... instance, during a large-scale terrorist attack in Paris on the 13
th
of November, 2015. But this was not the case in Moscow last Friday—the attackers desperately tried to escape and to save their live.
Second, it would be somewhat counterintuitive for ISIS to target Moscow at this particular moment, when Russia has taken a clearly pro-Palestinian position on a very sensitive for everybody in the Moslem world issue of the Israeli military operation in Gaza. It would be more logical to look for targets among the staunch advocates of Benyamin Netanyahu. ...
... it’s not always possible to see eye to eye with the U.S. in certain matters. We can only hope in the long-term that the EU and Russia’s shared embracement of multilateralism and the UN may provide a solid groundwork on which to foster more cooperative ... ... Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was killed during a U.S. raid. What do you make of his death and what consequences could that have for ISIS and international terrorism as a whole?
Andrey Kortunov, Michel Duclos:
Helping Iran to Make the Right Choice
The killing ...
... began to lose support rapidly. Saudi Arabia, which originally saw it as an obstacle to Iranian success lost faith. It became detrimental to early supporters because it led to an increase in foreign boots on the ground: the 2015 JCPOA agreement allowed Russia to increase presence in Syria and send forces to Khmeimim, and Western presence increased in the campaign to terminate ISIS.
How to prevent the next phase
Today, ISIS is gone. They have lost all of their territorial strongholds, and the ability to call themselves an “Islamic State.” According to Dr. Kepel, this is the end of Phase Three, the “aufhebung” phase....
... centralized state.
To maintain its current position of a critical power broker in Syria as well as in a broader Middle East context, the Kremlin has to figure out how to cope with three recent developments that call for significant adjustments in the Russian strategy.
First, the defeat of ISIS, which is definitely a positive development for everybody engaged in Syria and in neighboring countries, has an important downside. Old regional rivalries, animosities, fears and conflicts that were put aside in order to fight the common enemy, are ...
... with the United States have been largely dashed. U.S. goals, meanwhile, are centered on the destruction of ISIS and limiting the influence of Iran. The group generally agreed that preventing the resurgence of ISIS was more likely (although dislodging ISIS and other extremist groups would be easier than preventing their return) than any true constraints on Iran. Russia, for its part, is unlikely to abandon Iran for many reasons, including its expectation that Tehran will remain a crucial player in Syria and the region. Indeed, Turkey and Iran are the two outside powers that are most likely to remain at the core ...
... Russia and the USA are experiencing a period of tensions in their relationship. In your opinion, what should be done in order to overcome these challenges and mend fences?
For those of us who remember the Cold War, and have studied the development of Russia–US relations in the postwar era, the current state of affairs between Washington and Moscow seems comparatively manageable. Despite tensions between Washington and Moscow, we are, thankfully, very far from an emergency of the type of the Berlin Crisis of 1961, the Cuban Missile Crisis, or even the 1984 collision between the US plane carrier
Kitty Hawk
and the K-314 Soviet submarine in the Sea of Japan. How do we avoid such dangerous escalations? The answer is simple: regularize communications ...
... Timur Makhmutov, RIAC Deputy Director of Programs, and Davood Kiani, IRAS President, moderated the meeting.
On February 6 Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC) held a video conference with the Institute for Iran-Eurasia Studies (IRAS) on Russia’s and Iran’s positions in the Middle East in post-ISIS period.
The video conference consisted of two sessions: the presentations made by the speakers and the following discussions between the sided (Q&A). Timur Makhmutov, RIAC Deputy Director of Programs, and Davood Kiani, IRAS President, moderated the ...
One of the main events of 2017 has been the victory won by the Russian armed forces and the Assad government in Syria. When Russian President Vladimir Putin decisively intervened in Syria’s bloody civil war in September 2015, many were taken completely by surprise. Western commentators and politicians ― including ...
... desire for a new relationship with Russia. Morell’s sentiments, meanwhile, were manifest in that he repeatedly attacked Trump during the campaign as an “unwitting agent of the Russian Federation” and “a threat to our national security.” Russian analysts, as noted by the journal Sputnik, had by this time observed a “catfight” in Washington between the CIA, the Pentagon, and the State Department over policies towards Syria. While the Pentagon was interested in fighting ISIS, the State Department, together with the CIA, placed the major emphasis on deposing Assad. The reason Putin knew this may have been because one of the key opponents of this State-CIA goal was Obama’s former Director of the Defense Intelligence ...
... both waging war on the people of Syria, nothing will stop the flow of refugees that risk destabilizing Syria’s neighbors that include multiple major U.S. allies—a flow that has helped spur an explosion of right-wing insanity in both Europe (where Russia is “weaponizing” the refugee crisis to damage the EU) and America, a right wing insanity that feeds the rise of radical Islamic extremism even as the war in Syria does the same—unless the war stops and/or safe zones are established, as nothing will convince the more than five million ...