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
Russian military intervention in the Syrian Civil War over 9,000 sorties over the course of five and a half months, while helping the Syrian Army capture 400 towns and acquire 10,000 square kilometers of territory. In January 2016, a few months after Russia's involvement in Syria, diplomat Ranjit Gupta wrote, in an article published by , that the Russian reinforcement was "godsend for Assad, greatly boosting the regime's sagging morale and that of its armed forces." Gupta continued: In February 2016, Professor Fawaz A. Gerges of the London School of Economics opined the Russian military intervention had turned out to be a game-changer in the Syrian Civil War: