Category Archives: France

Will Turkey get tougher on ISIS?

Joseph Dana writes: Turkey is slowly starting to reveal how it intends to fight ISIL, both inside the country and beyond. Last weekend, Turkish security forces arrested three suspected ISIL fighters including one Belgian national of Moroccan origin with alleged ties to last week’s attacks in Paris.

While the European Union is moving quickly to tighten border controls and the United States and its anti-ISIL coalition allies are devising new military plans to bomb ISIL positions in Syria and Iraq, Turkey’s response to the crisis has been slow and scattered. Considering the outsize role Turkey continues to play in the ISIL saga as a primary transit country into and out of Syria, this is disconcerting.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister-turned-president, spent the last decade crafting a foreign policy propelled by the notion that Turkey was an emerging regional superpower. In 2011, Mr Erdogan threw Turkey’s weight firmly behind the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, betting on former Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi’s ability to lead a post-Arab Spring Middle East. Concurrently, Mr Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) developed a verbose anti-Bashar Al Assad stance regarding the civil war in Syria. As such, Turkey became the leading proponent for regime change in Damascus and engendered a close relationship with the rebels fighting Mr Assad’s forces. [Continue reading…]

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Don’t let Paris attacks stop COP21 climate change deal, pleads Obama

The Guardian reports: Barack Obama has moved to ensure that the Paris attacks do not sabotage a crucial climate change summit in the city next week, urging his fellow leaders to attend and strike a new deal on global warming.

The US president spoke out amid concerns that security fears in Paris coupled with an understandable deflection of French attention away from the imminent two-week summit might undermine chances for a historic agreement to rein in greenhouse gas emissions.

“I think it’s absolutely vital for every country, every leader, to send a signal that the viciousness of a handful of killers does not stop the world from doing vital business,” Obama said.

He added that world leaders had to show the murderous adversaries who killed at least 130 people “that we’re not afraid”. And the first chance to do that is next Monday, when the Paris climate change talks, known as COP21, start.

The Paris attacks have cast a deep shadow over COP21 – demonstrations have been banned and security has been stepped up – though none of the 130-plus heads of state and government due to attend has yet pulled out.

France has made a huge play of preparing for the summit, which is supposed to achieve a new global deal to curb emissions from 2020 and prevent the planet from catastrophic overheating. But in the wake of the 13 November attacks, there have been concerns that the French political leadership, and president François Hollande in particular, might have other things on their mind.

Privately, French officials insist they are determined not to let their agenda be set by terrorists. And some observers are hoping that the threat might galvanisethe talks to greater solidarity and urgency. [Continue reading…]

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What would the world look like if we defeated ISIS?

Paul Mason writes: Isis attacked civilians irrespective of their position on Islam or imperialist war; it attacked, specifically, symbols of a secular, liberal lifestyle. It did these things because that is what it is fighting: the west, its people, their values and their lifestyle.

In formulating the UK’s response – with or without Nato – the problems are large. The electorate mistrusts offensive military action. It fears – rightly on the basis of the evidence from Iraq and Afghanistan – that expeditionary warfare creates mainly chaos, opening a space for sectarian conflict, jihadism and killing civilians. Western electorates have no taste for the kind of allies we would need to reimpose the old “order” on the territories Isis operates in. Bashar al-Assad and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan are not only serial human-rights violators; they have each proved ready to attack those fighting Isis – the Kurds and the secular resistance.

But the biggest challenge comes if you imagine what victory would look like. Isis-held territory being reoccupied by armies that, this time, can withstand the suicide bombings, truck bombs and kidnappings that a defeated Isis would unleash. Mosques and madrassas across the region stripped of their jihadi preachers. A massive programme of economic development focused on human capital – education, healthcare and institution building – as well as physical reconstruction. Nonsectarian, democratic states in Iraq and Syria and an independent Kurdistan state spanning parts of both countries. To achieve this you would need to unleash surveillance, policing and military action on a scale that could only be acceptable to western electorates if carried out with a restraint and accountability not shown in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The alternative is to disengage, contain Isis, deal with the refugees and try to ignore the beheading videos.

