MOSCOW, October 25 (RIA Novosti) - Islamic State (IS) insurgency has not appeared "out of nowhere", but is a predictable result of the Arab Spring violence, that swept the Middle East starting in 2011, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Saturday.
"Islamic State is a real threat, but it did not appear out of nowhere. Since the beginning of the crisis (dubbed the Arab Spring) we have warned that a rash decision to dispose by any means of the existing regimes – though perhaps authoritarian but still secular – will not end well," said Lavrov, who appeared on the Vesti v Subbotu (Vesti on Saturday) show on a Russian TV channel.
The Russian foreign policy chief said that sporadic 2011 protests were soon hijacked by "extremists and terrorists who our Western partners unfortunately regarded as their allies."
Lavrov said global terrorism could not be thwarted by "designating" separate groupings as "bad terrorists" and letting all the rest run rampant or even help them topple unwanted governments.
"We need to… look at the situation in its entirety, primarily in the Middle Eastern and North African regions," the Russian foreign minister said, adding the main criteria for outlawing organizations was whether they used terror acts to drive their message home.
Lavrov's comment came after Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper implicated the IS in the recent Ottawa shooting. University of Ottawa International Law Professor Jabeur Fathally told RIA Novosti on Friday Canada should review its foreign policy and realize that a terrorist is a terrorist wherever he is, be it Ottawa or Damascus.
