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(Bloomberg) — Russian President Vladimir Putin said the fight against Islamic State should be the global community’s top priority in Syria, rather than changing the regime of Bashar al- Assad.

A broad coalition is needed to combat the threat posed by the terrorist group, which wants to spread its activities across Europe and Russia, Putin said on Tuesday at a summit of ex- Soviet countries in the Collective Security Treaty Organization in Dushanbe, Tajikistan. It’s impossible to curb Islamic State without the Syrian army and Russia is backing President Assad’s government in fighting terrorism, including by providing military aid, he said.

“It’s necessary to think about the political transition in that country” and Assad’s willing to “involve healthy opposition forces in the administration of the state,” Putin said. “But the focus today is definitely on the need to combine forces in the fight against terrorism.”

Syria’s civil war has killed more than 250,000 people since 2011 and prompted a refugee crisis that has spilled into neighboring countries and caused hundreds of thousands of people to seek shelter in the European Union. The turmoil has enabled the rise of Islamic State, which controls as much as half of Syria, while rebel militias backed by the U.S., Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar are also gaining ground. Russia is escalating military aid to Syria, which hosts the only Russian naval base outside the former Soviet Union, and is building a new air hub in the Middle East nation, according to the U.S.

Countries need to “put aside geopolitical ambitions” as well as “direct or indirect use of terrorist groups to achieve” goals that include regime change, in order to counter the threat of Islamic State, Putin said. “Elementary common sense responsibility for global and regional security demands the collective effort of the international community.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Anton Doroshev in Moscow at adoroshev@bloomberg.net To contact the editors responsible for this story: Balazs Penz at bpenz@bloomberg.net Tony Halpin, Paul Abelsky