Maria Dubovikova: Tunisia has become the first democracy in the Middle East, first of all due to the fact that its society is far more liberalized than any other country of the Middle East. Tunisia has once more confirmed that policy of “putting the cart before the horse” is useless, that obtrusion of democratic institutions doesn’t lead to the establishment of liberal democracy, and that to establish one, the society itself should be liberalized, which will automatically lead to the establishment of democratic rule. So can we say that Tunisian success becomes possible thanks to its historically strong ties with France? And in this case why didn’t the Arab Spring touch Morocco, which also has strong ties with France and a society that is more liberalized compared to the other countries of the MENA? Or, if Tunisia was and is the most liberalized country of the Middle East, why did the Islamists win the first elections after the fall of Ben Ali?

Mustapha Tlili: Tunisia and Morocco are different in many ways. First, they are different in terms of their size and population. On the one hand, you have about 30 million people in Morocco and approximately 10-11 million in Tunisia. Second, Tunisia is far more urbanized – you could even say far more advanced – than Morocco. Morocco remains a more rural country. Tunisia is up to 85% urban. That’s a big difference. If you look at the map of Tunisia, you’ll see that the concentration of the population is along the coast. And that concentration of the population along the coast orients its outlook towards the north, rather then towards the east or the west. When Tunisians think about their daily lives, of how to improve them, they don’t think east or west. They think north because Sardinia (Italy) is 20 minutes away by plane; Rome is 40 minutes. You can take a morning flight, do whatever you have to do in Rome, and come back in the afternoon. Paris is practically the same distance. The flight takes less then two hours. You can go there in the morning and come back in the afternoon. The whole length of Southern France and Southern Italy is so close – that has a huge impact. Also, the middle class in Tunisia is much stronger than the middle class in Morocco. Tunisia is more successful in terms of GDP, of buying power, of the level of comfort of middle class living. They invest in lasting things – houses and other property – connected with stability. If you are raised with these things, you are not going to burn down your own things or your brother’s – you are rising up because you want to change the structure. In Morocco, the population cannot even rise up because of the overwhelming power of the Monarchy and the tools of oppression the Monarchy has at its disposal. In Tunisia, when the break-down happened, it was a real revolution intended to stop the corrupt regime and the power it exercised through the police. The revolution was also connected with middle class ideology and demographics – hundreds of thousands of youth that were very well educated, with university diplomas, but jobless. If you look at the slogans of the revolution, they are dignity, employment, and freedom of expression. You’ll find them to be almost the same slogans of the Prague Spring – they were calling for freedom, for freedom of expression, for the end of dictatorship, and so on and so forth. In Morocco you didn’t have this. You had only a few demonstrations…

MD:  Shut down by the government.

MT:  Yes. These are differences that are very important and which we have to keep in mind. Also, the Islamists got into the picture later – they were not initially part of the revolution. The dictator fled the country on January 14, 2011. The following day «Project Syndicate» asked me to write a piece on the event. It appeared on January 20. By that time, most of the analysts expected the Islamists to come. But the Islamists were nowhere to be found. I started my piece this way. And this is a fact. Twenty years after The New York Times featured the fall of Bourguiba, the front-page article announced the flight of Ben Ali with a big picture. Look up that photo: it was a photo of a huge demonstration on January 14, the day Ben Ali fled the country. There is a sea of men and women. I looked at the photo trying to find a single woman with a headscarf or hijab, trying to find a single man with a beard. I started my column precisely with this observation. There is no way you can look at this image and find the Islamists present. If you look at the slogans that prevailed during these demonstrations, there was not a single call for the application of sharia. The protesters demands were – without exception – the typical demands of a middle class country for more freedoms. What happened, as history will show, is that Islamists were pushed by some powers to take advantage of the situation and to start making their presence known. And that is what happened in Tunisia. Suddenly, some of them who had been in exile, like Ghanushi, began showing their heads. And they had a lot of money. They were inundating the country with money to show their power. For instance, they bought a huge modern building to serve as their headquarters. Then they stated spreading their network across the country through local offices they established all over the place. They also started doing charity work in the country knowing very well there would be elections in few months. Spending huge amounts of money – and there are many indications that this money came from Qatar – the Islamists started preparing for elections. And given the sympathy that the Islamists had gained when they were in prison and in exile, and given the fact that secular forces (leftists, liberals, etc.) were not united and were fighting each other for power, the results of the elections were disastrous. The Islamists won over 80% of the vote. It had been agreed before the elections that the winning force would form the government. Despite their victory, the fact is, the Islamists were late to the party. The same is true for Egypt. If you go back to the history of that period (which already seems far away), the Islamists were not even thinking about presenting candidates for election. They said they were not thinking of running for the presidency. But then they changed their mind.

