Turkey issued an arrest warrant for the commander of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), Mazloum Kobani, on charges of plotting a bomb attack in the country’s capital Ankara, northern Iraqi news website Rudaw said.
Kobani, also known as Ferhat Abdi Şahin, fought for the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in Turkey in the 1990s. Turkey sees the SDF and its affiliates as offshoots of the PKK, which has waged a three-decades-long insurgency on Turkish soil.
The chief public prosecutor’s office in Ankara issued arrest warrants for Kobani, as well as the leader of the Democratic Union Party (PYD) Sahoz Hasan and Nurettin Halef, a commander of the PKK’s armed wing, the People’s Defence Forces (HPG), saying that they were responsible for the bomb attack on a tax office in the city, Rudaw said.
On February 2, 2018, an explosion at a tax office in Ankara’s Çukurambar district, initially believed to be a gas leak, was determined to be caused by a bomb. The next day, the Ankara governor’s office said that police detained eight people suspected of links to the alleged bomber. The governor’s office said the bomb suspect was a man who trained with Kurdish militants in Syria.