The head of the Kurdish militias in Syria, Ferhat Abdi Åžahin, alias Mazlum Abdi and Mazlum Kobane, survived a drone attack on Friday outside the Suleymaniye airport in Iraqi Kurdistan. The guerrilla leader’s convoy was escorted by at least three US soldiers, one of whom was traveling in the same vehicle, according to The Wall Street Journal. All of them were unharmed, although the projectile would have caused a fire near the perimeter of the international airport.
The main suspect is the Turkish army, which in the last year has increased this type of attacks against targets of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in northern Iraq. The incident follows the mysterious death last month of nine high-ranking militants from the PKK’s Syrian branch of the People’s Protection Units (YPG) in two alleged helicopter crashes in Iraqi Kurdistan. The YPG attributed the deaths to “bad weather.”
The deaths served to expose the existence of an air corridor between northeastern Syria under the control of the PKK, with US assistance, and Sulemania, the second city of Iraqi Kurdistan, which is the stronghold of the Talabani clan and their party. , the PUK, in the same way that the capital, Irbil, belongs to the KPD and the Barzani clan.
The Kurdistan Prime Minister has drawn a veil over yesterday’s incident, but has blamed the PUK for “using official institutions for illegal purposes”. Abdi, a longtime PKK militant, acts as head of the Syrian Democratic Forces, a politically correct name for a force totally dominated by the Syrian affiliate of the PKK, considered on paper as a terrorist organization by the US and the EU.