MD: Yes, as they could not imagine themselves coming into power after the years of oppression!

MT: Yes! And it should be said that when the Islamists came to power in Tunisia, instead of focusing on the demands of the revolution (jobs, dignity, freedom), they thought they had a mandate to change the identity of the country…. to impose sharia, to roll back the rights of women, to Islamize the country as if the country was not Muslim enough. And when Tunisians realized these objectives, they said no.

MD: I read, if I’m not mistaken, an article on the basis of your interview, given in February of this year to the Tunisian website. There you have said that there is an end of political Islam in Tunisia.

MT: Not only in Tunisia, but all over the Middle East.

MD: But what about ISIS? It’s not just Islamism, it’s extremism, and what’s more, it is an Islamic political extremism. I think it’s a new phenomenon we’ve never faced before in modern history. Are you taking into account the Salafists in Egypt who are much more conservative than the Muslim Brotherhood and still remain popular enough and have their electorate, or taking into account that there are many people who share the Islamist ideas, who even join the ranks of ISIS pushed by their faith? Can we really talk about the end of political Islam? Or maybe this is true for the current moment of history for some countries, and then the Islamists will return to power? Do you think that it is an absolute end with no possibility of recovery?

MT: Well, if we’re going to talk about the Muslim Brotherhood, we should look deep in its history. The movement's ideologue, Saïd al-Qotb, had spent one year in the United States and was overwhelmed by all the expressions of modernity, shocked by the decadence of the lifestyle and so on. And so he came back with a reaffirmed conviction that Muslim societies, which were lagging behind, could not in any way reach the West, nor improve their conditions within the Western model because the Western model was decadent – and therefore there should be an Islamic solution. He came up with the slogan: Islam is the solution. In the minds of al- Qotb and his successors, we should go back to the Islamic tradition, to the past. We have to renew the things that we have lost, we have to revive the ways of the Prophet, the ways of the caliphs, and the ways of those who the caliphs governed to solve today’s problems. Sometimes they got the chance to act openly; sometimes they were oppressed. But the Muslim Brotherhood persisted in Egypt through several different experiments in nation-building: first, the Pan-Arabism of Nasser, which failed, then pan-socialism. (This was also during Nasser’s time; what started as a Pan-Arabism evolved into the propaganda of Arab socialism under the influence of the Soviet Union and following Egypt’s problems with the U.S. due to the Israel issue.) That also failed. Then came Sadat, and a new period of authoritarian nationalism, which continued through Sadat’s rule and most of Mubarak’s rule. In the background, there was always a possibility of an “Islamic solution,” but until the revolution, the Islamists never had the chance to prove that their solution worked. And this is why they were elected by a majority in Egypt: because the people believed that since all the previous solutions had failed, these guys must have the answer. We know the result – in Egypt as well as in Tunisia. The Islamists were given a chance to rule for three years and they were a total failure. This is why I say the movement is over – because they had a chance to make an impact –

MD: But the chance is lost.

MT: It is for today. Take communism! It had its time. The industrial revolution saddled the labor class with numerous problems. Then came Marx with a beautiful theory, Engels to transform this theory into action, then Lenin and so forth. For all of them, communism was a solution. Seventy-five years later, it collapsed. It could not satisfy people’s demands and aspirations. The propaganda claimed, «We are better than the West», but the reality was different. Now having seen and lived in a consumer society, Russians are not going back to communism. Communism had its chance, but it failed.

Similarly, political Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood won’t come back. That’s why there is a crisis within the MB. There is a big crisis within Ennahda in Tunisia, too, because they know that they have failed. They have to review and revise their ideology and rid it of ideas like the establishment of sharia. Perhaps they should think of themselves as a Muslim party in the same way Christian democrats in Europe are inspired by Christian principles, but do not try to create a system of governance based in Christian authority. As long as the Islamists continue trying to create a system of governance according to Islam (such as sharia), as long as they stay as they are, they have no chance of being part of the political system and the society.