In reality, this question is only really posed for three countries that have the power diplomatically and militarily to take significant action: Britain, France and the US.

But that’s not the main question Isis posed last Friday. The main question is the one John Maynard Keynes threw at Britain’s political leadership in 1939: what is the world going to look like when we win?

By answering this, the British and American populations were persuaded to endure total war in the fight against Nazism. So the question now is not how many bombs we want to drop on the HQ of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. It is: what do we want at the peace conference, and what will our own society look like after the struggle is over? [Continue reading…]

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European fighters in ISIS were radical before they were religious

In August, Paul Cruickshank at West Point’s Combatting Terrorism center spoke to Alain Grignard, a senior member of the counterterror unit in the Brussels Federal Police: Are we seeing the emergence of a new breed of jihadi in the West?

Grignard: There’s no doubt there has been a shift. The travel flow we are seeing to Syria is to a significant degree an extension of the “inner-city” gang phenomenon. Young Muslim men with a history of social and criminal delinquency are joining up with the Islamic State as part of a sort of “super-gang.”

Previously we were mostly dealing with “radical Islamists”—individuals radicalized toward violence by an extremist interpretation of Islam—but now we’re increasingly dealing with what are best described as “Islamized radicals.” The young Muslims from “inner-city” areas of Belgium, France, and other European countries joining up with the Islamic State were radical before they were religious. Their revolt from society manifested itself through petty crime and delinquency. Many are essentially part of street gangs. What the Islamic State brought in its wake was a new strain of Islam which legitimized their radical approach. These youngsters are getting quickly and completely sucked in. The next thing they know they’re in Syria and in a real video game. The environment they find themselves in over there is attractive to them. Just like in gangs in Europe, respect is equated with fear. They feel like somebody when they’re over in Syria. If someone crosses you there, you put a bullet in his head. The Islamic State has legitimized their violent street credo. The gang dimension, and the group loyalty that it creates, make the social media messages by Belgian fighters in Syria to their circle back home encouraging attacks especially concerning.

CTC: Are you seeing any links between organized crime and Islamist terror cells?

Grignard: So far the links we’ve uncovered are almost all to unorganized crime rather than organized crime. The link between petty crime and Islamic terror is not of course a new phenomenon. For some time we’ve seen so-called takfiris operating in Europe who justified criminality through their radical interpretation of Islam. Additionally, we saw some young Belgians with a history of delinquency joining up with al-Qa`ida in the tribal areas of Pakistan in the late 2000s. But it has now become a much bigger phenomenon. Islamic State propaganda distributed over social media has had a big accelerating effect.

As we saw with the Brussels Jewish museum shooting and the Paris kosher market attack it’s all too easy for young men with a history of criminality to get access to weapons. And petty criminality has been the main source of funding for terrorist plots since 9/11 in Europe, whether it’s stolen cars, stolen credit cards, or fraudulently applying for bank loans.

Prison radicalization is a big factor in all of this. The message of radical recruiters inside jail to Muslim inmates goes something like this: “You had no choice but to carry out criminal actions because you were part of a discriminated against community. You were only defending yourself. And if you now put yourself in service of the cause by supplying false papers and weapons, not only are these actions legitimate but they will win you redemption and reward in paradise.” It’s a message that is unfortunately resonating. [Continue reading…]

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Surveillance challenge: The transition from struggling identity to mujahid is often fast and furious

Scott Atran and Nafees Hamid write: French counterterrorism surveillance data (FSPRT) has identified 11,400 radical Islamists, 25 percent of whom are women and 16 percent minors — among the minors, females are in a majority. Legal proceedings are now underway against 646 people suspected of involvement in terrorist activity. French Prime Minister Manuel Valls conceded after Friday’s attacks that even keeping full track of those suspected of being prone to violent acts is practically impossible: around-the-clock surveillance of a single individual requires ten to twenty security agents, of which there are only 6,500 for all of France.

