"The Turks viewed YPG senior leader Mazloum Kobani Abdi [Ferhat Abdi Şahin] — the U.S. military's most public YPG interlocutor — a
“The Turks viewed YPG senior leader Mazloum Kobani Abdi [Ferhat Abdi Şahin] — the U.S. military’s most public YPG interlocutor — as a hardened terrorist. They charged that he previously had been a senior leader for urban operations in Turkey — that is a dry term for Mazloum’s role in killing scores of Turkish civilians in southeastern Turkey,” a former senior Central Intelligence Agency official, Marc Polymeropoulos, said in an opinion piece published on Monday.
Questioning the tensions between Turkey and the U.S. over the latter’s relationship with the Syrian wing of the PKK terrorist group, the YPG, the author said that American officials have known all along that both groups are essentially the same.
“First and foremost, our Syrian Kurdish partners — the Syrian Democratic Front (SDF) — largely consisted of members of the People’s Protection Units, or the YPG. As the Turkish government claimed, and many in the U.S. national security community fully grasped as well, the YPG was simply a rebrand of the Syrian branch of the [PKK],” he said.
Saying that even American diplomats once felt threatened by the PKK terrorists, Polymeropoulos emphasized that both groups are the same. “In fact, colleagues of mine who have served at the U.S. Embassy in Ankara over the years remember all too well the danger they faced from the PKK. So let’s call it like it is — the YPG and the PKK for all essential purposes were one and the same,” he said.
The former CIA official also touched upon U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from Syria, saying that his move was “rash, immoral yet inevitable.”
“It is important to understand this policy paradox the U.S. government faced when President [Donald] Trump made his rash, immoral, yet fundamentally inevitable decision to disengage with the YPG and ultimately side with Turkey,” he concluded.