E. M. PRIMAKOV Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences Keywords: Islamic State, Sunni radicals, Ba'athist officers, Syria, Iraq, USA I consider the very existence and tendency to expand of the Islamic State (IS) group with the original name "Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant" to be a real threat in modern conditions. This is a fusion of different currents, each of which for the time being did not represent a large-scale danger. It is generally assumed that the basis of the IG was Sunni radicals from the Iraqi "triangle". They were joined by Ba'athist officers who created a number of underground organizations after the American occupation of Iraq. This has increased the fighting capacity of the Islamic State, although relations with the former Baathists, whose worldview does not fully coincide with the ideology of the IS, are not determined for the future. IS detachments, consisting of the most rabid terrorists who painted themselves in religious colors, rushed to Syria, taking a leading position among the opposition to the Alawite government of Bashar al-Assad. In Syria, they have recruited new supporters. Having built up its muscle, the Islamic State unexpectedly launched an offensive in Iraq, where it took control of a significant part of the country in a matter of days. This whole chain of expansion and victorious march of the Islamic State was largely the result of the policy of the United States, which intervened in Iraq, and the result of the policy pursued by the American occupation authorities. The US intervention plunged Iraq into chaos, completely unbalanced the situation in this country, where bloody clashes began between representatives of the two main trends in Islam - Shiites and Sunnis. The struggle between Saddam Hussein's mainly Sunni minority and the Shiites continued even before the American occupation of Iraq. But the clashes between them, which sometimes took harsh forms, were not based on religious contradictions. In any case, there w ... Читать далее