Yesterday the US State Department declared that they still consider the operation by the Air and Space Forces of Russia to be an operation not against Daesh, but against the moderate Syrian opposition. Moscow has many times rejected this view; however, the problem is that there are about a dozen groups comprising up to 100 thousand people who share the Daesh ideology. The British Center for Religious and Geopolitical Issues reports that about 60% of the rebels in Syria can be described as radical Islamists. Experts believe that ignoring this force by the international community “is the biggest threat.” “The West is at risk of making a strategic mistake, focusing on Daesh only. We cannot bomb ideology, but our war is ideological,” TASS cites British experts.
Sergey Bolshakov, Professor of the Department of Foreign Policy and International Relations of the Diplomatic Academy of the Russian Foreign Ministry, thinks that Daesh is a threat of a new type: “The organization has some grounds for this, it has the funding, it has profits, it has the widest network of internet propaganda; it attracts thousands of volunteers.”
The expert says that faced with such a danger, the international community needs to unite: “We have the situation when some inconsistencies and different interpretations of certain events, certain regional problems, are forgotten. And the states are uniting to destroy the common enemy. And the enemy is common for Russia, and Germany, and the EU, and the US… We must create a commonwealth, a coalition commonwealth of civilized states.”
According to Bolshakov, Russia “is a historically civilized European state, which has made the highest contribution to the history of European civilization. And now our leadership shows that it is necessary to postpone the issues that we can’t fully considered in the same way against the background, and join to the common task. Because otherwise we will all continue to work in a theater of the absurd.”
The expert believes that “the international community cannot be so separated, when it has Daesh as the main, indisputable and primary enemy. We still have a chance to unite. In any case, 2016 should be the year of unity in the fight, in the common fight against Daesh.”
