Tag: Russian foreign minister

Russian blames Western-backed funding for Paris attack

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Monday that last Wednesday’s attack on a French satirical magazine was committed by militants who had fought in Syria for the West-backed aim of ousting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad from power.

“Cooperation [with the West on counter-terrorism] has been suspended. Meanwhile, terrorists do not suspend cooperation with each other. Terrorist activity knows no bounds,” Lavrov said. “The two brothers who attacked the editorial office of the Paris magazine had mastered ‘the art of terror’ in Syria, fighting with those who had been trying to oust Bashar al-Assad – an aim supported by our Western counterparts,” he added.

Seventeen people were killed in the French capital and its neighbourhoods in the terrorist attacks last week. Among them were ten journalists from the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine, three policemen and four visitors of a kosher grocery store.

A video of supposedly Amedy Coulibaly, who murdered the five people, has emerged online. He swears his allegiance to the Islamic State in the clip and attempts to justify the wave of terror attacks.

The man much resembling Coulibaly talks of being a “soldier of the Caliphate” and states that he coordinated his plans with the brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi, who perpetrated a bloody massacre at the offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on Wednesday.

The man asserted that ‘France is a legitimate target.’ He is referred to as Aboü Bassir AbdAllah al-Ifriqip and wears military body armor, displays an array of weapons and does push-ups.

He pledges his allegiance to “Caliph Ibrahim”, also known as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed leader of the Islamic State and speaks about the attack on the policewoman in the past tense, suggesting the attack had already been completed.

In the background of the video, radio news is already documenting the attacks on the Charlie Hebdo offices.

All the jihadists belonged to the same terrorist cell, according to French police. The man in the video discusses how they coordinated with one another.

Lavrov: Syria and Iran are natural allies in fight against ISIS

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that Iraq and Syria are natural allies in the fight against ISIS.

Lavrov spoke at the International Conference on Peace and Security in Iraq, in Paris on 15 September 2014.

The foreign minister warned that “aggressive actions by the terrorist organization” threaten the future of Iraq as well as neighboring Syria.

“The achievements of the “Islamic State” and many other terrorist groups in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere would have been impossible without financial and material support from outside, including supply of weapons and purchase of oil from fields controlled by terrorists. Shutting down all the channels of such support must become a matter of priority.”

Earlier, President Obama declared that he would bomb the forces of ISIS in Syria without Syrian participation, but Vladimir Putin has warned that any such unilateral action in Syria would be clearly seen as “an act of aggression”.

Meanwhile Syria has asked Washington to engage in military and intelligence collaboration to defeat their mutual enemy, inviting US congressmen and senators to visit Damascus to discuss joint action against the jihadis.

Lavrov urged countries in the counterterrorist coalition to “demonstrate genuine unity, not allowing disputes between them on other issues to hamper the efficiency of joint counter-terrorist efforts”.

“The extremists will try to make use of any differences in our positions to undermine the united front against them. A truly collective approach should be developed through putting our minds and potentials together. No one can pretend that he knows better than others what kind of strategy we’ll need to help the region. And of course, we must build our common action on a solid foundation of United Nations Charter and UN counter-terrorist instruments and mechanisms. We face the same enemies in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere, and there is no room for double standards,” Lavrov told the conference.

He said it made no sense to try and distinguish between “bad” and “good” terrorists and that such reckless policies had lead to terrible consequences in Libya and Mali.