By Vestnik Kavkaza
The international coalition has managed to break the situation in the war against the terrorist group Islamic State, which is acting in Syria and Iraq, according to ITAR-TASS, citing CIA director John Brennan. “The positions of ISIS in Iraq and Syria are seriously weakened; it has stopped gaining ground. They don’t attack anymore, as they did a few months ago,” Brennan says. According to the CIA, ISIS involves about 30 thousand militants. It has declared a caliphate on the territories it has occupied in Iraq and Syria. It intends to extend the occupation. Various groups from Libya, Egypt, Afghanistan and Nigeria have taken an oath to ISIS.
Experts believe that there is no united front in fighting ISIS, as the governmental armies of Syria and Iraq, Iraqi and Syrian Kurds, as well as the international coalition headed by the USA, are acting separately.
The editor-in-chief of the journal 'Problems of National Strategy', Azhdar Kurtov, thinks that the US is directly involved in the strengthening of ISIS: “America is a big country, it has developed intelligence services, it has a developed intellectual corpus. And when they came to Iraq, they deliberately began not the separation of power established over decades, but the separation of ethnic and religious communities in relation to power. So they actually supported the Shias against the Sunni. This must have led to what happened. All experts are well aware that the notorious prison which they organized in Iraq, through which masses of Iraqi prisoners from the previous government passed, was a meeting place of American politicians and intelligence services. And many of the current leaders of IS went through this sieve. Apparently, they were treated in the right direction, including by the US intelligence agencies, and they have implemented those plans which someone put into their heads.”
At the same time, Kurtov thinks that the US is playing a double game with ISIS. On the one hand, it has established a coalition for fighting them, on the other hand, “in Turkey, its nearest ally in the region, the United States and a member of NATO, 5000 militants are trained openly, supported by the Americans, and in three years there will be 15,000 fighters, Syrians and other militants, to dismantle the government of Bashar al-Assad.”
The expert is skeptical about the threat of ISIS to Central Asia: “There is the geographical distance between these two regions. The possible transfer of militants, and the more difficult transfer of military equipment to the borderlands from the Raqqa region, the capital of IS, is problematic. These trends about Basmachi are invented by political scientists. The Basmachi movement was eliminated in the 1930s. Yes, there are the descendants of these people. And perhaps in the minds of these descendants there exists some geopolitical imagination, but these descendants were quiet for 80 years, except for episodes in World War II, they even were relatively quiet when they had the opportunity, when the Taliban came to the Turkmen-Afghan border.”
