The Western powers that fostered Islamic extremists to incite them against Middle Eastern regimes should stop dividing terrorists into good and bad ones, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, said in a TV interview.
In an interview to Channel 5 in St. Petersburg, Lavrov said: “Now that the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant has been appointed United States’ archenemy, I’d like to recall that [ISIS militants] are the very same people that evolved and got powerful sponsorship and material support from abroad at the time of the regime change efforts in Libya and later on when the same process was attempted in Syria.”
The Russian foreign minister recalled the no-holds-barred time when Americans and Europeans were justifying their help to Islamic fundamentalists as providing support to those opposing unpopular regimes.
“When we called their attention to the fact that there were a large number of terrorists and extremists fighting the regimes, [the Americans and Europeans] essentially told us that all such things would pass once they overthrew the regimes, and that they would deal with this later on,” Lavrov said. “But all this turned out to be wrong.”
In another example, Lavrov said that France had armed the militants fighting against Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi, yet some time later faced the same people in Mali, where French troops had to oppose Islamic fundamentalists who migrated there from a ravaged Libya after Gaddafi’s fall.
“We need a general criterion: if we do fight terrorism – we do it everywhere and always. You cannot divide terrorists into good and bad ones, only because some of them help you to oust a legitimately elected leader of a UN member country that you don’t like,” Lavrov said.
Washington insists that it is the “bad” terrorists that are being killed by the Americans, Lavrov said, adding that Americans became agitated only after “the disgusting video of American journalists being executed was broadcasted.”
