” the Associated Press reported Thursday. “The Syrian troops fought back and suffered ‘martyrs and wounded,’ it reported without elaborating.
“Separately,” the AP says, “the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces said three of its fighters were killed in fighting with Turkish-backed forces.”