In France, ‘normal’ is no longer what it used to be

Sylvie Kauffmann writes: For most Europeans, war was a conflict between states that had either territorial or ideological claims, fought by regular armies. It had a starting date and an end date. It belonged to previous centuries. War nowadays, writes the political philosopher Pierre Hassner in a recent book on the subject, “La Revanche des passions” (“Revenge of the Passions”), “has been relegitimized in the form of jihad, of global war on terror, or with the aim of promoting democracy.”

The war we are asked to fight is against obscure men who one day target cartoonists, the next day Jews, another day football stadiums, cafés or rock concerts — who target people who live in “the capital of abominations and perversion,” as ISIS described us in a communiqué after Friday’s attacks. It added a chilling warning: “This is only the beginning of the storm.”

So how do you fight such a storm? “War is not a word used lightly,” former President Nicolas Sarkozy said Sunday on television after a long meeting with President Hollande. He advocates working with President Vladimir Putin of Russia to address the Syrian war; on the home front, he advocates putting some 10,000 suspect Muslim radicals under house arrest and fitting with them all with electronic bracelets. Another conservative politician, Laurent Wauquiez, even suggested interning them — a measure that was immediately denounced in the media as tantamount to “creating a French Guantánamo.” The government considers both proposals incompatible with the rule of law, but is now committed, under the state of emergency, to close radical mosques and deport imams who preach hatred. [Continue reading…]

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How ISIS picks its suicide bombers

Michael Weiss writes: “Suicide bomber is a choice,” said the man we’ll call Abu Khaled, stubbing out a Marlboro Red and lighting a new one. “When you join ISIS, during the clerical classes, they ask: ‘Who will be a martyr?’ People raise their hands, and they go off to a separate group.”

The number of recruits is declining, the former ISIS intelligence officer and trainer had told me here, on the shores of the Bosporus. But, at least in those indoctrination classes, there’s no want of young men looking for a quick trip to Paradise. “They keep volunteering,” said Abu Khaled.

In the wide world outside al-Dawla al-Islamiya, the Islamic State, we have caught occasional glimpses of these incendiary young zealots. There was, for instance, Jake Bilardi, a disaffected Australian 18-year-old, who, judging by the blog he left while still in Melbourne, made a rather seamless transition from Chomskyism to takfirism, before detonating himself at a checkpoint in Iraq.

Abu Abdullah al-Australi, as he went to his death in Ramadi, was convinced that he was carrying out a noble act of self-sacrifice, turning kamikaze for the caliphate. For him, jihad began at home. “The turning point in my ideological development,” he’d written, coincided with the “beginning of my complete hatred and opposition to the entire system Australia and the majority of the world was based upon. It was also the moment I realised that violent global revolution was necessary to eliminate this system of governance and that I would likely be killed in this struggle.” He was right about that last part, if not quite about how his fellow revolutionaries determined his use-value. [Continue reading…]

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Paris attacks suspected mastermind was monitored by Western allies seeking to kill him

The Wall Street Journal reports: An Islamic State operative suspected of helping plan the Paris attacks had been monitored in Syria by Western allies seeking to kill him in an airstrike, but they couldn’t locate him in the weeks before the plot was carried out, two Western security officials said.

The operative, a Belgian citizen named Abdelhamid Abaaoud, was convicted in absentia in Brussels earlier this year of recruiting jihadists, was suspected of masterminding a foiled plot to behead police officers, escaped to Syria and was profiled in Islamic State’s online magazine mocking European authorities for their failure to catch him. A year ago, video emerged of him in Syria, smiling as he drove a truck dragging the dead bodies of Islamic State’s opponents tied to the bumper.

Mr. Abaaoud is one of two people who have emerged at the center of a probe into the attacks that killed 129 people on Friday. Both are at large. French and Belgian authorities are also searching for a 26-year-old petty criminal named Salah Abdeslam, who they say rented a car used in the attacks on Friday and is suspected of driving some of the suicide bombers through Paris.

On Monday, dozens of masked Belgian police stormed a house in a predominantly Muslim district in Brussels in their hunt for Mr. Abdeslam.

