Tag: paris attack
In Wake of Paris Terror, Obama Seems At Sea

In Wake of Paris Terror, Obama Seems At Sea

“Ich bin ein Berliner.” — John F. Kennedy in West Berlin, 1963, to a cheering multitude.

Given the terror in Paris, it was a bad week for the American president to be away in the Philippines and on other foreign travel.

For the soaring rhetoric that comes so easily to Barack Obama went AWOL when ISIS, the terrorist force rising in Syria and Iraq, struck France.

How simple to say something in French, to make tout le monde (all the world) feel we are with them.

When the heart of Paris takes nearly 500 civilian casualties — including young people out on a Friday evening — our head of state must be the mirror of our collective horror, grief and outrage.

President Bill Clinton wept when Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was murdered and led a huge bipartisan delegation on Air Force One to attend the funeral. That’s on a scale seldom seen.

Cerebral Obama is more “contained” than he claimed ISIS was, just days before the outbreak of terror. But you tell me, was he meeting the moment well?

Speaking on the militant attacks, Obama appeared uncharacteristically cross, off-guard and annoyed at the question of changing the modest Syrian refugee policy.

The current plan is to take in about 10,000 Syrians fleeing violence in their country, at which Republican governors, presidential candidates and some senators are balking.

Obama accused Republican critics of being afraid of “widows and orphans” seeking shelter on our shores. At a summit in Turkey, he stated nothing would get better if he were “just more bellicose.” He even suggested the only thing some were doing is “talking as if they’re tough.”

War-weary Obama, who opposes the call for ground forces as futile, is counting the days left before Election Day 2016. (Less than 365!) I’m all for the president speaking freely from the bully pulpit to articulate his core beliefs in his last year in office. To his credit, Obama gave voice this week to why we, a nation of immigrants, can’t shut down what Statue of Liberty symbolizes: a welcome to poor and oppressed peoples.

“Slamming the door in their faces would be a betrayal of our values,” Obama said overseas.

In the Capitol, however, I can say some of Obama’s comments abroad fell flat at home. Senate Republicans, even the few who wish him well, strongly feel the vetting process refugees will go through needs to be explained more fully to lawmakers. The concern is that a cell of terrorists might “present” as refugees to come into the U.S.

Bob Corker (R-TN), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said it was no time to “browbeat” or talk down to Republicans, the majority party in the Senate. New York Senator Chuck Schumer, a leading Democrat, agrees with Republican colleagues that a “pause” in the Syrian refugee plan is warranted.

But there is no reason this debate can’t wait to be conducted here. Timing is everything, and right now the focus is on France, not us. Swift and sure in resolve, France clearly doesn’t need our help in waging war; even FBI agents sent to Paris are not in the thick of the investigation.

Though the president is traveling in Turkey and Asia and can’t physically be in Paris, the brilliant orator among us could be sending bouquets of roses and a profusion of sympathy and solidarity to brokenhearted France.

Among friends — and the French are our oldest friends, since the Revolutionary War — character counts in a crisis. Never more so than when there is a searing death in the family. Deaths out of time and season, I might add. Among the victims, nobody was planning to die that day in the City of Light, plunged into darkness.

In the Folger Theatre, two blocks from the Capitol, the Shakespearean play Pericles opened as the lantern burned. In his famed funeral oration, the Athenian leader Pericles spoke straight to Obama’s message: “We throw open our city to the world, and never by alien acts exclude foreigners from any opportunity of learning or observing, although the eyes of an enemy may occasionally profit by our liberality.”

Kennedy in Berlin. Pericles in Athens. Obama, missing his moment.

To find out more about Jamie Stiehm and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit Creators.com.

Photo: U.S. President Barack Obama takes part in the APEC CEO Summit in Manila, Philippines, November 18, 2015. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

Suspected Mastermind Of Paris Attacks Killed In Raid, Says France

Suspected Mastermind Of Paris Attacks Killed In Raid, Says France

By John Irish and Gregory Blachier

PARIS (Reuters) — The suspected Islamic State mastermind of the Paris attacks was among those killed in a police raid north of the capital, France confirmed on Thursday, bringing an end to the hunt for Europe’s most wanted man.

