Dear Travelers’ Century Club Members of New England and Friends:
I hope that this note finds you safe and healthy as you manage your cabin fever! I know that I am experiencing it as well!
I would like to invite you to a special Virtual Coffee Gathering with Dr. Douglas Layton, perhaps the most prominent international expert on Iraq, especially the Kurdistan Region. Please find his impressive profile below.
The online gathering is scheduled for Saturday, Sept. 12, from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.
I hope that you will be able to join us!
Please email dave@unitedplanet.org for more information.
A Brief Profile of Douglas Layton:
Dr. Layton has lived and worked in Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) for 30 years in various capacities including Country Director of Health Care Partnerships in Iraq (US State Department-funded) and as the National Director for Kurdistan Development Corporation (a public/private partnership between the Kurdish Regional Government and British business entities).
He has written extensively on Kurdistan and is the founder of the first American English language school in the Kurdistan, the Classical School of the Medes.
He is also the founder of the first inwardly focused tour company in Kurdistan, Explore Mesopotamia and pioneered modern tourism in the region. He now resides in Connecticut and travels to Kurdistan on a regular basis. Explore Mesopotamia has offices in Connecticut and Erbil, the capital of the KRI and is currently the only registered inwardly focused tour company the region, having survived the ISIS crisis and the recent COVID -19 Pandemic.
Dr. Layton compiled and edited the only comprehensive Guide to Kurdistan which sold in over 50 countries. He is widely considered one of the foremost authorities on the Region of Kurdistan. He wrote most of the text and did much of the photography for the Guide.
He was the originator of the term “The Other Iraq” used by many media outlets and governments today. He initiated the successful International PR campaign titled Kurdistan: The Other Iraq shown on major news outlets such as CNN, FOX, CBS and BBC and many others worldwide in 2005-6. The campaign garnered over a half million positive hits to the website and resulted in large sums of investment in the region as well as the birth of today’s burgeoning tourism industry in the region.
In 1995 Layton testified as an expert before the US Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Near Eastern and South and Central Asian Affairs regarding the genocide against the Kurds by Saddam Hussein. In the wake of the hearings, Dr. Layton was targeted by Saddam with a million-dollar bounty and barely escaped an assassination attempt at his home in Dohuk, Kurdistan. He later sat on Saddam’s throne in the former palace in Baghdad after Saddam was executed.
He has traveled to more than 100 countries and is the founder of several International relief and development NGOs, including Shelter Now International in Afghanistan and Iraq and a refugee resettlement organization in Nashville, Servant Group International.
For complete profile see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Layton
Kind regards,
—Dave Santulli, New England Chapter Coordinator
