MOSCOW, August 5 (Itar-Tass) - A Russian expert in Middle East studies says compromise between Egypt’s armed forces and the Muslim Brotherhood is impossible at the moment.
“Egypt has been inevitably moving towards a civil war,” Yevgeny Satanovsky, President of Russia’s Institute of Middle East Studies, said in an interview with Itar-Tass on Monday. “If the armed forces had not ousted Mohamed Morsi that country would be already boiling in a civil war boiler" he said. "The Muslim Brotherhood does not want to give up. Almost half of the Egyptians together with Tunisia, Turkey, the Hamas organization in the Gaza Strip and Qatar are standing behind this movement.”
He added: "There cannot be a peace deal between religious fanatics and a secular society, between those who want to see Egypt as a country where the Sharia dominates, and as an absolutely religious state in the darkest, medieval sense of this word, and those who believe that Egypt should remain an Islamic state, but a temporal and tolerant country. All this remains irreconcilable,” Satanovsky said.
Speaking about a possible use-of-force scenario in Egypt, Satanovsky noted that at the moment the armed forces would secure a victory over Muslim Brothers. “As long as the army has tanks and aircraft, combustibles and munitions, it would be impossible to seize power in that country,” the expert said. “Of course, the readiness to use military hardware and weapons is necessary for this. As far as we can judge by the ongoing events in Egypt, the armed forces demonstrate such readiness.”