Five European ambassadors who had called the meeting hoping to present a unified front against Turkey stood together with a sixth, from Estonia, and demanded that Turkey cease its military operations. They vowed not to provide stabilization or development assistance in areas where the local population is mistreated.
Kelly Craft, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said the Trump administration does not endorse Turkey’s military action and warned of unspecified “consequences” but stopped short of condemning it.
“Failure to play by the rules, to protect vulnerable populations, failure to guarantee that ISIS cannot exploit these actions to reconstitute, will have consequences,” she said, using a common acronym for the Islamic State.
The Russian U.N. ambassador, Vassily Nebenzia, accused the United States and its coalition allies of conducting “demographic engineering” that he said led to the conflict. He called for a solution that would “take into account other aspects of the Syrian crisis, not just the Turkish operation.”
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