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
S-200 (missile) to field the S-200 system. During the initial years of the Syrian Civil War, parts of the S-200 systems were occasionally spotted when Syrian Air Defense Force sites were overrun by rebel forces. Most notably radars, missiles and other equipment from S-200 systems was pictured in a state of disrepair when rebels overtook the air defense site in Eastern Ghouta in October 2012. On 2 January 2017, the Syrian Army re-captured this air defense base. Starting with the Russian intervention in the civil war in late 2015, there were new efforts to restore some Syrian S-200 systems. Indeed, on 15