French prosecutors said police had stopped Mr. Abdeslam and two other men on their way to Brussels just hours after the Friday massacre. But a roadside background check failed to show that Mr. Abdeslam had rented a car in Belgium that was found outside the Bataclan night club, the site of one of the attacks, and police let him go. [Continue reading…]

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Putin vows payback after confirmation of Egypt plane bomb

Reuters reports: President Vladimir Putin vowed to hunt down those responsible for blowing up a Russian airliner over Egypt and intensified air strikes against militants in Syria, after the Kremlin concluded a bomb had destroyed the plane last month, killing 224 people.

Putin ordered the Russian navy in the eastern Mediterranean to coordinate its actions on the sea and in the air with the French navy, after the Kremlin used long-range bombers and cruise missiles in Syria and announced it would expand its strike force by 37 planes.

“We will find them anywhere on the planet and punish them,” Putin said of the plane bombers at a somber Kremlin meeting broadcast on Tuesday. The FSB security service swiftly announced a $50 million bounty in a global manhunt for the bombers.

Until Tuesday, Russia had played down assertions from Western countries that the Oct. 31 crash was the work of terrorists, saying it was important to let the official investigation run its course.

But four days after Islamist gunmen and bombers killed at least 129 people in Paris, Alexander Bortnikov, the head of the FSB, said in televised comments that traces of foreign-made explosive had been found on fragments of the downed plane and on passengers’ personal belongings. [Continue reading…]

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Divisions exposed in fight against ISIS in Iraq

The Financial Times reports: When Iraqi Kurdish fighters backed by US and UK air strikes last week pushed Isis militants out of Sinjar, homeland of Iraq’s Yazidi minority, the victory was praised as a significant blow to the jihadis.

It was the plight of the Yazidis stranded on Mount Sinjar following last year’s Isis onslaught that prompted the first US air strikes in the war against the jihadist group. Retaking Sinjar gave a psychological boost to the war against the militants and severed a significant supply line between the cities of Mosul and Raqqa, the two main Isis command centres.

But by raising the Kurdish flag over the city and signalling they were taking over part of Baghdad-controlled Ninevah province, the Kurds highlighted deep-rooted disputes between Iraqis that are complicating the joint effort to defeat Isis in its Iraqi heartland. [Continue reading…]

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The economic fallout from the Paris attacks cannot be measured by stock markets

Andrew Ross Sorkin writes: On Monday, market participants steeled themselves for a steep decline, but the indexes in the United States were up more than 1 percent, and markets in Europe were close to flat.

But that reaction — and the reaction to previous attacks — may belie the true cost of terrorism and, more important, underestimate the potential cost of the Paris killings.

“The aftermath of the Nov. 13 Paris attacks may not in itself prompt extensive market-based volatility,” Citigroup wrote in a report, suggesting that financial markets “treat such developments as idiosyncratic and the unfortunate reality of a world where large-scale carnage has become an almost daily, if sickening, development.”

The report, however, said, “We think this time is different.”

That view is consistent with the opinions of some security experts, who in recent days have said that the attack in Paris represents just one in a continuum.

“We have upgraded the risk of terrorist attacks not only in the Middle East but also in the West, as well as the likelihood of increased international military intervention in IS strongholds in Syria, Iraq and Libya,” Citigroup said, referring to the Islamic State.

The attack in Paris could have far-reaching implications for the future of the eurozone and for companies doing business there. The events in Paris could add to the pressure to close borders in the eurozone. It is also reigniting a debate about privacy and surveillance that could have big implications for technology companies.

Over the weekend, Evercore ISI, the research arm of the investment bank Evercore, published a note to its clients suggesting that the events in Paris could threaten the political support inside Germany for its chancellor, Angela Merkel, who has been a big supporter of open borders, of the Syrian migration and of limiting electronic surveillance on civil liberty grounds.

