Category Archives: Syria

With ISIS lasting and expanding, global jihadism is stronger than ever

In Britain’s New Statesman, Shiraz Maher writes: In the early phases of the war, the terrorist threat to the West appeared to be in decline as jihadists made their way to Syria to fight the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. There was little interest in carrying out attacks at home. A naive romanticism surrounded these early fighters. The Guardian’s George Monbiot compared them to volunteers in the Spanish Civil War. British fighters I was interviewing at the time seemed to appreciate this. One man from London with whom I developed a long-standing relationship even asked me to thank Monbiot on his behalf. “It really helped the mujahedin,” he said. This man epitomised the optimism of the early wave of fighters, who could not understand why they were considered a security threat. “Why is the gov [sic] calling us security threat and terrorists akhi [brother]?” he asked. He was sincerely bemused.

Nasser Muthana, the fighter who later boasted about his bomb-making skills, was also keen to reassure the government that Islamic State posed no threat. “Mi6 believe 300 Brits have returned to the UK . . . and how many terror attacks have they done? 0!!” he wrote. “We aren’t interested in you. We want Khilafa [the caliphate].”

The change in IS’s posturing towards the West came after the declaration of the caliphate in late June 2014. From that point the group adopted a more belligerent and expansionist policy, with the first edition of its English-language magazine promising to conquer Rome and defeat “crusaders” around the world.

Its fighters became more brazen. They cheered the beheading of western hostages and boasted of planning attacks in the West. There is a rationale for this: the caliphate cannot have static borders and must be territorially expansionist. Its duty is to confront the West and subjugate it to Islam. [Continue reading…]

I recommend reading the whole article but want to forewarn readers that it includes a particularly graphic account of one of ISIS’s recent atrocities.

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Peaceful protesters challenge ISIS rule in Syrian town

NOW reports: Residents of Syria’s northern Manbij have held an unprecedented set of protests against ISIS’ draconian policies in the Aleppo town, according to activists.

A popular pro-rebel Facebook page reporting on events in Manbij and Syria in general said that several small protest gatherings had taken place in the town on Thursday and posted what it said were pictures of the unusual event.

“In response to the oppressive practices of ISIS against residents of the city of Manbij… tens of citizens came out to criticize the group last Thursday afternoon and called on it to leave the city,” Manbij Mubasher reported on Sunday.

“Demonstrations took place on the Jarablus road and several streets [in the city] in the form of small gatherings, which the group met with gunfire and arrests.”

The post also went into detail on the alleged situation in the town — which was first seized by ISIS in January 2014 — outlining some of the factors that have raised the ire of locals. [Continue reading…]

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Raqqa activists reveal details of French airstrikes on ISIS stronghold

The Guardian reports: French warplanes have launched 30 airstrikes on more than a dozen Islamic State targets in Raqqa, activists in the Syrian city have said.

The raids were France’s first retaliation to Friday’s coordinated attacks in Paris claimed by Isis, in which at least 129 people were killed.

Residents said the targets bombed in the de facto capital of the militants’ self-proclaimed caliphate included the local Isis political office, the southern entrance to the city and a military camp.

“The French airstrikes were precise and targeted Daesh positions,” said one activist, using an Arabic acronym for Isis. “They hit Isis headquarters and camps that have ammunition warehouses as well as vehicles and [Isis] members.” [Continue reading…]

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Confessions of an ISIS defector

Michael Weiss writes: It took some convincing, but the man we’ll call Abu Khaled finally came to tell his story. Weeks of discussion over Skype and WhatsApp had established enough of his biography since last we’d encountered each other, in the early, more hopeful days of the Syrian revolution. He had since joined the ranks of the so-called Islamic State and served with its “state security” branch, the Amn al-Dawla, training jihadist infantry and foreign operatives. Now, he said, he had left ISIS as a defector—making him a marked man. But he did not want to leave Syria, and The Daily Beast was not about to send me there to the kidnap and decapitation capital of the world. I had met him often enough in Syria’s war zones in the past, before the rise of ISIS, to think I might trust him. But not that much. “Lucky for you, the Americans don’t pay ransoms,” he ventured, after the two of us began to grow more relaxed around each other and the question of ISIS hostage-taking inevitably came up. He said he was joking.

