Yearender: Good international coordination a must to combat terrorism

TERRORISM NOT INVINCIBLE

Talaat Musallam, a former Egyptian army general and security expert, believed that international cooperation is currently very weak, especially with the increase in terrorist networks, not only in the Arab countries and the Middle East, but also in the Western countries.

"There are no obvious international policies for combating terrorism," Musallam said.

He called for the establishment of an international anti-terrorism center that will be tasked with collecting information and drafting regulations on how to defeat terrorism legally, in addition to focusing on solving some economic problems like poverty and unemployment.

Richard Tutah, a Kenyan homeland security expert, suggested measures to constitute an alliance equivalent to the UN and EU whose main purpose is to deal with terrorism. The alliance could provide a platform for sharing intelligence information among countries.

An Egyptian political expert has said the effects of terrorism could be minimized in public life through a number of global measures, including achieving international justice.

"We need a comprehensive approach to deal with terrorism as the current international measures are mere reactions to violent acts committed by terrorist groups," Gehad Auda, a political science professor at British University in Cairo, told Xinhua.

"France is targeted (by terrorism), on the one hand, because of its domestic policy viewed as anti-Muslim and, on the other hand, for its foreign policy seen as imperialist, interventionist in Muslim countries," said Mathieu Guidere, senior expert of the European program of prevention of radicalization (PPREV-EU).

"The war against Daesh will not end only by the bombing and the intervention of coalition forces on the ground. The military forces must work with the forces of the countries concerned," he said.

The solution is adopting a domestic policy that is less Islamophobic and stops military interventions in Muslim countries, he added.

Xinhua reporters in Cairo, Nairobi and Paris contributed to the story.