Nor is it a matter of controlling the flow of people into France. France’s Center for the Prevention of Sectarian Drift Related to Islam (CPDSI) estimates that 90 percent of French citizens who have radical Islamist beliefs have French grandparents and 80 percent come from non-religious families. In fact, most Europeans who are drawn into jihad are “born again” into radical religion by their social peers. In France, and in Europe more generally, more than three of every four recruits join the Islamic State together with friends, while only one in five do so with family members and very few through direct recruitment by strangers. Many of these young people identify with neither the country their parents come from nor the country in which they live. Other identities are weak and non-motivating. One woman in the Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois described her conversion as being like that of a transgender person who opts out of the gender assigned at birth: “I was like a Muslim trapped in a Christian body,” she said. She believed she was only able to live fully as a Muslim with dignity in the Islamic State.

For others who have struggled to find meaning in their lives, ISIS is a thrilling cause and call to action that promises glory and esteem in the eyes of friends, and through friends, eternal respect and remembrance in the wider world that many of them will never live to enjoy. A July 2014 poll by ICM Research suggested that more than one in four French youth of all creeds between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four have a favorable or very favorable opinion of ISIS. Even if these estimates are high, in our own interviews with young people in the vast and soulless housing projects of the Paris banlieues we found surprisingly wide tolerance or support for ISIS among young people who want to be rebels with a cause — who want, as they see it, to defend the oppressed.

Yet the desire these young people in France express is not to be a “devout Muslim” but to become a mujahid (“holy warrior”): to take the radical step, immediately satisfying and life-changing, to obtain meaning through self-sacrifice. Although feelings of marginalization and outrage may build over a long time, the transition from struggling identity to mujahid is often fast and furious. The death of six of the eight Paris attackers by suicide bombs and one in a hail of police bullets testifies to the sincerity of this commitment, as do the hundreds of French volunteer deaths in Syria and Iraq. [Continue reading…]

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France leaps to Assad’s allies after Paris attacks

Alex Rowell writes: “Tremblez, tyrans,” warns La Marseillaise, the French revolutionary song that, in abridged form, has been the national anthem of the Republic since 1795. “[We are] all soldiers combating you.”

One tyrant unlikely to tremble at these words today is Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who is one of the few people to have had reason to enjoy the aftermath of last Friday’s attacks by ISIS in Paris. What has transpired in the week since on the French political scene – as it has to varying extents across Europe generally – is tantamount to a bloodless coup d’état for supporters and fellow travelers of Damascus and its allies Moscow and Tehran.

The phrase used by one source in Paris is “the defeat of the [Foreign Minister Laurent] Fabius Doctrine,” and indeed the man who once wrote a Washington Post op-ed arguing that “Assad and Daesh [ISIS] are two sides of the same barbaric coin,” and who just weeks ago said Russian strikes in Syria were killing civilians, on Thursday declared Russian intentions against ISIS were “sincere,” and called on France to “gather all our forces” in alliance with them.

This followed the news that the French military, which in August 2013 was just “hours” from air-striking Syrian regime targets until US President Barack Obama telephoned President François Hollande to call them off, is now formally coordinating the dispatch of an aircraft carrier to the eastern Mediterranean with Russia, whose President Vladimir Putin has instructed his navy to welcome the French crew “as allies.” Perhaps most tellingly, Hollande is combining a trip to Washington on Tuesday to discuss the fight against ISIS with an equivalent visit to Moscow two days later – suggesting, if only symbolically, an unprecedented new parity of relationships. [Continue reading…]

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Possible Russia-West rapprochement over Syria stokes fears in Europe’s east

RFE/RL reports: France’s surprise embrace of Russia in the aftermath of the deadly terrorist attacks in Paris has raised concerns across the former Soviet bloc that Moscow wants to leverage the fight against Islamic extremists in Syria to secure Western concessions over Ukraine.

Just days after the massacres in the French capital killed 129 people and injured hundreds of others, President Francois Hollande called for the formation of a grand coalition — including Russia — to destroy the Islamic State (IS) group, which claimed responsibility for the attacks.