I knew from our digital parlays that, if he were telling the truth, he had extraordinary, granular information about the way ISIS operates: who is really in charge, how they come and go, what divisions there are in the ranks of the fighters and the population. Abu Khaled saw firsthand, he said, what amounted to the colonial arrogance of Iraqi and other foreign elites in the ISIS leadership occupying large swaths of his Syrian homeland. He was in a position to explain the banality of the bureaucracy in a would-be state, and the extraordinary savagery of the multiple security services ISIS has created to watch the people, and to watch each other. He could also tell me why so many remain beholden to a totalitarian cult which, far from shrinking from its atrocities and acts of ultra-violence, glories in them.

Abu Khaled had worked with hundreds of foreign recruits to the ISIS banner, some of whom had already traveled back to their home countries as part of the group’s effort to sow clandestine agents among its enemies.

But Abu Khaled didn’t want to leave his wife and an apartment he’d just acquired in the suburbs of embattled Aleppo. He didn’t want to risk the long journey to this Turkish port city. Since he’d bailed out of ISIS, he said, he’d been busy building his own 78-man katiba, or battalion, to fight his former jihadist comrades.

All very interesting, I answered, but still we would have to meet face to face, even if that meant both of us taking calculated risks. [Continue reading…]

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Paris attacks: The Molenbeek, Belgium connection

The New York Times reports: Authorities there have arrested several people in Molenbeek, a poor section of Brussels that is home to many Arab immigrants and that has been linked to past terrorist attacks.

Amedy Coulibaly, who carried out the January attack on a kosher supermarket in Paris, is believed to have bought weapons in Molenbeek. Mehdi Nemmouche, a Frenchman who targeted the Jewish Museum of Belgium in Brussels in 2014, killing four people, also reportedly obtained weapons there.

Most recently, Ayoub El Khazzani, a Moroccan who was thwarted in his attempt to attack passengers on a high-speed train to Paris from Amsterdam, is also thought to have lived there at some point.

“I notice that each time there is a link with Molenbeek,” Prime Minister Charles Michel of Belgium said on Sunday. “This is a gigantic problem.”

Investigators have identified three brothers in Molenbeek as crucial suspects in the Paris attacks. Belgian prosecutors identified one, Ibrahim Abdeslam, as the suicide bomber who struck the Comptoir Voltaire cafe. Another brother, Mohamed, was detained Saturday in Molenbeek.

A third, Salah Abdeslam, 26, described as dangerous, is the subject of a widening manhunt by the French. He apparently slipped through their fingers immediately after the attacks.

“He was stopped and his papers were checked,” said Agnès Thibault-Lecuivre, a spokeswoman for the Paris prosecutor’s office. “It was a routine road check. He showed his papers. ”

Asked if there had been anything in his papers to indicate that he should have been arrested, she replied, “Nothing.”

Two vehicles used in the attacks were rented in Belgium last week, the federal prosecutor for Belgium announced on Sunday. One was a gray Volkswagen Polo, abandoned near the Bataclan hall after being used by the three attackers who died there.

The other, a black Seat Leon, was discovered early Sunday morning in the eastern Paris suburb of Montreuil. Inside were three Kalashnikov rifles; there was speculation that the vehicle had been a getaway car for gunmen in central Paris. [Continue reading…]

CNN reports: In an interview with CNN terrorism analyst Paul Cruickshank in August, Alain Grignard, a senior member of the counterterror unit in the Brussels federal police and a lecturer on political Islam at the University of Liege, said the perpetrators of the Verviers plot [in January] fitted a typical profile of Belgian jihadists: “men in their early twenties mostly from the Molenbeek district of Brussels moving in circles with a track record of delinquency and petty crime.”

“They were radicalized very quickly, and when they came back from Syria they had no fear of death,” Grignard said in the interview, published in the Combating Terrorism Center’s publication, the CTC Sentinel. Cruickshank is also editor-in-chief of the CTC Sentinel.