“The connection between the terror threat and migration flows threatens to rupture the border-free Schengen zone,” the note said, describing the borderless, passport-free zone known as the Schengen area. “It challenges Merkel’s position at home and in the wider E.U., nudging higher the tail risk that Europe’s indispensable leader could fall from power.”

The economic implications of this are significant, to say the least. Evercore ISI even speculated it was possible that Ms. Merkel could ultimately be replaced by Wolfgang Schäuble, Germany’s finance minister, who has seemingly been inclined to let Greece leave the eurozone.

Policy makers and investors estimating the cost of terrorism often miss the larger picture: While the stock market quickly rebounded after Sept. 11, the true economic damage may have been as high as $3.3 trillion. [Continue reading…]

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After Paris attacks, CIA director rekindles debate over surveillance

Scott Shane writes: A diabolical range of recent attacks claimed by the Islamic State — a Russian airliner blown up in Egypt, a double suicide bombing in Beirut and Friday’s ghastly assaults on Paris — has rekindled a debate over the proper limits of government surveillance in an age of terrorist mayhem.

On Monday, in unusually raw language, John Brennan, the C.I.A. director, denounced what he called “hand-wringing” over intrusive government spying and said leaks about intelligence programs had made it harder to identify the “murderous sociopaths” of the Islamic State.

Mr. Brennan appeared to be speaking mainly of the disclosures since 2013 of the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance of phone and Internet communications by Edward J. Snowden, which prompted sharp criticism, lawsuits and new restrictions on electronic spying in the United States and in Europe.

In the wake of the 129 deaths in Paris, Mr. Brennan and some other officials sounded eager to reopen a clamorous argument over surveillance in which critics of the spy agencies had seemed to hold an advantage in recent years.

“As far as I know, there’s no evidence the French lacked some kind of surveillance authority that would have made a difference,” said Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union. “When we’ve invested new powers in the government in response to events like the Paris attacks, they have often been abused.”

The debate over the proper limits on government dates to the origins of the United States, with periodic overreaching in the name of security being curtailed in the interest of liberty. This era of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State in some ways resembles battles that American and European authorities fought in the late 1800s with anarchists who carried out a wave of assassinations and bombings, provoking a huge increase in police powers, said Audrey Kurth Cronin, a historian of terrorism at George Mason University.

Since then, there were the excesses of McCarthyism exploiting fears of Communist infiltration in the 1950s, the exposure of domestic spying and C.I.A. assassination plots in the 1970s, and the battles over torture, secret detention and drone strikes since Sept. 11, 2001. [Continue reading…]

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Iranian cartoonist arrested after showing solidarity with victims of Paris attacks

EA Worldview reports: A leading cartoonist. Hadi Heidari, has been detained in the latest crackdown by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.

Heidari was arrested at work at the daily newspaper Shahrvand on Monday, reportedly by the intelligence division of the Guards. One of his latest cartoons expressed sorrowful solidarity with the people of France over Islamic State’s attacks that killed 129 people last Friday.

The Guards have seized journalists, businessmen, and activists in recent weeks, amid their political clashes with the Rouhani Government. Among those held are two US citizens, Iranian-American oil executive Siamak Namazi and Lebanese-American businessman Nazar Zaka. [Continue reading…]

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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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Mindless terrorists? The truth about ISIS is much worse

Scott Atran writes: It’s “the first of the storm”, says Islamic State. And little wonder. For the chaotic scenes on the streets of Paris and the fearful reaction those attacks provoked are precisely what Isis planned and prayed for. The greater the reaction against Muslims in Europe and the deeper the west becomes involved in military action in the Middle East, the happier Isis leaders will be. Because this is about the organisation’s key strategy: finding, creating and managing chaos.

There is a playbook, a manifesto: The Management of Savagery/Chaos, a tract written more than a decade ago under the name Abu Bakr Naji, for the Mesopotamian wing of al-Qaida that would become Isis. Think of the horror of Paris and then consider these, its principal axioms.

Hit soft targets. “Diversify and widen the vexation strikes against the crusader-Zionist enemy in every place in the Islamic world, and even outside of it if possible, so as to disperse the efforts of the alliance of the enemy and thus drain it to the greatest extent possible.”