Putin followed by ordering his navy to cooperate with the French Navy in the eastern Mediterranean, where Russia has a base in the Syrian port of Tartus.

Hollande’s push for cooperation with Russia was a major pivot for France, which has been a loyal partner in the multinational U.S.-led coalition fighting IS militants in Syria and Iraq.

The French government had also objected vehemently when Russia began its Syrian air campaign on September 30, saying Moscow’s ulterior motive was to keep embattled President Bashar al-Assad in power.

Former Ukrainian diplomat Bohdan Yaremenko told RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service on November 18 that following the Paris attacks, Putin had “created the opportunity for dialogue with the West that he had lost due to the situation in Ukraine.” [Continue reading…]

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What is it about Molenbeek? The bit of Belgium that was a base for Paris terror attacks

By Martin Conway, University of Oxford

Just as during the German invasions of 1914 and 1940, war, it seems, is coming to France through Belgium. If one follows the logic of the statements of various French political leaders since the bloody attacks in Paris on November 13, Belgium has become the base from which Islamic State has brought the conflicts of the Middle East to the streets of Paris.

There is much about that logic that would not withstand serious analysis. France has grown many of its problems within its own suburbs. And groups committed to armed action, from the Resistance movements of World War II to the Basque nationalist groups of the 1980s and 1990s, have often found it expedient to use neighbouring territories as a base from which to launch their operations.

That said, the French authorities have a case. Molenbeek – an urban commune on the north-western edges of Brussels – is unlikely to feature any time soon on tourist-bus tours of historic Brussels.

Though it lies only a couple of kilometres from the Grand Place and the Manneken Pis, and a mere taxi ride from European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker’s office, Molenbeek is another world. This inner-city area, now on the front pages of newspapers across Europe, is deprived of funds, social cohesion and effective government.

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Assad and ISIS need each other to survive

Manuel Almeida writes: The notion that ISIS should be number one priority while the genocidal President of Syria is a matter to be dealt with when and if ISIS is defeated, is deeply flawed for a number of reasons beyond the obvious moral one.

The key to defeat the radical group is a government willing and able to do so and with the capacity to bring on board much of the opposition; all the Assad regime is not. Any Syria expert will tell you Assad has avoided as much as possible to confront ISIS, focusing instead the regime’s military effort on the myriad of opposition groups that are not bent on exporting jihad.

Not only that, Assad has struck deals with ISIS to buy oil and gas on the cheap from the radical group, as highlighted in a recent report by the Financial Times based on interviews with various Syrians employed in the energy sector. Thus, the regime gets the supply of energy to meet its electricity needs while providing a key source of income for the group’s terrorist activities. ISIS controls eight power plants in Syria, including three hydroelectric facilities and Syria’s largest gas plant.

In the early stages of the uprisings against his rule, Assad released hundreds of jihadists from Syria’s jails, contributing to his strategy of portraying the war as an existential battle between secular forces of moderation and fanatic religious militants. Yet for that desperate narrative to have any grounding, it would be necessary to ignore the thousands of groups and sub-groups that form the Sunni opposition. Plus, with Iranian forces and all the Shiite militias from Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan fighting for the regime, Assad can hardly claim to be non-sectarian.

The Assad regime is also responsible for the great majority of civilian casualties, a great portion of which via its incessant campaign of airstrikes on urban areas. This has been part of the strategy to radicalize the opposition and make the urban areas not controlled by the regime are almost unlivable.

Ironically, Assad and ISIS need each other to survive. As Hussein Ibish, a scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington D.C., recently put it: “The key factor in the rise of ISIS in Syria has clearly been its politically symbiotic relationship with the Assad dictatorship in Damascus. On paper, these two entities despise each other and could hardly be more ideologically and politically hostile. Yet in practice, they share an overwhelming interest in ensuring that the conflict in Syria is as brutal and sectarian as possible.” [Continue reading…]

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ISIS is losing ground. Will that mean more attacks overseas?

The Washington Post reports: Just hours after his men helped recapture the northern Iraqi town of Sinjar from Islamic State militants last week, Maj. Gen. Ali Ahmed, an officer with Kurdish security forces, watched another battle unfold on his television, this one some 2,500 miles away in Paris.

