UFA. July 9 (Interfax) - BRICS and SCO member countries unanimously maintain that the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) is absolute evil, and double standards cannot be applied in fighting it with the purpose of toppling 'undesirable' regimes, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has said.
"Declarations [to be issued] at the BRICS summit today and the SCO summit tomorrow will state that ISIL is absolute evil… and this absolute evil should be fought adamantly, without applying double standards and without trying to use for timeserving purposes any abnormal situations in which some may think that terrorists [operating] in a particular country can be temporary associates or be used to depose undesirable regimes," Lavrov said at a press briefing in Ufa on Thursday.
For instance, some Western countries attempted to topple the regime in Syria, "they not as much conspired as shut their eyes to the activity of terrorists, repeatedly blocked our initiatives [made] at the UN Security Council with the purpose of condemning the terrorist outrage in Syria, and frankly admitted that the terrorists were bad but they opposed an illegal regime and if [Syrian leader] al-Assad had disappeared from the political scene, terrorists would not have come to that region," the Russian foreign minister said.
"There can be no double standards in fighting terrorism, and no matter who perpetrates terror attacks and where they must be condemned and fought. These double standards should be set aside even for the sake of self-preservation instinct, because ISIL is a threat to the majority of countries in the world: Europe, the United States and the Russian Federation," the Russian foreign minister said.
He said that Russia was trying to "track terrorist fighters from amongst our citizens who are fighting for Islamic State [of Iraq and the Levant]."