Next week Australia will discuss whether to join the struggle against the radical group Islamic State on Syrian territory. Six months ago the country, which is far away from the Middle East battles, promised the U.S. to support the international coalition and send 300 officers for training Iraqi troops in the struggle against ISIS. Last year Australia sent experts on military aviation and soldiers of the Special Forces to Iraq, ITAR-TASS reports. However, there is no united format of a struggle against ISIS: the governmental armies of Syria and Iraq, the Kurds, the Lebanese and Iraqi Shiite militants are fighting it, while the international coalition headed by the U.S. is making air attacks only.
Yuri Nagernyak, the Director General of the International Fund for Promotion of Culture, Science and Education ‘Humanism, Progress and the Rule of Law’, thinks that the trends that are taking place in world politics today are the result of a systemic crisis, in which modern civilization and world politics are directed by arms of certain countries at preserving the status quo in the form of a unipolar world.
According to the expert, the ISIS phenomenon has acquired such a scale and significance in today's politics for several reasons - outside intervention, poor governance, unequal distribution of wealth, very limited possibilities of social elevators. “If global players put such a task together, ISIS can be crushed, smothered quite quickly. But this is not only a definite plus, but also a certain disadvantage, the meaning of which will then be in the minds of millions of people, it will remain as a symbol, a kind of ideal which they will seek. If ISIS lasts for a few years, then it will discredit not only itself, but also the very idea, and broad masses of people who are now deceived by the ISIS propaganda will understand that this is not the right way,” Nagernyak believes.
He says that the successes that ISIS has in the region are due to the fact that each of the parties which supposedly opposes ISIS has its own interests: “These interests do not coincide and are not brought together, and this is quite problematic. I do not think that any dramatic change will happen in global politics in the near future, so that the participants of the process agree unequivocally to confront ISIS sincerely. Such quasi-states, such subcultures as IS are very unpredictable. Today, they have the same view of things, but tomorrow something may change in the leadership, tomorrow some adjustments might appear in the ideology and the direction may change.”
Yuri Nagernyak thinks that during the period that has passed since Beslan, the world has gone far ahead in terms of extremism and terrorism. “Terrorism is an external manifestation of political extremism. It has found a systemic basis. What is worse, it has gained quite a strong ideological foundation. And then in such a situation any negative developments in the economic, political and social spheres of a country objectively generate support inside. Yes, indeed, today, hundreds, perhaps thousands of immigrants from the former Soviet Union are fighting on the side of ISIS… And the development of certain negative trends in the region, such as the failure to modernize in the post-Soviet countries along the Western model, they inevitably increase the attractive force of ISIS. Therefore, there is a threat to the post-Soviet space.”
