WASHINGTON, October 18 (RIA Novosti) - Washington and Moscow should cooperate to destroy their common threat - the Islamic State (IS) terrorist group, former US Army Intelligence Officer, Michael Pregent told RIA Novosti.
"The United States and Russia should work together to kill ISIS," Pregent, visiting Fellow at the Institute for National Strategic Studies at the National Defense University said on Friday.
He stressed that Russians see the IS as the same enemy the Americans see it as. "They want to kill it. They want to destroy it," he said.
"You demonstrate cooperation and resolve by going after ISIS together. And that should give both countries a better position to negotiate and talk about things." Pregent said.
Pregent added that Russia and the United States can disagree on strategic policies. "But if there is a threat to all of us - kill it and then we go back to the chess game," he concluded.
The IS, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), has been fighting the Syrian government since 2012. In June 2014, the extremist group expanded its attacks to northern and western Iraq and declared an Islamic caliphate on the territories that had fallen under its control.
Early in September, US President Barack Obama unveiled a strategy to defeat the IS insurgency by creating an international anti-IS coalition and conducting airstrikes against IS targets in Iraq and Syria. The US-led coalition is currently comprised of more than 60 countries, according to the State Department, but it does not include Russia. The relations between Moscow and Washington have been strained for the past several months over the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.