“These guys had maybe more experience in gunbattles than our own commandos.”

Like many European jihadists, they were an outgrowth of the “inner-city gang phenomenon,” he said, who had already revolted against Western society through petty crime and delinquency before having their antisocial approach “legitimized” by a radical strain of Islam.

“These youngsters are getting quickly and completely sucked in. The next thing they know they’re in Syria and in a real video game,” he said.

He told Cruickshank that the terror threat in Belgium, fueled by the trail of young jihadists to fight in Syria and Iraq, had “never been higher in all the years I’ve been working on counterterrorism.”

“To give you an idea of the scale of the challenge, in the past two years we’ve charged more people with terrorism offenses than in the 30 years before that,” he said. “It’s impossible to do surveillance on everybody.”

Since 2012, he said, al Qaeda had been “trying to talent spot” Western jihadists on the battlefields of Syria for use in potential operations against the West, while ISIS had appeared more focused on state building. But since the start of the U.S.-led air campaign targeting ISIS, the concern had grown that ISIS would also focus on directly targeting Western countries.

“And the worry is that competition between al Qaeda and the Islamic State will see both groups try to outdo each other with attacks in the West,” he said. [Continue reading…]

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Why Syrian refugee passport found at Paris attack scene must be treated with caution

The Guardian reports: there are several reasons why it’s worth waiting until all the facts are known before making too strong a link between the attacks and the refugee crisis. The first is a general one: on at least 12 occasions, Isis has actually criticised refugees for fleeing to Europe. “For those who want to blame the attacks on Paris on refugees, you might want to get your facts straight,” wrote Aaron Zelin, an analyst of jihad, in an online commentary about the 12 outbursts. “The reality is, [Isis] loathes that individuals are fleeing Syria for Europe. It undermines [Isis’s] message that its self-styled caliphate is a refuge.” It’s therefore unlikely that the vast majority of Syrians fleeing to Europe are Isis supporters, since their actions are in obvious contravention of the group’s creed.

The second reason for caution is more specific. Investigators still need to verify the Syrian passport was carried by an attacker rather than a dead bystander (one Egyptian passport-holder initially believed to be an assailant turned out to be an injured victim). They will then need to be certain that the passport’s carrier was the same as the passport’s legitimate owner.

It’s possible that it was stolen. Since the possession of a Syrian passport makes it easier to claim asylum in Europe, there is a busy trade in stolen Syrian documents. Syrians interviewed on Greece’s border with Macedonia have described how they were mugged for their passports after leaving the Greek islands as they tried to make their way north through the Balkans. Such passports can be sold on for as much as several thousand euros, in a trade that the EU’s border agency acknowledges is a growing problem. Forgeries are also common; a Dutch journalist recently had one made in the name of his prime minister. [Continue reading…]

CBS News reports: A U.S. intelligence official told CBS News that a name and picture were recovered from the Syrian passport and the individual was not known to intelligence officials.

However, a U.S. intelligence official told CBS News the Syrian passport might be fake. The official said the passport did not contain the correct numbers for a legitimate Syrian passport and the picture did not match the name. [Continue reading…]

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Paris attacks may be a sign of worse to come

The Associated Press reports: Hassan Hassan, an associate fellow at Chatham House in London and co-author of “ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror,” said the Islamic State has a twin strategy of state-building within its self-declared caliphate and establishing itself as a “global leader of jihad” in place of al-Qaida. “They wanted to show they are the new al-Qaida … that this is going to be the new organization that everyone has to be part of. The old organization is dying.”

Hassan noted that until recently, many observers did not take IS seriously as a global threat. But their own statements make clear that their ambitions extend beyond the current limits of their “caliphate.” The group has urged supporters around the world to carry out attacks in the West.

In September 2014, the Islamic State group’s spokesman, Abu Mohammed al-Adnani, called for lone-wolf attacks on Westerners and any “disbelievers” among countries fighting IS — a term understood to reference not only non-Muslims but anyone who is not a devout Sunni. That statement’s specific targets included any “disbelieving American or European — especially the spiteful and filthy French.” Other statements have threatened to topple Rome — apparently related to the location of the Vatican.

