Putin must now realise he’s been fighting the wrong war

[Pelican Press 0]

****** must now realise he’s been fighting the wrong war

Russian President

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may have convinced himself that Russia’s main ****** ***** in the West. But the

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carried out by an offshoot of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) demonstrates that Islamist terrorists pose a far more deadly threat to his country’s well-being.

The Kremlin has a long and ******* history of

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, from Russia’s brutal military campaign in Chechnya – ******’s first war after becoming president – to Moscow’s more recent military intervention in Syria, where Russian forces were involved in eliminating Isil’s self-declared caliphate in Raqqa.

It is worth remembering that ******’s primary justification for deploying Russian forces to Syria in 2015 was to target the Islamist militants who had seized control of large swathes of the country, even if his main motivation was to keep the Assad regime, long-standing allies of Moscow, in power.

Explaining his decision to intervene in Syria in a speech to the UN General Assembly in September 2015, ****** made a rousing call for an international coalition to ****** global terrorism, comparing the campaign to defeat Isil to allied efforts to defeat the Nazis during the Second World War.

These days, ****** has adopted an entirely different approach, one where confronting the West, not Islamist extremism,

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. Many of the Russian forces that fought Isil in Syria are now mired in a brutal conflict in Ukraine.

After the devastating ******* on Moscow’s Crocus City concert hall, where at least 115 people were gunned down by a group of Islamist terrorists, ****** may well reflect that, by concentrating his military focus on Ukraine, he now finds himself fighting the wrong war.

After the

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in 2017, there has been a worrying tendency, both in Moscow and the West, to believe the threat posed by Islamist militants is on the wane.

That was certainly the thinking that informed the Biden administration’s disastrous decision to withdraw US-led coalition forces from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021, handing control of the country over to the Taliban, Isil’s ideological soulmates. ****** even made a rare public declaration in support of the decision. It’s a judgment he may well come to regret following reports that the group responsible for the concert hall ******* was based in Afghanistan and operating under the Taliban’s protection.

While most world leaders regard the Taliban regime in Kabul as relatively benign, that is not the view of the Western intelligence community which, on the contrary, believes Afghanistan has once again become a

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. Moreover, one of the more calamitous consequences of the 2021 withdrawal was the complete destruction of the West’s intelligence-gathering network there.

This has eroded our ability to confront the Islamist threat, and at a time when ********** organisations like ****** – which adheres to the same Islamist creed as the Taliban – are increasing their capacity to carry out large-scale operations such as that of October 7. The tactics used by the ******* group responsible for the Moscow ******* were disturbingly similar to those that ****** used in its ******** on ******** civilians.

In such circumstances ******, instead of escalating his confrontation with the West, would be better advised to give his backing to an international effort to combat the modern menace of Islamist-inspired terrorism.

A good place to start would be at the UN where Moscow could concentrate its efforts on tackling the disturbing rise of Islamist terrorism. That could prove far more effective at keeping Russia’s citizens safe than persisting with his unwinnable war in Ukraine.

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**** Coughlin’s latest book, ‘Assad: The Triumph of Tyranny’, is published by Picador

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Vladimir ******,Islamist terrorists,Islamist extremism,Syria,Russian forces,Moscow,UN General Assembly
#****** #realise #hes #fighting #wrong #war

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