Authorities said they had identified the corpse of Belgian national Abdelhamid Abaaoud from fingerprints in the aftermath of Wednesday’s raid, in which at least two people died including a female suicide bomber after a gun battle with police.

“It was his body we discovered in the building, riddled with impacts,” a statement from the Paris prosecutor said, a day after the pre-dawn raid. The prosecutor later added that it was unclear whether Abaaoud had detonated a suicide belt.

Abaaoud was accused of orchestrating last Friday’s coordinated bombings and shootings in the French capital, which killed 129 people. Seven assailants died in the attack and a suspected eighth is still on the run.

Prime Minister Manuel Valls broke the news of Abaaoud’s death in parliament on Thursday to applause from lawmakers who were voting to extend a state of emergency for another three months.

“We know today… that the mastermind of the attacks — or one of them, let’s remain cautious — was among those dead,” Valls told reporters.

Even before last week’s attacks, Morroccan-born Abaaoud, 28, was one of Islamic State’s highest-profile European recruits, prominently profiled in the group’s slick online English-language magazine Dabiq, where he boasted of traveling across European borders staging attacks.

The group, which controls swathes of Iraq and Syria, has attracted thousands of young Europeans, and Abaaoud was seen as a leading figure in attracting others to the movement, particularly from his home country Belgium.

He claimed to have escaped a manhunt after a raid in Belgium in 2013 in which two other militants were killed. His own family has disowned him, accusing him of abducting his 13-year-old brother, who was later promoted on the Internet as Islamic State’s youngest foreign fighter in Syria.

Before the attacks, European governments thought Abaaoud was still in Syria. “This is a major failing,” said Roland Jaquard at the International Observatory for Terrorism.

While quickly tracking him down will be seen as a major success for French authorities, his presence in Paris will focus more attention on the difficulty European security services have in monitoring the continent’s borders.

French officials have called for changes to the functioning of the EU’s Schengen zone, which normally does not monitor the entry and exit of citizens of its 26 countries. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians have arrived in Europe as refugees in recent months, including someone who used a passport found at the scene of one of Friday’s attacks.

FIREFIGHT, EXPLOSIONS

Early on Wednesday, police swooped on the house where Abaaoud was holed up in the Paris suburb of St. Denis. Heavily armed officers stormed the building before dawn, triggering a firefight and multiple explosions.

Officials had said on Wednesday that two people were killed in the raid, including a female suicide bomber who blew herself up. Forensic scientists were trying to determine whether a third person had died. Eight people were arrested.

Two police sources and a source close to the investigation told Reuters the St. Denis cell had been planning a new attack on Paris’s La Defense business district. A source close to the investigation said the female bomber who was killed might have been Abaaoud’s cousin.

The victims of the deadliest attacks in France since World War Two came from 17 different countries, many of them young people out on a Friday night at bars, restaurants, a concert hall and a soccer stadium.

Islamic State says it carried out the attacks in retaliation for French air raids against its positions over the past year.

France has called for a global coalition to defeat the group and has launched air strikes on Raqqa, the de-facto Islamic State capital in northern Syria, since the weekend. Russia has also targeted the city in retribution for the downing of a Russian airliner last month that killed 224.

The aftermath of the attacks could see common cause between Western capitals and Moscow, more than a year after the United States and European Union imposed financial sanctions on Russia over its annexation of territory from Ukraine.

Russia and the West are divided over Syria, with Moscow supporting President Bashar al-Assad and Western countries saying he must leave power to end a four-year-old civil war. Moscow launched air strikes in Syria six weeks ago and says it is targeting Islamic State, although most of its strikes have hit areas controlled by other groups opposed to Assad.