“They always speak about Iraq and Syria as the beginning of something, but with an eye on the West and conquering Rome,” Hassan said.

Online, almost all commentators referred to the new IS principle of retaliating promptly to what militants say are Western attacks against Muslims that that kill hundreds of people including women and children. That taps into frustration in the region over civilian deaths in the wars of recent years — a sentiment that exceeds the ranks of core supporters of jihadism.

A well-known IS ideologue, Gharib al-Ikhwan, commented IS now follows a new strategy: “Any killing in the Islamic nation will be met with an instant, decisive and horrible reaction.”

He mentioned the downing the Russian plane over Sinai, suicide bombing in southern Beirut and Paris attacks. He also considered the shooting in Jordan’s police training center, which killed five people including two Americans, as punishment for America — though there has been no mention yet of the motive of the killing.

Hussein bin Mahmoud, a leading militant ideologue, mocked those who fight Muslims in the region yet “think that we don’t have the right to kill them in a Paris theater, in train stations in London or Madrid or in a building in New York.”

“Sorry Paris for those evil villains who killed peaceful and civilized Parisians while your beautiful planes and your modern bombs kill the wicked Arab children,” he wrote in a piece carried by IS media arm al-Battar.

Observers assess that high-profile attacks involving mass murder of perceived enemies serves multiple goals for IS that go far beyond muscle-flexing. [Continue reading…]

Charlie Winter tweeted five reasons ISIS launched the Paris attacks:

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Vienna talks may have delivered a gift to Assad

Hassan Hassan writes: Over the past five years in Syria, the Obama administration seems to have perfected the art of laying out the moral and practical argument against a decision it would later take.

In 2013, for example, Barack Obama said that the US would be setting a dangerous precedent if it did not respond to the chemical attack in a Damascus suburb that killed nearly 1,500 civilians, including 426 children. That precedent was already set as a botched process to destroy all the regime’s chemical arsenal or deter it from reusing it failed.

Also, US secretary of state John Kerry has repeatedly argued that Bashar Al Assad was a magnet for terrorists – a point that the Syrian president vigorously protested against at the weekend, arguing that it is the West and “especially France” that is to blame for Friday’s attacks in Paris. Mr Kerry has also stated that Mr Al Assad’s removal is vital for any hope for peace in the country.

That, too, has seemingly become a secondary issue in the effort to combat terrorism. Backers of both the opposition and the regime, along with representatives of the EU, the Arab League and the UN, agreed to support a ceasefire between the belligerent parties and on fighting terrorism. There was no mention of Mr Al Assad.

While western officials hailed the Vienna talks as a breakthrough, the statement issued by the participants is one of the most detached statements since the conflict started. Indeed, it is a regressive process that may make matters worse. [Continue reading…]

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‘It’s not just men fighting the war in Syria; it is women, too, and they feel forgotten’

The Observer reports: Who would want to be a woman in Aleppo? The female population of Syria’s second city find themselves threatened both by the murderous misogynists of Islamic State (Isis) and the Russian allies of the president, Bashar al-Assad, whose bombing raids mean that now even bad weather offers the city no respite.

“Before, Assad’s forces were not able to drop their bombs when it was raining or cloudy, so those were days we were glad to see,” said Zaina Erhaim, a documentary filmmaker from Aleppo. “But now the Russians have come and they can bomb in these conditions, so there is no relief any more from the death that comes from the sky.”

Amid the carnage and suffering, Erhaim has just completed a documentary that attempts to a tell a story that was in danger of being forgotten: the story of the women who chose not to leave, but to stay and help a city to survive its darkest hour.

“It’s not just men fighting the war in Syria; it is women, too, and they feel forgotten,” she told the Observer. “The women activists are working harder, against more problems, but are forgotten as the west obsesses on Islamic State. It is just Assad against Isis, but we are still here in this ruined place and now we are facing two enemies, Isis and Assad.”