MD: Ok! But if the Islamist ideas are no longer attractive to these societies – taking into account the dramatic catastrophe that is going in Iraq and Syria – why do they still appear to be attractive for Europeans, who are fleeing the countries they are living in and joining ISIS? Why, as this kind of Islamism loses its influence in the Middle East, is it at the same time gaining supporters and partisans in Western societies?

MT: The reason for this is a failure of European countries in integrating Muslim immigrants. If you look at those who are joining the ranks of ISIS, they are marginalized youth. Many have been in prison or were drugs addicts. This is what I love about sociology – you are going to the roots of social problems. It’s clear if you look at the biographies of those who have joined ISIS that there has been a failure of immigration policy and failure of integration of Muslim immigrants into European societies. The reason why the ideology is attractive is because the youth who are rejected, who are marginalized, find in the preaching of those extremists who approach them something they can identify themselves with while seeking revenge against the West. If you look at the videos they produce and analyze the language of these videos, they are all about revenge. Take another symbol– the robe their prisoners wear. Those orange clothes are meant to remind you of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq where the Americans tortured their prisoners.

MD: Lakhdar Brahimi accused the West of contributing to the creation of ISIS. Do you agree with him?

MT: No. The West produced horrors that remained in the imagination of these young people, who saw these images on TV. And when you are living in a marginalized society, or society group, growing up with the images of torture of Muslim co-religionists in Syria and Iraq, then you are growing up with the feeling that you should take revenge. And in that sense, the West has contributed, but not – at least in my perspective – by allowing or helping ISIS to be formed. We have to be very careful. But in the sense of the 2003 Iraq war having influence on the formation of ISIS – yes, he is absolutely right. If you look at the composition of ISIS, at who the soldiers are…

MD: The ex-Saddam soldiers!

MT: Yes! And the U.S.’s big mistake in the early years of the occupation was the disbandment of the Iraqi army, which created an army of unhappy people dreaming of revenge.

IMESClub presents the extract of Vitaly Naumkin's interview to MK.

The informal meeting of Syrian authorities and opposition members decided to be held upon the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs initiative in Moscow on January 26-29th might be more representative and free than previous events of this kind. This was told by the meeting moderator Director of the Institute of Oriental Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences, Vitaly Naumkin in his exclusive interview to MK. According to Dr. Naumkin invitations to Syrian opposition members were sent "on individual basis" in order the negotiating parties to present only themselves rather than some sort of organizations.

What will the inter-Syrian meeting that is being prepared in Moscow be? Are there any details?