There are signs however that the recognition of a common threat since the Paris shootings and the Russian air crash could prompt more efforts to cooperate.

European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker wrote to President Vladimir Putin this week, suggesting closer trade ties between the 28-nation EU and a Russian-led economic bloc, linking them to progress on implementing a ceasefire in Ukraine.

In the letter, seen by Reuters, Juncker underlined the importance of good relations between the European Union and Moscow, “which to my regret have not been able to develop over the past year”. He said he had asked Commission officials to study options for closer ties between the EU and the Moscow-led Eurasian Economic Union of former Soviet states.

Lithuanian Foreign Minister Linas Linkevicius said he was surprised by the letter, which he said did not reflect a common view of EU member states and made no reference to EU sanctions.

INTERNATIONAL COORDINATION

Paris and Moscow are not coordinating their air strikes in Syria, but French President Francois Hollande is due to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Nov. 26 to discuss how their countries’ militaries might work together.

Two days before that, Hollande will meet U.S. President Barack Obama in Washington to discuss the role of a U.S.-led coalition in any unified effort against Islamic State.

France is one of several European countries participating in the U.S.-led coalition’s strikes against Islamic State targets in Iraq, and two months ago became the only European country to join strikes in Syria as well.

Obama on Thursday reiterated the U.S. position that eradicating the group was tied up with ending the civil war in Syria, which could not happen as long as Assad was in power.

“Bottom line is, I do not foresee a situation in which we can end the civil war in Syria while Assad remains in power,” he told reporters in Manila on the sidelines of the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit.

(Additional reporting and writing by Crispian Balmer, Andrew Callus and Ingrid Melander; Writing by Peter Graff; Editing by Pravin Char)

Photo: An undated photograph of a man described as Abdelhamid Abaaoud that was published in the Islamic State’s online magazine Dabiq and posted on a social media website. REUTERS/Social Media Website via Reuters TV

Analysis: Attack In France Spotlights Europe’s Vulnerability To Terrorism

Analysis: Attack In France Spotlights Europe’s Vulnerability To Terrorism

By Patrick J. McDonnell, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

PARIS — At a makeshift shrine down the street from a concert hall turned scene of carnage, a steady stream of well-wishers came Saturday to pay tribute to scores massacred when suicide assailants struck the music theater, a soccer stadium and several restaurants and bars.

“The French will combat these thieves of life,” declared a handwritten note.

But Friday’s brazen assaults — all targeting venues where people went to savor life in Europe’s storied cultural capital — served to dramatize anew the continent’s continued vulnerability to terrorism.

The string of shootings and bombings came less than a year after attacks here on the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a kosher grocery that left 17 dead. Last January’s strikes, while horrific, were aimed at specific targets — an irreverent publication that had lampooned Islam and a market that catered to Jewish shoppers.

This time, the victims appeared chosen simply because they were in France and were out on a weekend night to enjoy music, sports and the company of fellow human beings.

Preventing such attacks in a free society is a daunting security challenge, experts caution, even for nations like France with considerable experience fighting extremist groups and infiltrating militant cells.

“Paris is … a warning that the best counter-terrorist efforts in the world cannot protect any country, particularly the open societies in the West, from every attack,” wrote Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.

French President Francois Hollande labeled the synchronized series of attacks an “act of war” that was “organized and planned from outside,” though details about the planning were publicly vague.

The extremist Islamic State group took credit for the attacks, which claimed more than 125 lives, boasting that it had targeted “the capital of prostitution and obscenity” in retribution for France’s involvement in the U.S.-led coalition bombing of extremist-held terrain in Syria and Iraq.

If Islamic State indeed carried out the attacks, Friday’s operation would represent the latest in a string of deadly operations outside of Syria and Iraq, the group’s home base. Its ability to carry out such sensational assaults would now appear to equal or even eclipse that of al-Qaida, a fierce rival.

