Operation Serval of the ground and the populations". Mathieu Guidère, a scholar of Islam and the Arab world at the University of Toulouse, said in an interview published in the newsmagazine Jeune Afrique, that without the French military intervention the state of Mali would have fallen. France's stated rationale for the operation is that to do otherwise would allow "a terrorist state at the doorstep of France and Europe." Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised the intervention in a phone call with French President François Hollande as "a brave step against extremist Islamic terrorism". Egypt's former President Mohammed Morsi, an Islamist, criticized
British military intervention in the Sierra Leone Civil War first two were relatively minor operations: a series of air strikes against Iraq in 1998 codenamed Operation Desert Fox, and a deployment of a company of Gurkhas and special forces on peacekeeping operations in East Timor in 1999. The third operation, the first major deployment under Blair, was in Kosovo in 1999, where British forces led a NATO intervention in the Kosovo War. During the British operations in Kosovo, Blair delivered a speech in Chicago, in which he outlined his "Doctrine of the International Community". Blair advocated a greater use of humanitarian intervention—the use of armed force to protect a