MOSCOW, September 25 (RIA Novosti) – Without deploying a ground operation against the Islamic State (IS), the efforts of the US-led coalition are pointless because the extremists will rise again at has been the case with the Taliban in Afghanistan, a senior expert at the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies' Center for Defense Studies said Thursday.
"Concerning the [US-backed] coalition's capabilities, they are limited. If there is no ground operation, the IS will go underground, regroup and will rise again, just as the Taliban did in Afghanistan. The United States has been caught twice with the same bait," Vladimir Karyakin said at the "Iraq-Syria-US" roundtable discussion held in Moscow.
Washington has resorted to airstrikes against IS targets in Iraq in August, after the group seized vast Iraqi and Syrian territories and proclaimed an Islamic caliphate over the territories under the group’s control.
In September, US President Barack Obama revealed his strategy to counter the insurgency in the Middle East, which extended airstrikes from Iraq to Syria, but stressed that there will not be a new ground military operation in Iraq.
