On Sunday, CNN reported, citing government sources, that the Israeli intelligence service had obtained and shared crucial intel data with the US and Britain regarding ISIL chatter over the crash of the Russian passenger jet in Egypt.
Commenting on the report, Eskin noted that "it would have been a surprise if Israel hadn't done it," noting that the country "is professionally equipped to get information from the Arab countries [for the prevention of] terrorism." He added that Israel was likely the first country to have learned about crash in the first place, given its advanced network of radar systems pointed toward the region.
Asked to comment on why Russia didn't seem to get this information, Eskin suggested that the fact that CNN didn't mention it does not exclude the possibility that Israel did not indeed share it. The analyst recalled that the two countries have had a number of intelligence sharing agreements in the past, most notably during the Second Chechen war, when Tel Aviv provided some very important intel to Moscow.
Noting that he now has no doubt that the people onboard the passenger jet have become "the victims of Islamist terrorism" (even though the official investigation has not yet made any conclusions), the analyst noted that it will only strengthen the Russian leadership's resolve to fight Islamist terrorism.
"I want to remind you that it was two years ago when Yusuf al-Qaradawi [one of the intellectual leaders of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood], who can be said to have spiritually inspired ISIL, proclaimed Russia to be enemy number one for his followers," the analyst recalled. "This was an open call for terrorism against Russian citizens."
Eskin noted that there have been "numerous terrorist activities against Russia over the last decade from these forces. I want to remind you, quoting Deputy Prime Minister Dmitri Rogozin, the former head of the Russian Foreign Relations Committee, that there were several thousand Arab terrorists fighting alongside the Chechen separatists 15 years ago on Russian territory."
The moral of the story, according to the expert, is that "if they are not hit on their territory in Syria and Iraq, they come to your home, and what Russia is doing is trying to keep them out of Russia, which is something the government has to do. And if someone thinks that by appeasing terrorists and not acting against them, you can prevent their infiltration and activities, they don't know anything about the history of the Middle East."
Ultimately, Eskin believes that "Russia is doing absolutely the right thing now by being present in Syria and showing the whole world that it's better to combat terrorism on the enemy's territory rather than to bring the enemy into your own home. This makes sense to me, I don't know about the critics, but I don't see any other logic in this case."
"They're just mixed up: they hang on to the Middle East with a message of support for what has been dubbed the Arab Spring," the expert noted. "And the Arab Spring was nothing else but a kind of politically correct ISIL –the Muslim brotherhood taking over Egypt, and trying to do the same in Syria, along with different tribal forces…We can't forget to mention as well the thousands of people killed by the West in Libya, tens if not hundreds of thousands in Iraq, and all of this led to ISIL's birth."
"I'm not trying to imply, as some people do, that any Western country supported ISIL directly, but there is no doubt about fact that ISIL's birth was caused indirectly by Western mistakes," Eskin added. "So the reason is very simple: they've made all these mistakes and now they don't know how to deal with them, still trying to play this game of 'good terrorist/bad terrorist'…which is a game which just doesn't work in this world."