What had seemed a winning day in the war against the Islamic State had taken a horrific turn with attacks in the French capital that left 129 people dead.

The victory by Kurdish forces in Sinjar was just one in a string of losses for the militant group as it faces attacks on multiple fronts — from Ramadi in Iraq to Raqqa in Syria.

But the squeeze on Islamic State territory has coincided with an uptick in the group’s operations overseas. That’s no coincidence, according to some analysts, who expect the Islamic State to lash out with more attacks abroad to divert attention from its territorial losses.

“Their recruiting appeal is based on the appearance of strength, and that informs a lot of their strategy,” said J.M. Berger, co-author of “ISIS: The State of Terror” and a fellow at the Brookings Institution.

From the outset, the Islamic State has been acutely aware of its international image, with its slickly produced videos of beheadings and massacres a key part of attracting recruits.

“The brothers launched the attack in Paris to prove that we are a strong state and we can fight our enemies anywhere,” said one Islamic State sympathizer in Turkey, who declined to be named because of links to the terrorist group. “Since they are fighting us in our land, we are going to fight them in their lands.”

At its peak last year, the Islamic State had seized about a third of Iraqi territory, but it has lost about a third of that. After more than a year of bloody battles, pro-government forces wrested control of the oil refinery of Baiji in October.

In Ramadi, Iraqi security forces have steadily progressed in recent months and have encircled the city, according to Iraqi commanders.

“The city is besieged 360 degrees,” said Maj. Gen. Thamir Ismail, commander of SWAT forces in the province. “Daesh lost Baiji, and lost Sinjar, and now day by day they are losing Ramadi,” he said. He used an Arabic term for the Islamic State, which is also known as ISIS and ISIL.

“They attacked Paris in order to keep up the morale of their fighters and distract from their losses in Syria and Iraq,” he said. “I expect that when we liberate Ramadi, there will be more attacks in Europe.” [Continue reading…]

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ISIS: The bridge between petty crime and mass murder

In the current debate about the effectiveness of military action against ISIS, one of the most commonly made assertions is that this is an ideological war — it requires victory on the battleground of ideas.

This view is not without merits and yet particularly when it comes to Western ISIS recruits, the stories we most often encounter depict individuals who, although they might be susceptible to brainwashing, have never been intellectually engaged. How do you win a debate with someone who has neither an interest nor an aptitude for engaging in debate?

The powers of persuasion at play here, seem to have much less to do with ideas than with identities and personal empowerment.

This is about a transformation in which someone goes from an aimless life in which they feel lost, to a purposeful life in which they have a sense of mission and their individual actions are consequential.

For those whose sense of alienation is rooted in their perception of the culture and state in which they were raised, it’s hard to imagine that they can be won back by those very institutions by which they felt they had already been discarded.

The Wall Street Journal reports: Two suspects in the Paris attacks sold the bar they owned in Brussels six weeks before the onslaught, according to public records seen by The Wall Street Journal, and it was shut down shortly after the sale over suspicion that drugs had been sold and consumed there.

Brahim Abdeslam, who authorities say blew himself up outside a restaurant during the attacks, and his brother Salah Abdeslam — who police suspect rented the car used in the attacks and is now the subject of a manhunt — sold their stakes in the Les Beguines bar on Sept. 30, according to public documents.

The records show the brothers transferred ownership of the bar to a person based in a Belgian town on the French border. The documents didn’t say how much it was sold for.

A neighbor described the place in the predominantly Muslim quarter of Molenbeek as a rough hangout with regular fights and frequent visits by police.

According to an official notice posted Nov. 2 and effective Nov. 5, authorities were shutting it down for five months because of a police report from August about the trafficking of “poisonous, narcotic and psychotropic substances” on the premises.

Molenbeek’s mayor, Françoise Schepmans, previously told The Wall Street Journal that two of the brothers were known to authorities, largely for drug violations.