It has character of preliminary consultation meeting or communications between different groups of the Syrian political opposition and civil society with representatives of the Syrian Arab Republic government at "Moscow ground" offered by the MFA of Russia. I am honored to be assigned by the MFA as a moderator of this meeting. It will last for four days during January 26-29th and will consist of two parts. The first part to be held on January 26-27th is a meeting of the Syrian political opposition and civil society representatives without participation on behalf of the Syrian government. On January 28-29th the government delegation of the Syrian Arab Republic, ie the government in place, will join the meeting. In Moscow free dialogue will take place with open agenda to discuss all issues related to plausible reconciliation in Syria. Such inclusive dialogue is impossible without preliminary conditions. Moreover as one can see from the meeting format the MFA of Russia offers only place for negotiations, namely the Syrians will discuss all issues dealing with counterterrorism and political settlement on their own. I am informed (provided that I don't represent any state institution or civil society and act in modest role of all sessions' moderator) that Moscow dialogue is not an alternative to Geneva process or two Geneva conferences the second of which ended in nothing. There was the Geneva Communiqué as of June 20, 2012, adopted by the Security Council Resolution 2118. Russia is committed to principles of this Communiqué and the meeting will be held on the basis of this commitment but with no external interference as noninterference in inter-Syrian affairs is, in my opinion, one more principle that Russian diplomacy is guided by. I personally find this approach very attractive and affirmative. Additionally, as far as I know, this meeting is not only not an alternative to "Geneva" on the contrary it may serve a place for some kind of jump to "Geneva" aimed at turning back to the Geneva format if the Syrians succeed in reaching agreement on anything. Today it is absolutely obvious that there's a need to negotiate, a bloodshed must be stopped as it is clear that there are Syrian patriots in both parties to the conflict (or even in several parties to the conflict in a manner of speaking): on behalf of both the opposition and government forces, those loyal to the government. There are patriots among the opposition members and I hope that people who have agreed to arrive in Moscow will actually negotiate from stance of the Syrian patriots interested in keeping their country's integrity and stopping of fratricidal bloodshed. Invitations to participate in the meeting were sent by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to opposition members on individual basis. That is to say people who arrive to attend the meeting won't represent any kind of organizations. I hesitate to predict, but I think if they demonstrate will to express any consolidated opinion on behalf of their organizations, they will have opportunity to do so. However they were invited on individual basis in order to avoid any kind of competitive atmosphere and exclusiveness, i.e. that some organization is more or less important. I guess those who don't attend the meeting, maybe there are such people that don't accept the invitation, are isolating themselves and look in not very good way as this means exactly an open dialogue. Nobody imposes nothing and sets no preliminary conditions, and it seems to me there are a least two components of such dialogue. One the one hand, it is countering horrible terrorism and extremism, in particular ISIS and some other organizations threatening both the regime and moderate opposition. On the other hand, it is an absolutely obvious need for renewal, reforms, some kind of other movements aimed at conciliating positions of parties and making political settlement, that has no alternative, possible. Any dialogue is a two-way street. However everything should be settled by the Syrians and nobody would impose anything here. This will probably be the core of such meeting and my modest task is to conduct sessions and give everyone opportunity to express opinion.

Regarding the substantive part of the meeting is there any particular agenda?

No, there isn't. The dialogue has open agenda, the meeting organizers set no questions. The Syrians will decide what to discuss on their own. This is a national agenda defined by the meeting participants.

Translated by Evgeniya Efimova

Stay connected - IMESClub will provide the monitoring of the inter-Syrian meeting and exclusive materials.

Interview is available in Russian (click here).

Maria Dubovikova: The first question I would like to ask, following the recent changes on the battlefield of the everlasting conflic – what are the prospects of the Arab-Israeli conflict now? Are there still chances for a peace settlement in the short or maybe mid-term perspective? And why?

Vitaly Naumkin: I think there are no chances for a peace settlement in the short terms. It is a difficult confrontation, which will occasionally inflame and deescalate. Explosions will follow the pauses, and it may last long enough, maybe for several years. I do not see any chances for a resolution even in mid-term perspective. Why? First of all because there is no intention from the Israeli part to stop the occupation. It goes on. And the settlement is impossible without the end of occupation. Some dialog is possible – the parties will be forced to have it. Some experts believe that the reconcilement can be achieved only through an imposed decision. I do not much agree with such scenario. First of all, because there is no accord within the international community, among the global players. Let’s take,the US–Russia relations as an example. Is it possible to speak about agreement if the Americans still impose pressure on all the Middle-Eastern countries to make them stop the cooperation and the development of ties with Russia, trying to talk them into joining the sanction war, that is waged against Russia by the US, EU, and some other countries – Australia, Canada, etc.? Secondly, a decision may be imposed only on the parties, that are dependent much on the external players and obliged to listen to them. And even in such case it is not always possible. Israel has shown that it is not eager to listen even its closest partners, as it is sure that they will not abandon the strategic union with it and will continue to support it. And if Israel is criticized everywhere, even in the US, and this criticism is growing due to the atrocities against civilian population in Gaza, this will not make the US threaten Israel with any sanctions. There is nothing to talk about without sanctions. In this sense Israel is a quite sustainable state.

Thirdly, the positions of the two parties are so irreconcilable, that it is unlikely that something can be imposed on them now. And if we examine the consequences of the events in Gaza from the Arab angle, we will see that HAMAS positions are not undermined, but they have strengthened instead, despite they receive support in the region only from Qatar and Turkey. The sympathies towards HAMAS are very high among the population of the West Bank, which is however controlled by Fatah. Our Palestinian friends give such an assessment. HAMAS believes that it was victorious in this battle. Israel had to agree to cooperate with the coalition government. It is a technical, not a party one but is created on the basis of agreement between HAMAS and Fatah. At the beginning Israel refused to conduct dialogue with HAMAS, but agreed afterwards. Mutual concessions made a fragile ceasefire agreement possible.  

