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 and politically motivated, and accused critics of "barbarism," which elicited heavier condemnation from Western governments in support of rebel groups. The Syrian Civil War has been waged since 2011 between multiple opposition (anti-government) groupings and the government as well, as their local and foreign support bases. Since 2014, a significant part of Syria′s territory had been claimed by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, an entity internationally recognised as terrorist. In the north-west of the country, the main opposition faction is the al-Qaeda-affiliated al-Nusra Front, allied with numerous other smaller Islamist groups, some of which operated under the