Strike when potential victims have their guard down. Sow fear in general populations, damage economies. “If a tourist resort that the crusaders patronise … is hit, all of the tourist resorts in all of the states of the world will have to be secured by the work of additional forces, which are double the ordinary amount, and a huge increase in spending.”

Consider reports suggesting a 15-year-old was involved in Friday’s atrocity. “Capture the rebelliousness of youth, their energy and idealism, and their readiness for self-sacrifice, while fools preach ‘moderation’ (wasatiyyah), security and avoidance of risk.”

Think of the group’s appreciation of focus on cause and effect: “Work to expose the weakness of America’s centralised power by pushing it to abandon the media psychological war and the war by proxy until it fights directly.” Ditto for France, the UK and other allies.

There is a recruitment framework. The Grey Zone, a 10-page editorial in Isis’s online magazine Dabiq in early 2015, describes the twilight area occupied by most Muslims between good and evil, the caliphate and the infidel, which the “blessed operations of September 11” brought into relief. Quoting Bin Laden it said: “The world today is divided. Bush spoke the truth when he said, ‘Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists’, with the actual ‘terrorist’ being the western crusaders.” Now, it said, “the time had come for another event to … bring division to the world and destroy the grey zone”. The attacks in Paris were the latest instalment of this strategy, targeting Europe, as did the recent attacks in Turkey. There will be more, much more, to come. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS threatens attack on Washington, other countries

Reuters reports: Islamic State warned in a new video on Monday that countries taking part in air strikes against Syria would suffer the same fate as France, and threatened to attack in Washington.

The video, which appeared on a site used by Islamic State to post its messages, begins with news footage of the aftermath of Friday’s Paris shootings in which at least 129 people were killed.

The message to countries involved in what it called the “crusader campaign” was delivered by a man dressed in fatigues and a turban, and identified in subtitles as Al Ghareeb the Algerian.

“We say to the states that take part in the crusader campaign that, by God, you will have a day, God willing, like France’s and by God, as we struck France in the center of its abode in Paris, then we swear that we will strike America at its center in Washington,” the man said. [Continue reading…]

After the Paris attacks, American gun lovers took to Twitter claiming that armed civilians could have prevented the attacks. Presumably they now believe that the prevalence of gun ownership in the U.S. makes Washington DC less vulnerable to a similar attack.

What is beyond dispute is that there is no other country that makes it easier for a group of individuals to gather the weapons and ammunition required for launching such an attack.

Are Newt Gingrich and his cohorts now going to start patrolling the streets of the capital? Or might it dawn on them that in reality, incapable as they are of living in a permanent state of armed vigilance, in the face of ruthless and heavily armed attackers such as those who struck Paris, unarmed and armed civilians pursuing their daily lives make equally soft targets.

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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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In ISIS interview, suspected Paris-attacks mastermind Abdelhamid Abaaoud taunted intelligence services

The Guardian reports: In an interview with the Islamic State magazine Dabiq [published in February], Abaaoud boasted that he had been able to plot attacks against the west right under the nose of Belgian intelligence agencies, and that he was in Syria in February.

The militant, also known as Abu Umar al-Baljiki, said he and two fellow jihadis travelled to Belgium to “terrorise the crusaders waging war against the Muslims”.

Posing for pictures holding an Isis flag and the Qu’ran, the bearded Abaaoud said: “We faced a number of trials during the journey. We spent months trying to find a way into Europe, and by Allah’s strength, we succeeded in finally making our way to Belgium,” he told the magazine.

“We were then able to obtain weapons and set up a safe house while we planned to carry out operations against the crusaders. All of this was facilitated for us by Allah. There is no might nor power except by him.”

Abaaoud revealed he was stopped during the journey by “an officer” after a picture of him fighting for Islamic State was published in Belgian media; however the officer “let me go, as he did not see the resemblance,” he said. It is not clear when or where this alleged police intervention took place.

The 27-year-old said the two fellow jihadis killed by Belgian police during the raid in January were “blessed with shahādah [martyrdom], which is what they had desired for so long”.

