Moussa: ISIS may return under a different name

The Former Secretary General of the Arab League, Amr Moussa, said that the Arab world “will not accept any foreign tutelage or any attempts to impose new borders on Arabs in the same manner as Sykes-Picot.”

In his speech before the International Peace Institute’s conference in the Bahraini capital Manama on Friday, Moussa said that the Middle East today “does not need Sykes-Picot agreements or Balfour promises”, calling for starting “a serious talk about a new regional order.”

“Creating a new regional order is not a luxury, but a necessity,” he added.

Moussa accused foreign powers of exploiting sectarian sentiments in the region to fuel sectarian divide. Such interventions, he said, have led to the rise of groups like ISIS in Iraq and Syria. He dismissed ISIS as “a bad reaction” which will soon disappear, but the reasons for its emergence have to be addressed in order to avoid its re-emergence in different forms and under different names.

“If we defeat ISIS today without defeating the reasons for its creation, it will return after a year or two,” he said, criticising the current strategy against ISIS as “ineffective.”