More than a month after the start of Turkey’s invasion of northeast Syria which critics blame President Trump for ‘green lighting’, backlash continues in political and non-political circles outside Washington DC.
The United Nations reports hundreds of thousands civilians displaced due to the Turkish operation with at least 92 civilians killed.
“Of the more than 200,000 people who fled the fighting in recent weeks, close to 100,000 people have not yet been able to return home and are dispersed across improvised camps and collective shelters,” said Najat Rochdi, Senior Humanitarian Adviser to the United Nations Special Envoy for Syria on November 7.
Local sources confirm hundreds of casualties among Kurdish fighters who had already lost an estimated 11,000 fighters in the US-led campaign to defeat the Islamic State group (ISIS).
Thomas Kaplan, the New York-born billionaire investor described the US decision to not prevent the Turkish attack on Kurds a “voluntary betrayal”.
“It was almost as if we launched an airstrike on our positions,” he said.
In an exclusive interview with Rudaw, Kaplan said “by abandoning the Syrian Kurds, we were leaving people that we fought with in the field of battle and their wives and their children at the mercy of the Turks”.
Earlier this week, Kaplan together with famed French philosopher Bernard Henri Levi held a public discussion and echoed the same message about the Kurds at New York’s iconic cultural center 92Y. Thomas Kaplan and Bernard Henry Levi co-founded a non- profit to “defend a loyal friend of the West: the Kurdish people”.
Kaplan also talked to Rudaw about the ‘imminent possibility’ of a direct conflict between Iran and Israel.
“I think it’s a possibility tomorrow. About a year ago I started going dark about where the region is going” said Kaplan ,who often frequents the region and has a vast network of friends and business partners in Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
Back in 1988, he rightly predicted the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait 18 months before Saddam Hussein shocked the international community by rolling hundreds of thousands of troops into the tiny but oil-rich neighboring country. Kaplan told Rudaw that his geopolitical predictions are based on his analysis and understanding of the history in which holds a doctoral degree.