In Erhaim’s film, entitled Syria’s Rebellious Women and made over the past 18 months, she profiles some of her friends who have helped to document the war, deliver supplies to civilians and provide medical services in ways that some within their country now regard as unacceptable behaviour for women. “Our patriarchal traditions now have guns,” she says.

“Despite the insult the word implies, I’m not bothered any more by those who call me hurma, suggesting weakness, dependency, minor, his pleasure tool, his property, his possession,” she said. Erhaim is project co-ordinator and trainer with the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR) in Syria. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS’s French infiltration

Jean-Pierre Filiu writes: I have been warning against a “European 9/11” since the spring of 2014. On May 24 of that year, the French jihadi terrorist Mehdi Nemmouche attacked the Jewish museum in Brussels, killing three people on the spot (a fourth victim would die later from his injuries). Nemmouche was arrested six days later in the French city of Marseille, with a small arsenal of weaponry. He was also identified by Western hostages released by ISIS as one of their most brutal tormentors while in captivity.

The Brussels terror attack took place weeks before Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi proclaimed his “Caliphate” in the Iraqi city of Mosul and months before an American-led coalition started a vigorous campaign of bombing against ISIS targets. One can therefore only fall into the trap of the jihadi propagandists when explaining the Paris massacre as “retaliation” for France’s participation in the anti-ISIS coalition. Moreover, the Brussels-Marseille connection reveals a European pattern that has been manifested in all the subsequent attacks, including that of November 13.

From January 7 to January 9, 2015, three terror attacks targeted Paris and its vicinity with assaults on the Charlie Hebdo journal, a Jewish supermarket, and a policewoman. Seventeen people were murdered, before the French security forces managed to kill the three terrorists, first the brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi, then Amedy Coulibaly. The Kouachi brothers had been involved in 2004-2005 in the so-called “nineteenth district network” of French radicals who had enlisted in the anti-American jihad in Iraq.

The key figure and inspirational role model of this jihadi network was Boubaker al-Hakim, a French-Tunisian extremist who was protected by Bashar al-Assad’s intelligence apparatus when transiting through Syria from France to Iraq. Hakim was eventually jailed in France from 2005 to 2011 soon after his “nineteenth district” was dismantled. On release from prison he headed to Tunisia where he organized the military branch of the jihadi group “Supporters of the Sharia” (Ansar al-Sharia). He joined ISIS in 2013 and chose the moniker of “Abu Muqatil” to issue repeated threats against “infidel” France from the north-east of Syria. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS, Syria and the end of the illusion of containment

When Bernie Sanders, in preparation for Saturday’s Democratic presidential debate, considered how he should field questions on ISIS in the wake of the Paris attacks, one point must have been obvious: he shouldn’t make President Obama’s blunder of talking about containment.

Instead, Sanders opted for a revised version of George Bush’s declaration right after 9/11: “My administration has a job to do and we’re going to do it. We will rid the world of the evil-doers.”

Replace “my administration” with America leading the world, and switch “evil-doers” for ISIS and you get from Sanders: “Together, leading the world, this country will rid our planet of this barbaric organization called ISIS.”

If after 9/11 many Americans were too traumatized to think straight and thus hesitated to dismiss Bush’s impossible promise, Sander’s audience already aware that he’s unlikely to win the Democratic nomination, let alone become president, couldn’t have been too surprised about being offered this kind of empty rhetoric.

After all, when it comes to his inability to present a credible policy on how to deal with ISIS, Sanders is far from alone.

Consider, for instance, the “expert” opinion of political scientist, Stephen Walt, less than six months ago:

Despite its bloodthirsty and gruesome tactics, the Islamic State is not, in fact, a powerful global actor. Its message attracts recruits among marginalized youth in other countries, but attracting perhaps 25,000 ill-trained followers from a global population of more than 7 billion is not that significant. It may even be a net gain if these people leave their countries of origin and then get to experience the harsh realities of jihadi rule. Some of them will realize that the Islamic State is brutal and unjust and a recipe for disaster; the rest will be isolated and contained in one spot instead of stirring up trouble at home.

