Which means Eva might have died in the middle east unless in this timeline she didn't have her heart stopped there. But simply put EXALT wouldn't be able to last any more than XCOM did, the aliens would have taken them down too. At most they'd have been one of the minor resistance groups, but I didn't want to work in all of Lusett, Eve, Viktor, Desmond (as a clone), possibly Elene and the handmaidens, the EXALT elite soldiers, modified Eva, etc. Too much extra stuff for a story that's supposed to be focused on liberating Earth from the Ayys.