Gen. Flynn “Steps Up” To Urge International Anti-Terror Coordination in Moscow

Outspoken former head of U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, was a featured speaker at an RT international conference Thursday in Moscow, stressing the need for cooperation between the United States, Russia, and others, to defeat the Islamic State.

The conference celebrated the 10th anniversary of RT’s founding as Russia’s international news broadcaster, over which time it has built a 700-million-person audience for its English, Spanish, and Arabic broadcasts, Russian President Vladimir Putin noted in his message of congratulations to the conference.

Gen. Flynn’s participation in the conference itself sent the message that serious institutional people in the United States and Russia are intent on establishing as their common cause, the defeat of an international terrorist apparatus which, according to Gen. Flynn’s estimates, likely counts in its Syrian and Iraqi ranks some 30,000-plus foreign fighters from 80 different countries.

Interviewed by RT on the sidelines of the conference, Flynn said that “I’m standing in a forum with Russian TV, frankly, to step up to the world to say, ‘Hey, look, we have to do more as an international community'” to defeat this enemy, “and we have to have a sense of urgency.” He called for the Russians and the Americans to figure out how to align their strategies, and indicated some of his own thinking on what that entails.

The Islamic State has gone beyond being a regional threat; it is a global threat, as the world has seen in Paris and in San Bernandino, California, Flynn emphasized.  And there have been direct threats inside of Russia as well.

“I do think little things like sharing intelligence, working together, getting each other inside of our operation centers to begin to understand where are the military objectives,— but we also have to have a different set of strategic objectives that actually become mutually supporting,” Flynn said.

Other international participants in the conference, whose presentations have not yet been archived, included former Czech Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs Cyril Svoboda; and “German statesman and ex-VP of the OSCE Willy Wimmer.”