That kind of assessment, along with overly optimistic reports from his own field commanders, led Obama — just hours before ISIS let loose mayhem across Paris — to assert:

From the start our goal has been first to contain, and we have contained them.

Clearly, the containment strategy isn’t working.

The fact that containment could even be presented as an option is indicative of the fact that too often, what is presented as strategy in Washington, is too often little more than branding.

By a process of what could be called rhetorical logic, a tried and tested solution — the Soviet Union was successfully contained — gets repackaged for ISIS, a much smaller power. Containment worked then, so it can work now — so goes the logic.

But for containment to work, the Soviet Union and ISIS would by nature if not size, need to be comparable entities — which obviously they are not.

ISIS is a shapeshifter. As a fledgling state it might be contained, but as an inspirational force it penetrates the globe.

Almost exactly a year ago, ISIS issued the following warning:

This is a message to all the enemies of Islam and specifically France…. As long as you keep bombing you will not find peace. You will even fear travelling to the market. I call my brothers in France who have not made Hijra, those who are unable to make Hijra, and those who do not possess the means to make Hijra. Know that Jihad in this time is fard-‘ayn (obligatory on all).

For those fixated on the malevolent force of Western power, the simple solution to the threat posed by ISIS is to comply with its request: stop bombing — as though Western meddling is the only fuel that sustains the organization’s existence.

What this perspective overlooks is the fact that many of ISIS’s enemies benefit from the group’s continuation.

As failed states, Syria and Iraq have both moved more closely within the orbit of Iranian power. The growth of ISIS has further empowered the generals who want to be seen as indispensable protectors of scattered Shia populations.

Likewise, Vladamir Putin — who wants to be seen as a defender of national sovereignty and a counterweight to Western intervention — is using ISIS as a pretext for buttressing the Assad regime.

Lastly, Assad himself needs ISIS to reinforce the argument that in Syria there are only two choices: stability or chaos.

In the West, what most narratives miss when portraying ISIS as a product of external forces is that it now has a life of its own.

ISIS can’t easily be contained. It can’t be bombed out of existence. In the battle on the ground to reclaim territory, city by city, the result so far has been that each city that gets liberated also gets destroyed. The idea that it can be strangled by cutting off external support, overestimates the size of that support and underestimates the degree to which ISIS is entangling itself in local communities.

What is clear, is that ISIS presents a problem that will not go away. And as it bombs passenger aircraft and sends out operatives to conduct massacres in capital cities, those who thought it posed little risk of “stirring up trouble at home,” have dramatically been proved wrong.

Stephen Walt now has nothing more to say about containment:


What made the invasion of Iraq especially foolish was the fact that it had nothing to do with al Qaeda nor were there any weapons of mass destruction.

What’s foolish now is to compare a few hundred fighters holed up in caves in Afghanistan with an army of tens of thousands ruling over a population of six million, whose home address is not in dispute.

The response to the Paris attacks must be “vigorous”?

The effort here has nothing to do with ISIS but instead that required by an analyst when spinning away from his recent advice that we could “patiently wait” for ISIS, through its excesses, to be undermined from within.

Indeed, in Walt’s vivid imagination, ISIS might even hang on to power long enough to secure a seat at the United Nations!

Assume the Islamic State is contained but not overthrown and that it eventually creates durable governing institutions. As befits a group built in part on the former Baathist thugocracy, it is already creating the administrative structures of statehood: levying taxes, monitoring its borders, building armed forces, co-opting local groups, etc. Some of its neighbors are tacitly acknowledging this reality by turning a blind eye to the smuggling that keeps the Islamic State in business. Should this continue, how long will it be before other countries begin to recognize the “Islamic State” as a legitimate government?

This might sound preposterous, but remember that the international community has often tried to ostracize revolutionary movements, only to grudgingly recognize them once their staying power was proven. The Western powers refused to recognize the Soviet Union for some years after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, and the United States did not do so until 1933. Similarly, the United States did not establish full diplomatic relations with the government of the world’s most populous country — the People’s Republic of China — until 1979, a full 30 years after the PRC was founded. Given these (and other) precedents, can we be certain that the Islamic State might not one day become a legitimate member of the international community, with a seat at the United Nations?

