Russia Is Bombing Everything But ISIS - Reporter

What You Need To Know:

✓ “Nobody is really fighting the Islamic State. You can’t fight a terrorist group with airstrikes”;

✓ Russia is “bombing everything but the Islamic State”;

✓ Borri questions why no one is fighting ISIS on the ground;

✓ “The Islamic State pretends to be a caliphate, something universal and without borders. It’s opposite on the ground. You see that the Islamic State is influenced by national backgrounds.”

So who is fighting the Islamic State? “Nobody is really fighting the Islamic State. You can’t fight a terrorist group with airstrikes,” says Francesca Borri, an Italian journalist specializing in Middle Eastern affairs.

Russia’s most recent airstrikes have threatened Syrian peace talks, but according to Borri, like other countries, Russia is “bombing everything but the Islamic State”.

Borri questions why no one is fighting the terrorist group on the ground: “For sure we are overestimating the military strength of the Islamic State, I have no doubt at all... If you analyze battle-by-battle, step-by-step, how ISIS took over territory. They never took over something fighting.”

Having experience with the Islamic State in both Iraq and Syria, Borri says there is a clear difference between the group depending on their location: “The Islamic State pretends to be a caliphate, something universal and without borders. It’s opposite on the ground. You see that the Islamic State is influenced by national backgrounds.” For that reason, Borri believes that the attacks in Paris are separate, and should be seen as a European phenomenon “that has nothing to do with Syria and Iraq.”

Hromadske’s Nataliya Gumenyuk spoke to Francesa Borri, Italian Journalist in Kyiv on December 19th, 2015