Islamic State, a Qaida breakaway faction, has also taken responsibility for twin suicide bombings in a Beirut suburb last week that killed more than 40, and for downing a Russian commercial airliner over the Sinai two weeks ago, killing all 224 on board.

When it first emerged on the scene amid the tumult of the long-running Syrian war, many commentators said that Islamic State’s interests appeared to be largely local in nature. But that has changed considerably, perhaps in response to intense international efforts to destroy the group’s self-proclaimed “caliphate.”

In a chilling tone, Islamic State called Friday’s attacks “the first of the storm and a warning to those who wish to learn.”

Thus the Paris carnage may have been the latest collateral damage from the calamitous Syrian war, which has already destabilized much of the Middle East and helped generate a refugee crisis in Europe.

Friday’s attacks seemed certain to increase pressure on deeply divided world powers to help broker a political settlement to the Syria conflict — and to escalate military operations against Islamic State and other extremist groups that have thrived amid the chaos in Syria.

As investigators delve into the attack, there are many unanswered questions: Was it indeed conceived and planned abroad or in Europe? Where did the assailants get the guns, ammunition and explosives — and where did they assemble the bombs? Do any attackers or support personnel, such as bomb assemblers — remain at large? Police on Saturday were investigating whether one team of attackers may have escaped.

Several witnesses at the Bataclan concert hall mentioned hearing attackers say the words “Syria” and “vengeance.”

“I clearly heard them tell the hostages, ‘It’s the fault of Hollande, it’s the fault of your president, he shouldn’t have intervened in Syria,'” Pierre Janaszak, a radio and TV presenter, told the Agence France-Presse news agency. “They also spoke about Iraq.”

The operation demonstrated a considerable level of sophistication and probably involved weeks or months of surveillance and organization, authorities and experts said.

The use of heavily armed suicide or “kamikaze” attackers, as the media here referred to the assailants, was regarded as a first in France — though experts voiced concerns that the tactic, numbingly familiar in the Middle East, could become more common in Europe and elsewhere.

“Simplicity,” noted Marc Trevidic, a former French anti-terrorism judge, in an interview with BFMTV here. “There is nothing better when it comes to terrorism.”

France is considered particularly vulnerable to domestic terrorism. More than 1,800 of its citizens are believed to have traveled to Syria and Iraq to fight with extremists. Radicalized returnees trained in the Syria-Iraq battle zone present a significant threat, authorities say. But it was unclear late Saturday how many, if any, of the attackers in Friday’s killing rampage had traveled to Syria or Iraq.

The nationalities of the Kalashnikov-wielding assailants in the Paris attacks also remained a question mark. Witnesses at the Bataclan concert described the assailants as young, perhaps in their 20s, and speaking unaccented French, according to media accounts here.

One of the attackers was a 29-year-old Frenchman who had been investigated for “minor offenses” but had never been implicated in acts of terrorism, French public prosecutor Francois Molins said during a news conference.

Still, his involvement would appear to raise anew the question of whether an intelligence failure contributed to the tragedy — as many charged was the case in the January attacks. Those perpetrators were three French citizens, of Algerian and Malian origins, with varying previous links to Islamic extremist elements. All three eventually were killed in police shootouts.

In the aftermath of Friday’s attacks, a Syrian passport was found near the body of one of the three bombers who struck near Stade de France sports arena, where a soccer match between France and Germany was being held. But it was not immediately clear if the passport belonged to the attacker.

A Greek official said the passport found at the scene in Paris had been presented by a Syrian who crossed into the European Union via the Greek island of Leros in October. That again raised the worrisome specter that some small minority of the multitudes of migrants coming to Europe from Syria could be terrorist operatives.

(Special correspondent Nabih Bulos in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and Times staff writers Alexandra Zavis and Michael Finnegan in Los Angeles and Richard A. Serrano, Bob Drogin, W.J. Hennigan, Brian Bennett and Paul Richter of the Tribune Washington Bureau in Washington contributed to this report.)

