Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan demanded the United States hand over the commander of Kurdish-led forces in Syria, in a sharp rebuke of Washington’s call for negotiations with the Syrian Kurds.
The call for Mazloum Abdi’s extradition on Thursday came after US President Donald Trump, in a letter to Erdogan on October 11, said the Kurdish commander was “willing to negotiate” with the Turkish president and “make concessions that they would have never made in the past”.
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Abdi, also known as Ferhat Abdi Sahin and Mazloum Kobane, heads the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), Washington’s main Syrian ally in the fight against Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or ISIS).
Ankara, however, views the group as “terrorists” linked to Kurdish separatists inside Turkey and launched a military push to drive the fighters away from its border with Syria.
Speaking to state-run TRT on Thursday night, Erdogan said he instructed his justice minister to take the “necessary steps” for Abdi’s extradition.
“With the US, we have an extradition agreement. The US should hand this man to us,” he said.
Global News 
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