The illusion created by the term containment is not only that a strategy exists where there is none, but that the problem is located elsewhere while we remain safe at home.

But in Vienna yesterday, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry correctly said: “The impact of this war bleeds into all nations.”

(That graphic and realistic observation was coupled with an improbable forecast: that elections will take place in Syria in 18 months.)

For the last four years, much of the West has chosen to look the other way, quietly taking comfort in the distance that separates our own homes from Syria’s misery.

And even now, as ISIS brings the violence home, for some, this will provide a justification to widen the divide, shut out refugees and reinforce an isolationist and xenophobic mentality.

But disengagement and retreat, as strongly as we might wish otherwise, will not make this problem go away.

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Paris gunmen single out François Hollande, and leave him with few palatable responses

The New York Times reports: For the second time this year, France has found itself singled out for calculated terrorist attacks that have at once stunned and united the country. But perhaps no one was singled out by Friday’s carnage more than the nation’s leader, President François Hollande.

Mr. Hollande was in the soccer stadium that was the attackers’ most spectacular target — a thwarted attempt by suicide bombers to blow themselves up under his very nose.

His name was evoked by the attackers who stormed a rock concert elsewhere in Paris, declaring, according to a witness, that their carnage “was the fault of Hollande. This was the fault of your president. He didn’t have to intervene in Syria.”

It was a strike not only at France but also at his policies, presidency and leadership, at home and abroad.

That messy reality presents Mr. Hollande with a particularly stark quandary: Taking the fight even more aggressively to Syria and Iraq, as he pledged to do on Saturday, carries the risk of inviting still more attacks from the Islamic State and its sympathizers and of fanning simmering divisions between Muslims and non-Muslims in France. [Continue reading…]

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Why ISIS attacked Paris — and what happens next

Aris Roussinos writes: At this stage in the war, with the combination of overwhelming US air power and effective local ground forces beginning to show significant results, it actually seems easier for IS to carry out a mass terrorist attack in the center of a major Western capital than it is for them to win a military victory on the ground in either Syria or Iraq.

The Paris attack, like the bombing of a Russian airliner over Egypt’s Sinai peninsula that IS has also claimed, is a remarkable inversion of roles in IS’ feud with its progenitor, al Qaeda. IS has sold itself on its ability to take and hold ground in the Middle East, scorning old-school al Qaeda for its reliance on occasional but meaningless spectacular attacks in the West.

But now IS is beginning to crumble on all fronts in both Syria and Iraq, while al Qaeda’s Syrian arm Jabhat al-Nusra has devoted its energies to quiet state-building efforts in the regions it controls

The meticulous coordination and sophistication of the attacks in Paris indicate the plot was hatched well in advance, but perhaps initiated as a sudden response to the group’s military setbacks. The purpose of the attacks is likely twofold: Partly to strike fear into Westerners, and also partly to reassure its core constituency of supporters — including those in the West — that the group’s setbacks are merely a blip. [Continue reading…]

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After Paris, is it time to ‘smash’ Raqqa, the ISIS capital?

Christopher Dickey writes: As this stunned city tried to come to terms with the horror that struck it the night of Friday the 13th, the word “war” echoed in cafes, on the streets, and in the statements of government officials.

Teams of suicide bombers from the so-called Islamic State, striking at soft targets in the heart of the city and a stadium on the outskirts, had taken their own lives along with those of at least 129 innocents, blasting away with Kalashnikovs at a rock concert and restaurants, and at a soccer game attended by more than 80,000 people, before blowing themselves up.

A statement purportedly from ISIS called the attacks “the Blessed Paris Invasion.” French President François Hollande, more accurately, described them as “an act of war committed by a terrorist army.” And he promised a “merciless” response.