Asked by the magazine why he became a suspect, Abaaoud said: “The intelligence knew me from before as I had been previously imprisoned by them. After the raid on the safe house, they figured out that I had been with the brothers and that we had been planning operations together. So they gathered intelligence agents from all over the world – from Europe and America – in order to detain me.

“They arrested Muslims in Greece, Spain, France, and Belgium in order to apprehend me … All those arrested were not even connected to our plans! May Allah release all Muslims from the prisons of these crusaders.”

He boasted that he had been able to plan terror attacks against westerners while living in Belgium and being wanted by intelligence agencies when he travelled to Syria in January 2014.

“I was able to leave … despite being chased after by so many intelligence agencies,” he told the magazine. “All this proves that a Muslim should not fear the bloated image of the crusader intelligence.

“My name and picture were all over the news yet I was able to stay in their homeland, plan operations against them, and leave safely when doing so became necessary. I ask Allah to accept the fruitful deeds of the shuhadā’ who terrorised the crusaders of America, France, Canada, Australia, Germany, and Belgium.”

Growing up in the Belgian capital’s Molenbeek district, a multi-ethnic area at the centre of Belgian police counter-terror operations, Abaaoud was described as a happy-go-lucky study who went to one of Brussels’ most prestigious high schools, Saint-Pierre d’Uccle. [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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Iraq warned of attacks before Paris assault

The Associated Press reports: Senior Iraqi intelligence officials warned members of the U.S.-led coalition fighting the Islamic State group of imminent assaults by the militant organization just one day before last week’s deadly attacks in Paris killed 129 people, The Associated Press has learned.

Iraqi intelligence sent a dispatch saying the group’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, had ordered an attack on coalition countries fighting against them in Iraq and Syria, as well as on Iran and Russia, through bombings or other attacks in the days ahead.

The dispatch said the Iraqis had no specific details on when or where the attack would take place, and a senior French security official told the AP that French intelligence gets this kind of communication “all the time” and “every day.”

Without commenting specifically on the Iraqi warning, a senior U.S. intelligence official said he was not aware of any threat information sent to Western governments that was specific enough to have thwarted the Paris attacks. Officials from the U.S., French and other Western governments have expressed worries for months about Islamic State-inspired attacks by militants who fought in Syria, the official noted. In recent weeks, the sense of danger had spiked.

Six senior Iraqi officials confirmed the information in the dispatch, a copy of which was obtained by the AP, and four of these intelligence officials said they also warned France specifically of a potential attack. Two officials told the AP that France was warned beforehand of details that French authorities have yet to make public.

“We have recovered information from our direct sources in the Islamic State terrorist organization about the orders issued by terrorist ‘Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’ directing all members of the organization to implement an international attack that includes all coalition countries, in addition to Iran and the Russian Federation, through bombings or assassinations or hostage taking in the coming days. We do not have information on the date and place for implementing these terrorist operations at this time,” the Iraqi dispatch read in part.

Among the other warnings cited by Iraqi officials: that the Paris attacks appear to have been planned in Raqqa, Syria — the Islamic State’s de-facto capital — where the attackers were trained specifically for this operation and with the intention of sending them to France.

The officials also said a sleeper cell in France then met with the attackers after their training and helped them to execute the plan.

There were 24 people involved in the operation, they said: 19 attackers and five others in charge of logistics and planning. [Continue reading…]

AFP reports: The suicide vests used Friday by attackers in Paris — a first in France — were made by a highly-skilled professional who could still be at large in Europe, intelligence and security experts say.

All seven of the assailants who died in attacks wore identical explosive vests and did not hesitate to blow themselves up — a worrying change of tactic for jihadists targeting France.

Unlike the attacks in London in 2005 where the bombers’ explosives were stored in backpacks, Friday’s assailants used the sort of suicide vests normally associated with bombings in the Middle East.

“Suicide vests require a munitions specialist. To make a reliable and effective explosive is not something anyone can do,” a former French intelligence chief told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity. [Continue reading…]

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