US Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen: Kurds have been forces for positive change
Earlier this week, Kurdistan 24 spoke with US Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Florida) who expressed her high regard for the Kurdish people.
Ros-Lehtinen, formerly Chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, now chairs the Subcommittee on the Middle East and North Africa.
“We have seen that Kurds have been forces for positive change,” she said. “They’re good allies of the United States.”
“They share our values,” she continued, “and I don’t think that they’ve been treated well by many countries.”
She also suggested that it would be better if the American people became “more engaged” with events in the region. “We’re so involved in our daily lives and all of the pressures we have, sometimes, we don’t look around” and see the suffering there.
Ros-Lehtinen is a Cuban immigrant who fled to the United States with her family as a child, a year after Fidel Castro seized power. Much later, she became the first Hispanic woman elected to the House of Representatives.
Kathryn Porter, the President and founder of the Leadership Council for Human Rights, described Ros-Lehtinen as “a great friend of the Kurds,” who “was always there to help.”
In 2016, Ros-Lehtinen sponsored legislation calling on the US to arm the Peshmerga and provide assistance to the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in order to support the two million people, refugees and internally displaced persons, who fled to the Kurdistan Region.
Ros-Lehtinen has served in the US Congress since 1989, but she did not run for re-election in November, and she will be retiring from the legislative body in January when the next congressional session begins.
