Allied Against ISIS? Actually, Not!

Seven countries express concerns about Russia’s airstrikes against ISIS

Written by Yoana Manoilova exclusively for SouthFront

Turkey, the US, the UK, France, Qatar, Germany, and Saudi Arabia expressed their concerns about Russia’s airstrikes against ISIS. ” We express our deep concern with regard to the Russian military build-up in Syria These military actions constitute a further escalation and will only fuel more extremism and radicalization,” runs a joint statement, unveiled by Turkey’s Foreign Ministry. Russia’s airstrikes in Syria against ISIS were started after President Bashar Assad requested them from Russia. On Thursday, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said the Russian Aerospace Forces were targeting the Islamic State, Jabhat al-Nusra and other terrorist groups in Syria. Lavrov said that the US-led coalition was also targeting the Islamic State and Jabhat al-Nusra.”We have the same approach,” Lavrov said. It’s surprising how Russia’s military action is more efficient than the US, and British actions, taken together.

But the following concerns of these 7 countries lead us to the thought maybe they don’t want Russia to succeed in where they failed to. It’s interesting how David Cameron was to urge hard military force against ISIS just a month ago. “We’ve got to defeat these criminal gangs who trade in human misery and risk people’s lives and kill people,” he said. “You’ve got to deal with the problem at source, which is this evil Assad regime and the [ISIS] terrorists.”
It is ironic how the American and British military action against ISIS was not about to provoke more extremism and radicalization. Or maybe their attacks didn’t bring the possibility of this simply because they were targeting mostly empty IS bases. The shame here is on them because even a child could know where the oil refineries were, and as we all know oil is the main source of money and weapons for ISIS.

Turkey has always been rather quiet when it comes down to ISIS. We expected a lot more from their side but maybe because they were afraid of this ‘radicalization and extremism’, meanwhile, they decided to use the benefits of the situation. We can still wonder why they didn’t put a lot of efforts trying to stop the petrol smuggling in their country, or is better to ask how much did the country win out of this. We can ask the question why the Turks are not doing more to enable the Kurds and their feared Peshmerga forces to more effectively attack the Islamic State. Maybe the ‘modern’ Turkey still sees the whole situation as ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’.
And, after all, while everybody is chasing his own interest in this situation, we need to think who really wants to destroy ISIS, and who wins out of it because clearly there are people who win a lot out of it.