As long ago as August 2012 the Defence Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s intelligence arm, said in a report first disclosed earlier this year that the “Salafists [Islamic fundamentalists], the Muslim Brotherhood and AQI [al-Qaeda in Iraq, later Isis] are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria”.
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An Iranian MP has said the fact that Russian Federation has engaged in war with terrorists in Syria is because Moscow has realized it will face the ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) threat sooner or later.
But officials and residents in militant-held areas say it has left residents even more desperate, alienated from a government many feel has abandoned them.
“This is not going to be turned around overnight, because it is not just a military campaign we’re involved in”, the president said, adding that numerous problems that have fostered militancy “have been built up over decades”.
Russia, Iran, Iraq and Syria are operating a joint Baghdad Information Center, coordinating the fight against the terrorist group. To me, this is the latest and greatest sign that Iraq is actually, as a government, a strategic enemy of the United States.
Russia’s defense ministry posted footage on its official YouTube page purportedly showing night airstrikes by Russian jets on four Islamic State sites in Syrian territory.
French President Francois Hollande, using an Arabic acronym for IS, said it was important that “the strikes, regardless of who is carrying them out, target Daesh and not other groups”.
Tensions between Washington and Moscow are escalating over Russian airstrikes that apparently are serving to strengthen Assad by targeting rebels – perhaps including a few aligned with the United States of America – rather than hitting “IS” fighters it promised to attack.
The summit came as the Obama administration confronts serious setbacks in its strategy to crush the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, where the brutal Islamist movement controls huge swaths of a self-declared caliphate, bolstered by an estimated 30,000 recruits from more than 100 countries. I believe that we have answered the Iraqi call, he said.
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The United States was hesitating, and Russian Federation and Iran have taken advantage of this, said Hamid al-Mutlaq, a Sunni member of the Iraqi parliaments defense and security committee.