But HAMAS has not managed to make Israel satisfy the demands presented in the beginning of the conflict – to lift the blockade and free Palestinian convicts. Israel, in its turn has suffered an important reputation loss. There was no choice as annihilating more than two thousand people including 400 children and trying to continue to present it as a counterterrorism is impossible. They wave no opportunities to calm the anger of the Palestinians. Some hot-heads in Israel say that they need to reoccupy Gaza, deploy troops there. It is a new occupation and it will lead to the further radicalization. It will cause violence, guerilla and subversive warfare and this will not have an end. There will be no security and that is why Israel has to retreat and free the territories. Israel says it has to provide its own security. Of course it has, but only through a settlement including the interests of all the parties.

Many of the projects of reconciliation proposed today include an idea of demilitarization of Gaza and establishment of Mahmud Abbas’s administration control there. Mahmud Abbas can not follow such decision as the Palestinians are using the concept of common sovereignty over the whole Palestine, which includes the West Bank, Gaza and Eastern Jerusalem – all three inseparable parts of Arab Palestine. Why the Palestinian authorities have to agree to demilitarize one part, not knowing what to do with the others? Demilitarization is only possible for the whole state, which should be created on these three territories according to the resolutions of the Security Council of UN. But Israel refuses to recognize East Jerusalem as a capital of Palestinian state as it considers it as an eternal and indivisible capital of the Jewish state. The Palestinian leaders also can not agree to demilitarize Gaza as they will be just smashed by their own population. The reputation of Abbas is already shaky and if he makes further unilateral concession, he will be just branded as a traitor and he will have difficult times. Moreover, there is no accord among the Palestinians. However, meanwhile Mahmud Abbas and Khaled Mashal manage to interact productively. It is difficult to say whether this cooperation will be long term or not. All the more so, there are parties of realists and radicals within HAMAS. I have often heard from the Palestinian public figures, that they could agree to the demilitarization in conditions of the international guarantees for the security and deployment of the international forces.

I will repeat, that such state should include all three parts of Arab Palestine – West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. May be, it is possible to fantasize over the granting this city a special status, giving the access to it to the representatives of all the Abrahamic confessions. It is possible to agree on that. There are some other variants of compromise solutions but Palestinians can give up Jerusalem on no conditions, let alone they have support of international community and the international law. And the Arab and the whole Islamic world will not support such “renegade”. This is out of question. A compromise should be found.

M.D.: You have mentioned the US pressure on the Arab countries to make them join sanctions against Russia. And it seems that mostly all their attempts are in vain. Is the Arab world interested in cooperation with Russia? Or the West is still more attractive partner for it?

V.N.: Unfortunately, there is no unity in the Arab world, it is atomized. There are pro-Western elites in the Arab countries, which at best do not care what policy towards Russia will their governments conduct. These elites will act only according to the US and their own interests. There are other elites, which are at least interested in diversification of their states external policy, and Russia is much needed here in all the spheres: political, economic, and military, just as a counterbalance for the Americans. This is the most humble estimation. Analyzing further, we will find some core elements in cooperation with Russia, which cannot be provided by anyone else today. Let’s take for example Egypt. Who can really provide weapons today if these weapons are not supplied by the US? Russia. But in this respect Egypt does not abandon the cooperation with the US and is not going to do so. There are some differences between Cairo and Washington and As-Sisi is willing to develop relations with Moscow. By the way, Egypt always had such tendency to work with both parties, even during the Cold war era, Nasser’s Egypt was considered a “client” of the USSR. President As-Sisi acts very reasonably; it is just common for Egypt. It is a big country with important geopolitical interests, international weight.

Saudi Arabia also tries to act independently. And it is also inclined to develop relations with Russia on many directions. But there are states that are attached to the US and depend in them in their own security. The Western countries limit theirmilitary cooperation and they are unable to quit this orbit. This also concerns some countries that had some contracts with Russia in this sphere and that are interested in development of the cooperation, say, the UAE. They cannot work on this direction without the US approval and they do not need this. Maybe such need will emerge due to the grave deterioration of the situation in the Iranian, Syrian and Iraqi directions.