But if this attack in the heart of a major Western capital represents the beginning of a new phase in the combat between ISIS and the civilized world, the question going forward is what kind of war will it be? What can be done not just to control and contain the threat? That approach by Washington and its allies clearly has not worked. There was nothing controlled or contained about what happened here. [Continue reading…]

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Syrian dictator who helped ISIS rise now exploiting Paris attacks

Huffington Post reports: A man widely understood to be one of the chief drivers of the rise of the Islamic State wants the world to work with him following the extremist group’s attacks on Paris Friday.

Syrian President Bashar Assad told reporters Saturday that “mistaken policies” by the French government — a veiled reference to its support for the anti-Assad opposition — are to blame for the assault because they have empowered terrorists. Assad, speaking from his capital of Damascus, offered to work with France and other countries to help stamp out the group, which is also known as ISIS.

Assad conveniently did not mention his own state policy of empowering extremists in Syria, according to reports of his remarks in the pro-Assad and Western media. His regime has avoided direct assaults on the Islamic State, occasionally aided it on the battlefield and released known militants from prison. [Continue reading…]

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Paris terror attacks: France now faces fight against fear and exclusion

By Aurelien Mondon, University of Bath

The attacks that took place at a series of venues in Paris on November 13 are already the deadliest on French soil since 1945. At least 127 people have been killed in six different places. Reports say that another 100 are in “absolute” critical condition. Police have reported that eight people believed to have carried out the attacks are also dead – seven by blowing themselves up.

It was not as though France had not prepared itself to face such a tragedy. Anti-terrorist measures have been at their highest level in Paris since January, when two brothers attacked the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, killing 12.

This was obvious to any bystander over the past few months. Armed soldiers have become part of the Paris experience. Yet the government’s security plan, the plan vigipirate, was not enough to stop what is so far believed to be the most organised and coordinated attack Islamic State has perpetrated outside its territory. Details are still thin on the ground, but IS has claimed responsibility. President François Hollande has blamed the group and made it clear that he sees this as an act of war.

As scenes that were indeed reminiscent of war spread across the centre of Paris, Hollande declared a state of emergency. He announced a series of radical measures such as re-establishing border controls. Schools and universities have been closed.

Meanwhile, there was the blizzard of unconfirmed information that’s to be expected in such a situation. The climate of fear was reinforced by the 24-hour news media’s tendency to not only relate the facts – as messy and incomplete as they are – but to encourage speculation.

Even as the attacks were still underway, commentators could be heard discussing what could happen next and what type of attacks we could, or indeed should, expect. The sense of panic only intensified with the proliferation of amateur videos on social media.

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Hollande blames ISIS for ‘act of war’ on Paris

The New York Times reports: President François Hollande called the terrorist attacks that killed 127 people in Paris on Friday night an “act of war,” and blamed the slaughter on the Islamic State.

“It is an act of war that was committed by a terrorist army, a jihadist army, Daesh, against France,” Mr. Hollande said from the Élysée Palace, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State. “It is an act of war that was prepared, organized and planned from abroad, with complicity from the inside, which the investigation will help establish.”

Mr. Hollande did not specify what intelligence the authorities had gathered to established the Islamic State’s involvement.

The Islamic State on Saturday claimed responsibility for the attacks, calling them “miracles” in a statement released by one of its publications and distributed on Twitter — a claim that could not be independently verified. [Continue reading…]

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Paris attack witness describes gunman: ‘He was dressed in black, professional, shooting and killing’

The Guardian reports: We were about 20 metres away from the cafe when we heard a firecracker and I looked around and I could see a man, maybe 185cm tall, and the position made it clear he was shooting.

He was standing in a shooting position. He had his right leg forward and he was standing with his left leg back. He was holding up to his left shoulder a long automatic machine gun – I saw it had a magazine beneath it.

Everything he was wearing was tight, either boots or shoes and the trousers were tight, the jumper he was wearing was tight, no zippers or collars. Everything was toned black.

If you think of what a combat soldier looks like, that is it – just without the webbing. Just a man in military uniform, black jumper, black trousers, black shoes or boots and a machine gun. Maybe a woolly hat.

He was left handed and shooting in bursts of three or four shots. It was fully intentional, professional bursts of three or four shots. [Continue reading…]

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