The history of the two fits a pattern in which many Islamist terrorists in Europe have been radicalized from the ranks of petty criminals and drug users. [Continue reading…]

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The ISIS poster boy for Paris attack is no ‘mastermind’

The Daily Beast reports: even as initial reports based on unofficial police sources claimed they were closing in on [Abdelhamid] Abaaoud in Saint-Denis, questions are being raised in intelligence circles about whether he is really so important to the ISIS terror networks as he’s sometimes been portrayed. [Abaaoud’ death has now been confirmed by French authorities.]

Probably not, says Wassim Nasr, the well-sourced terrorism analyst at the French international network France 24. Nasr, in his commentary, has carefully demoted Abaaoud from “mastermind” to “operational commander.” And that sentiment is shared by current and former U.S. intelligence officials.

Abaaoud clearly seems to have had personal connections to important ISIS figures as well as to men who acted as foot soldiers in Europe, including one who attacked a Jewish museum in Brussels, killing four.

But Abaaoud is now seen as a potentially important logistics coordinator or maybe even a top field operative, while the multiple, coordinated attacks in Paris bear the marks of an operation that was planned and ordered by men higher in the ISIS hierarchy.

“To call him a mastermind seems like saying a major or a lieutenant colonel was the mastermind of some battle plan,” a former senior U.S. intelligence official opined. “He seems more like the lead guy for the project, who more often than not is getting signoff from headquarters.”

One U.S. official, who asked not to be identified when discussing a sensitive ongoing investigation, said it would be misleading to suggest that Abaaoud thought up and then oversaw the attacks himself, because the operation was too sophisticated for one person.

For starters, the attackers were wearing suicide vests, which aren’t easy to make, Bruce Riedel, a former CIA intelligence officer and counterterrorism expert, told The Daily Beast.

“It’s also not easy to transport them from Syria to Paris,” Riedel said. “It’s more likely there is a bomb maker somewhere near Paris with some kind of workshop. It’s unlikely [ISIS] would use a bomb maker for a suicide mission, so he is probably still alive and very busy.” [Continue reading…]

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Now is the time to show solidarity with refugees fleeing from terrorism and tyranny

Ian Birrell writes: we share common cause with most refugees flooding to Europe from Iraq and Syria, who are driven by desire to share our freedoms after jihadis helped devastate their homelands. Those terrible events in France happen almost daily in Iraq and Syria, which is why families risk their lives to get on boats across the Mediterranean (although death is more likely to come from the Syrian regime some westerners suddenly seek to aid). The refugees I have met in Germany, Greece and Italy this year loathe Isis with bitter intensity – and the feeling is mutual, since the fanatics dislike those leaving their domain for undermining their proclamations of a paradisiacal caliphate.

There are justified, if regrettable, questions over the future of the Schengen area. But those calling for Europe to shut exterior borders and reject refugees should ask why people board lethal and overloaded boats. European Union borders are closed already, but desperate people resort to desperate measures. Shut off one route and another opens up; the only change is that those running from torture, war and repressionwill be fleeced still further by smugglers, and forced to take even more dangerous journeys. This can be seen already with the sinking of boats used to carry refugees; trafficking gangs simply switched to older, less seaworthy vessels and overcrowded inflatables.

Jean-Claude Juncker, the European commission president, is right to say that if one attacker arrived masquerading as an asylum seeker then he is “a criminal and not a refugee”. None of the 750,000 refugees admitted to the United States since 9/11 have been arrested on domestic terror charges. But isolationists and misanthropes in Europe and north America are using the Paris massacres to argue against offering sanctuary. Such is the Orwellian nature of debate, some say a British government that sought to end support for rescue missions to pull drowning people from the sea is more compassionate than a German government struggling to offer sanctuary to huge numbers of refugees. [Continue reading…]

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France will still take 30,000 Syrian refugees, president says

Huffington Post reports: French President François Hollande said Wednesday that he remains committed to taking in refugees following a wave of deadly attacks in Paris that killed at least 129 people last week.

“Some have wanted to link the influx of refugees to Friday’s acts of terror,” Hollande said in a speech to French mayors. But “30,000 refugees will be welcomed in the next two years.”

