United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon today called on Russia and the USA to cooperate in eradicating terrorism and announced that at the beginning of next year he will present a comprehensive plan to combat terrorism and violence.
"All those terrorists and extremists should be defeated in the name of humanity," Ban said at the annual summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which is being held in Malaysia, Reuters reported.
"To this end, we must unite. We must show global solidarity in the face of the common enemy in the form of the Islamic State, as well as other extremist and terrorist countries," Ban said.
US President Barack Obama also said at the ASEAN summit in Kuala Lumpur that the US and its allies will not relent in the fight against IS extremists and will pursue their leaders and cut off their funding channels.
"Destroying IS is not only a realistic goal, we will actually do it," Obama said at a press conference after the summit.
He added: "We will destroy them. We will take the territory they have occupied, we will cut off their financing channels, we will hunt down their leaders, we will dismantle their networks and supply channels and we will destroy them."
The US president also said that he hopes that Russia will shift the focus of its airstrikes in Syria to IS targets and expressed the hope that Moscow will agree to a change of government in Syria that entails the departure of President Bashar al-Assad.
Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said at the ASEAN summit that Muslim-majority countries like Russia should unite in the fight against IS.
"We need a consolidated anti-terrorist position of countries where there are large Islamic communities, and Russia is one of those countries," Medvedev said, adding that "it is clear that we can fight this threat only if we unite and act through international institutions like the UN".
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