A violent brawl broke out at a New York hotel on Thursday afternoon after protesters crashed a speech delivered by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Footage from the event showed one man screaming, “You’re a terrorist. Get out of my country!”, leading to a violent confrontation between protesters and security personnel.
Meanwhile, Erdogan supporters began chanting his name in an attempt to drown out the protest.
One of the protesters was Robert Renas Amos, an American who volunteered with a Kurdish group in Syria to fight against ISIS militants. Amos told Fox News that the group decided to protest the death of American citizen Michael Israel, an American who was killed last year in Syria while fighting for the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG).
Meghan Bodette, who identified herself as one of six protesters (one of whom was filming), also added their goal was “to call attention to the Turkish state’s war crimes and human rights abuses against the Kurdish people,” both in Turkey and in Syria.
“Erdogan should not be able to speak here unchallenged, and we challenged him because the American people need to know that a state that claims to be our ally is hindering the fight against ISIS in Syria and destroying civilian lives,” Bodette wrote on Twitter.
A statement from the White House failed to acknowledge the incident, claiming that President Donald Trump had met with Erdogan to “reaffirm the strategic partnership between the United States and Turkey,” as well as outline their opposition to this month’s Kurdish independence referendum.
A similar incident occurred during Erdogan’s last official visit to the U.S. in May after his security team began assaulting mainly Armenian and Kurdish protesters while he was in Washington, D.C.
The protesters were mainly protesting Turkey’s increasingly authoritarian bent under Erdogan. Nearly a dozen people were hurt, and 15 Turkish security officials later were indicted on assault charges.
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