Brussels, 05/10/2015 (Agence Europe) - On Friday 2 October, the West called on Russia only to bomb targets linked to Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL-Daesh) in Syria.
“The fight against Daesh must really be directed against Deash”, said Catherine Ray, a spokesperson for High Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Federica Mogherini. Later that day, in a joint statement, the governments of Germany, France, the UK, the USA, Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia called on Russia to “immediately cease its attacks on the Syrian opposition and civilians, and to focus its efforts on fighting ISIL”. They underlined their “deep concern” with regard to the Russian military build-up in Syria and “especially the attacks by the Russian Air Force on Hama, Homs and Idlib which led to civilian casualties and did not target Daesh”. “These military actions constitute a further escalation and will only fuel more extremism and radicalisation”, they stated.
France's President François Hollande and Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel have discussed the situation with Russia's President Vladimir Putin. “The airstrikes must concern Daesh and only Daesh”, Hollande stated at a press conference a few hours after a meeting with Putin. “We both insisted on the fact that ISIL is the enemy that we must defeat”, Merkel added.
On 4 October, Hollande said that the Russian air strikes had not targeted ISIL as a priority. “I'm not saying that there weren't any, but there were others, which were more numerous than those that targeted Daesh”, he said on the French-German television channel Arte. (Original version in French by Camille-Cerise Gessant)