Hardly anyone will dare to predict now how the situation in Iraq and over it will develop. What will be the further actions of ISIS? How will the de-facto third air war, launched by the Americans in the North of Iraq, finish? Will they bring it on the Syrian airspace and what could be the consequences in such case?

Alas, there are more questions than the answers. But these questions will also determine how the Arab countries will cooperate with Russia. No doubt, that nobody, including the US, will be able to isolate Russia in the Middle East.  And even their closest ally – Israel is going to launch a broad cooperation with Russia. This country understands our open, fair and reasonable enough position during the last crisis, when we criticized the actions of Israel in Gaza, but showed the willingness to cooperate with them and highly appreciated the fact, that Israel had not supported the anti-Russian sanctions.

Israel did not take part in the voting on the anti-Russian resolution in the UN General Assembly in March concerning the inclusion on Crimea and Sevastopol into Russia. And Netanyahu does not conceal that during the last crisis he contacted President Putin on the phone several times (Israeli establishment does not like to have secrets) – this does show something.

M.D.: As for ISIS – it’s quiet evident that the crisis is extremely dangerous for the Middle East and for the whole international community as well. How do you think, do the Western powers, the Middle Eastern ones have a chance to stop the spreading of ISIS and to annihilate it? And wil the ongoing American operation on the North of Iraq be effective, or will they finally have to deploy their troops on Iraqi land once again?

V.N.: I would say it is impossible to defeat a movement that has deep mass and religious roots by bombardments. How is it possible to precisely identify the targets and then eliminate exactly those radicals by airstrikes? The Americans do have smart bombs, but they are not so smart to return back if the target is invalid. “It seems, that is not those guys!” That means there will be civilian casualties, as always, which cause a rise of anti-Americanism everywhere. The ISIS member may be untouched, but the one who fights against him may catch a packet and go to long rest. These are unforeseen consequences of airstrikes.

But in the modern warfare the air forces remain the key element in any combat activities. That is why the absence of planes in ISIS is their weak point. It is also important that this theater of operations does not provide much cover. So, generally it is easy to destroy large groups of vehicles and personnel by aviation – there is no cover for them. David Goldman from the “Middle Eastern Forum” even believes that the capabilities of ISIS are “overestimated” and reminds that the insurgents from this organization “operate on the terrain where the aerial reconnaissance may detect any stray cat”. That is why now the ISIS is hunting aircrafts – planes, helicopters, drones, and attempts to capture airfields in Iraq and Syria. They hunt pilots. The absence of aviation is partially compensated by the modern AA systems captured in Syria, if they will not be destroyed by the US air force, mainly by UAVs.

The Iraqi armed forces have not had aviation for long time – the West was afraid to give it to them, thus not numerous flying personnel has lost qualification. The dissolution of all the military units of Saddam Hussein’s state contributed to this issue. It was one of the gravest mistakes made by the US trying to make a new state in Iraq. And now the ex-officers of the old army fight on the ISIS side.

Russia has just recently provided airplanes to Iraq, but the pilots have still to do some training to operate them efficiently. There are countries having powerful air forces among Iraq’s neighbors.  Saudi Arabia has more than 300 F-15, 75 “Typhoons” and more than 80 “Apache” attack helicopters. Jordan is armed with 60 F-16 and 25 “Cobra” attack helicopters. On the one hand if these countries engaged in combat, I am sure, they would demolish this ISIS. And they would not much care about the collateral damage. But on the other hand, such actions could cause hatred not only towards the Americans (who are already hated enough) but also against these regimes, which are already considered pro-Western. Moreover, my colleagues from these countries, including Saudi Arabia, mention that there are great sympathies towards ISIS among the population. And these sympathies are spread not only among the common people, religious activists, social outcasts, but also among the military. That is why in personal discussions they are voicing concerns, that if such war begins, no one knows on which side will fight several dozens of thousands Saudi Arabians, which are supposed to be engaged in combat. And let’s not forget about such crucial mobilization motivators for religious extremism like Israeli occupation, American invasion, unfinished campaign in Afghanistan (and it is unclear what will happen to this country in future), severe civilian war in Syria, which absorbs Jihadists-legionnaires from all over the world to fight the secular regime.