Hollande expressed his gratitude to mayors who have welcomed refugees from the “jungle” of Calais, a town on the western coast of France where thousands of refugees are encamped and living in squalor.

He said France has a simultaneous duty to ensure “humanity for refugees and protection of the French people.” [Continue reading…]

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The pot-smoking Paris suicide bomber

The Daily Mail reports: The former wife of Paris bomber Ibrahim Abdeslam has broken her silence to say he was a jobless layabout who smoked cannabis ‘all day every day’, never went to the mosque and had spent time in prison.

Ibrahim, 31, blew himself up outside the Comptoir Voltaire cafe during Friday’s terrorist massacre in Paris, injuring three people, but only killing himself.

In an exclusive interview his wife Niama told how during their ill-fated two-year marriage the trained electrician did just one day of work, often smoking three or four joints a day.

Speaking from her home in Moleenbeek, Brussels, Niama, 36, said: ‘His favourite activities were smoking weed and sleeping. He often slept during the day. The number of joints that he smoked was alarming.

‘Despite his diploma as an electrician, he found no job,’ she said. In those two years we were married, he worked a single day. It made him lazy.’

Ibrahim, also known as Brahim, was one of at least eight jihadis behind Friday’s atrocities, which left 129 dead and at least 352 injured, while striking fear and terror across Europe.

Security sources suggest he had accidentally detonated the bomb early, after fumbling with the device as he embarked on a religious ‘war’ against the west. [Continue reading…]

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We cannot live in peace at home while millions of people are engulfed in war

Harleen Gambhir writes: Last week, President Obama said that the Islamic State is “contained” in Iraq and Syria, but the group’s attacks in Paris soon afterward showed that it poses a greater threat to the West than ever. The Islamic State is executing a global strategy to defend its territory in Iraq and Syria, foster affiliates in other Muslim-majority areas, and encourage and direct terrorist attacks in the wider world. It has exported its brutality and military methods to groups in Libya, Egypt, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Now it is using tactical skills acquired on Middle Eastern battlefields to provoke an anti-Muslim backlash that will generate even more recruits within Western societies. The United States and its allies must respond quickly to this threat.

The Islamic State’s strategy is to polarize Western society — to “destroy the grayzone,” as it says in its publications. The group hopes frequent, devastating attacks in its name will provoke overreactions by European governments against innocent Muslims, thereby alienating and radicalizing Muslim communities throughout the continent. The atrocities in Paris are only the most recent instances of this accelerating campaign. Since January, European citizens fighting with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria have provided online and material support to lethal operations in Paris, Copenhagen and near Lyon, France, as well as attempted attacks in London, Barcelona and near Brussels. Islamic State fighters are likely responsible for destroying the Russian airliner over the Sinai. These attacks are not random, nor are they aimed primarily at affecting Western policy in the Middle East. They are, rather, part of a militarily capable organization’s campaign to mobilize extremist actors already in Europe and to recruit new ones.

The strategy is explicit. The Islamic State explained after the January attacks on Charlie Hebdo magazine that such attacks “compel the Crusaders to actively destroy the grayzone themselves. . . . Muslims in the West will quickly find themselves between one of two choices, they either apostatize . . . or they [emigrate] to the Islamic State and thereby escape persecution from the Crusader governments and citizens.” The group calculates that a small number of attackers can profoundly shift the way that European society views its 44 million Muslim members and, as a result, the way European Muslims view themselves. Through this provocation, it seeks to set conditions for an apocalyptic war with the West.

Unfortunately, elements of European society are reacting as the Islamic State desires. Far-right parties have gained strength in many European countries. France’s National Front is expected to dominate local elections in northern France this winter; on Saturday, Marine Le Pen, its leader, declared “those who maintain links with Islamism” to be “France’s enemies.” The Danish People’s Party gained 21 percent of the vote in national elections in June on a nationalist, anti-Islamic platform. The anti-foreigner Sweden Democrats is steadily growing in popularity. [Continue reading…]

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