The future beckons
In the last few days remaining of 2017, Cairo hosted an eminent international leader, Russian President Vladimir Putin. It was his second visit to the Egyptian capital in less than two years. In between, Egypt and the Middle East have witnessed dramatic developments that catapulted Russia to the driver s seat in shaping the future of the Middle East.
When President Putin had come to Egypt in early 2015, the country was facing serious economic, financial, and political pressures from the interior and exterior. Regionally, the terrorist groups operating in both Iraq and Syria were emerging as powerful and destructive non-state actors. They were expanding east and west in the Levant, enjoying tacit and indirect western, regional, and Arab support, both financially and politically. One of these groups, the so-called “Islamic State”, had conquered Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq, in June 2014. In the meantime, the west and its regional and Arab allies and partners had financed terrorist and extremist groups operating within Syria to topple the regime of Syrian President Bashar Al Assad. Turkey was the headquarters of this alliance, where terrorists roamed without hindrance and arms and militants were smuggled into Syria. Coordination and cooperation among several intelligence services, including the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had been almost daily routine on Turkish territory to provide a certain shameful cover to these groups. The ultimate objective was to empower a pro-western fundamentalist regime in Damascus, in a western-inspired master plan to install Islamist regimes in the main Arab capitals that would become silent allies and partners for the United States and the west in the first half of the 21st century. Once established in these capitals, it would use them to threaten Russia and Iran, and ultimately China, in the name of spreading democracy under the guise of Islamist regimes.