The US examine the possibility to launch strikes on ISIS on the Syrian territory, a part of which is controlled by the extremists, and where they are gaining sufficient military success – regions of Rakka, Deir az-Zora, Aleppo. However Washington rules out any cooperation or coordination of actions with Bashar al-Assad government – a natural ally of those who fight Jihadists from ISIS, connected with Al-Kaeda by a group “an-Nusra” and other groups. If these strikes will hit targets on the Syrian soil without Damask consent, even if these targets are the regions of concentration of the ISIS troops and weaponry, the Syrian government will consider such strikes a violation of its sovereignty. It seems nice, that the ISIS would be bombed out, but who knows what these Americans can do – the highest-ranking officials of the country, including Obama, are repeating “Assad should leave” like a mantra. What if they decide to bomb also (or event instead) the government forces? By the way, I think that Russia will be on Damask side, though we are also very willing to be done with the ISIS.

In Syria there is in fact a confrontation between the government forces and thuggish Jihadists. And where is a moderate, according to the Western classification, opposition? Where is the Syrian Free Army? It is impossible to see it. However, a positive tendency of forming coalition of all those fighting against the ISIS is falling apart. Today, as far as I know, even the Kurdish Working Party and the organizations connected to it, which have not collaborated with Arabs yet, are fighting the ISIS in cooperation with some moderate Islamists. ISIS threatens all neighboring countries – mainly Jordan, which has its own Islamist extremists, Lebanon, which has got a subdivision of ISIS with an unknown before Amir al-Urdunni. The head of ISIS Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi threatens to reach Kuwait, which he is going to punish for the cooperation with the US.

The situation is extremely dangerous. To sum up, the local regimes should not expect to defeat the ISIS by the US smart bombs and missiles. And nobody wants to fight on the ground – not the Americans, not even these regimes themselves, a part of them even refuses to list ISIS as a terrorist organization. It is better not to risk, who knows, how the situation will turn? Moreover, the defeat of ISIS would cause a reverse reaction as a sympathy and input of forces to cruel Jihadists who speculate in the feelings of Muslims. Meanwhile, the Iraqi army facing severe difficulties does not show its best. And the potential of Kurdish armed units “Peshmerga” was also overestimated. It was on thing to conduct guerilla warfare against Iraqi security forces in their mountains during Saddam Hussein rule. But fighting in open combats with reckless, wildly cruel and heavily armed ISIS fighters – it is absolutely another type of warfare. My Iraqi friends tell me that there are also ISIS allies among the Kurds, however they are not numerous. Kurds are not very religious in general.  And the massacres against non-Muslim minorities on the North of Iraq – Ezids, Shabakh, Christians, were aimed to threaten all the population of the region. The capital of Iraqi Kurdistan – Erbil does not manage to deal with the huge mass of refugees.

I think that Peshmerga, which are still able to make a barrage against the murderers from the ISIS with the coordination with the Iraqi army and the US Air support, will not go further than their territories. They will not go to fight in the South of Iraq.  It is a theater for the Iraqi army and the militia of Shia who live there.  A so-called Golden division of Iraq – an elite unit consisting mainly of Shia, and destined mainly to defend Shia shrines in Kerbel, Nejef and some other places, has a good combat reputation.

Iran has recently declared that it has sent its advisors to Iraqi Kuristan. Prior to that the Iranian advisors were only in the Iraqi army and in the security forces. Will the Americans and their allies cooperate with Iranians? Will the West be able to overcome the anti-Iranian syndrome having the common interests with Iran to oppose the ISIS and al-Qaeda? It seems, that again, there are more questions than answers. But in general the battle will be long and bloody.

M.D.:And the Libyan crisis?

V.N.: Also seriously and for long!

M.D.: With no any chance?

V.N.: What chances? Libya seems to have few people and much oil – make a deal! It is possible to divide power and resources. Maybe someone in the region will not like it, but I will dare to say: the Arab League should think about creating a peacekeeping force (under the support of the UN) to make Libyans stop the internal conflict, not to allow the creation of an “Islamic state” on its territory, how it happened in Iraq. The countries like Egypt, Algeria, concerned about such threat could have played an extremely important role in realization of a such plan. Let’s recall how the Syrian troops have once entered Lebanon and stopped the civil war there. But the crisis should be settled by the Arabs only and not by a new Western intervention.

Interview is available in Russian: