Turkey’s hunt for Kurdish rebels knows no borders. But the attack launched last Friday on the international airport of Souleymanieh, in the Kurdish autonomous region of northern Iraq, crossed a new red line. A convoy of five vehicles carrying senior Syrian Kurdish officials was indeed targeted by a missile fired from a drone.
“The attack happened near our convoy taking us back to the airport,” Ilham Ahmed, head of the Syrian Democratic Council, confirmed to online media Al-Monitor. Mainly in the convoy was Mazloum Abdi, the commander-in-chief of the SDF – the fighting force of the Kurdish-dominated Northeast Syrian Administration (AANES), and main ally of the international anti-jihadist coalition.
“It is an action carried out on a civilian airport, on the sovereign territory of Iraq, and which openly violates international law”, reacts Nuri Mahmoud, the spokesman of the YPG (People’s Protection Units), the branch member of the Kurdish guerrillas of the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party), who was passing through Paris at the time of the attack. “Our commander-in-chief was in Souleymanieh for a working visit, including talks with our partners in the context of counterterrorism cooperation,” the official explained on Tuesday.
Coordination meetings of the anti-jihadist coalition are held regularly at an American base in the Souleymanieh region. “It’s not the first time we’ve been targeted like this. Several of our officers have already been killed in this way in Rojava [the Kurdish region of Syria, editor’s note]. And the presence of American soldiers does not stop them. Last November, Turkish strikes targeted an American base in Tall Tamer and several of our comrades died,” the spokesperson said.
The April 7 drone strike did not cause any casualties and Mazloum Abdi emerged unscathed from this assassination attempt, which “is not the first”, he said. The missile would have sunk deep into the ground before exploding, preventing further damage. For years, Ankara has been tracking what it considers to be a “terrorist leader”, a member of the PKK and former fellow traveler of Abdullah Öcalan. Turkey, which for thirty years has had permanent military bases in the Kurdish region of Iraq, has intensified its operations against the PKK’s training camps and against its logistical support.
The Iraqi government demanded an apology from Turkey the day after the incident. Baghdad asserted that there was “no legal basis for intimidating civilians under the pretext of the presence on Iraqi soil of a force that is hostile to Turkey”. In a statement, the Iraqi presidency called on Ankara to “take responsibility and issue an official apology”. But, with the approach of the elections – presidential and legislative -, which are to be held on May 14, the pressure from Turkey will increase, worries for his part Nuri Mahmoud, the spokesman of the YPG. Erdogan would like to be able to hang an extra head on his hunting board.