(c)2015 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

French fire brigade members aid an injured individual near the Bataclan concert hall following fatal shootings in Paris, November 13, 2015. REUTERS/Christian Hartmann

ISIS Strikes Paris With Multiple Terror Attacks; 129 Reported Dead; France Closes Its Borders

ISIS Strikes Paris With Multiple Terror Attacks; 129 Reported Dead; France Closes Its Borders

This story is developing and being updated.

At least 129 people are dead and over 350 are injured after a coordinated series of terror attacks throughout Paris Friday night.

The Telegraph and the AFP is reporting that at least seven sites were attacked, many in popular nightlife sections of the city and tourist spots.

President François Hollande called the attacks an “act of war,” and declared a state of emergency and said that the country would close its borders. The military was being mobilized and travel may be restricted, he said.

Concertgoers were held hostage in the Bataclan Theater, where an American rock band — Eagles of Death Metal — had been scheduled to perform. CNN reported that there were six to eight attackers, and eyewitnesses reported sounds of screams and gunfighters.

Julien Pearce, a radio reporter who was in attendance at the concert, described men dressed in black, carrying Kalashnikovs, firing into the tightly packed crowd for 10 to 15 minutes. Describing the scene to CNN, Pearce said: “They said nothing. They just shot. They were just shooting into people.”

“It was a bloodbath,” he said.

Police raided the building, bringing the siege to a close, but it was unclear initially how many of the hostages were killed. Eighty-seven people were killed in the concert hall alone, and bodies were still being recovered on Saturday morning.

From Reuters:

The assaults came as France, a founder member of the U.S.-led coalition waging air strikes against Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, was on high alert for terrorist attacks.

It was the worst such attack in Europe since the Madrid train bombings of 2004, in which 191 died.

Hollande said the attacks had been organized from abroad by Islamic State with internal help.

“Faced with war, the country must take appropriate action,” he said after an emergency meeting of security chiefs. He also announced three days of national mourning.

Former president Nicolas Sarkozy added in a statement: “The war we must wage should be total.”

During a visit to Vienna, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said “we are witnessing a kind of medieval and modern fascism at the same time.”

In its claim of responsibility, Islamic State said the attacks were a response to France’s campaign against its fighters.

It also distributed an undated video in which a militant said France would not live peacefully as long it took part in U.S.-led bombing raids against them.

“As long as you keep bombing you will not live in peace. You will even fear traveling to the market,” said a bearded Arabic-speaking militant, flanked by other fighters.

A French government source told Reuters there were 127 dead, 67 in critical condition and 116 wounded. Six attackers blew themselves up and one was shot by police. There may have been an eighth attacker, but this is not confirmed.

The attacks, in which automatic weapons and explosives belts were used, lasted 40 minutes.

“The terrorists, the murderers, raked several cafe terraces with machine-gun fire before entering (the concert hall). There were many victims in terrible, atrocious conditions in several places,” police prefect Michel Cadot told reporters.

Three restaurants, the Petit Cambodge in the 11th district, Le Carillon in the 10th and La Belle Equipe in the 11th, were all attacked by men with guns, according to the BBC.

The French National Stadium was hosting a soccer match this evening between France and Germany, when, AP reported, two suicide attacks and one bombing occurred. French President François Hollande was in attendance, and was taken to safety.

A Vine of the game is circulating, where players are seen stopping at the sound of the explosion.

Reuters reports that American security officials believe the attacks were coordinated. Officials believe that the death toll will climb, with President Hollande calling the attacks “unprecedented.”

It is unclear how many gunmen were involved in the attacks.

In a press briefing, President Obama called the attacks “outrageous,” and said that the French values of liberty, equality, and fraternity would endure “beyond any act of terrorism.”

CNN reported that Islamic State sympathizers were celebrating the attacks on Twitter.

A general view of the scene shows rescue service personnel working near the covered bodies outside a restaurant following a shooting incident in Paris, France, November 13, 2015. REUTERS/Philippe Wojazer