Paris attacks: Are aerial attacks the answer?
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Two days following the horrible massacres that left 129 people dead in the centre of Paris during the night of Friday, Nov 13, the French forces carried out bombing raids on Raqqa, the Daesh capital in Syria. Though the French Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian has qualified the operations as a vital blow to the militant Islamic State group, not many people, including Prime Minister Manuel Valls, seem to believe that will bring an end to the acts of fanatical terrorism in France itself.
Scepticism, though somewhat subdued in view of the highly emotional atmosphere reigning in the country, was already expressed by intellectuals when President François Hollande had led a street march in Paris on Jan 11 this year following the killings of 12 journalists belonging to Charlie Hebdo four days earlier.
‘Is dancing and singing in the streets and wearing rather ridiculous badges of I am Charlie for the benefit of TV cameras our answer to the war of terrorism carried out by people who are born in this very democratic country?’ many people had asked.
‘The real questions are,’ said they, ‘how could the Kouachi brothers and their accomplice Coulibali who had carried out the Jan 7 killings move in and out of France at will, cross the Turkish border, get training with the Daesh, then come back armed with Kalashnikov rifles and do what they pleased without the security forces being aware of their activities?’
Can Western powers resolve this crisis by conducting air strikes on Daesh bases in Syria alone?
Details are seeping out minute by minute of Friday’s massacres. At least two abandoned cars were discovered Saturday morning: a grey VW Polo full of three Kalashnikov rifles and plenty of ammunition to make one’s head reel right next to the Bataclan concert hall in the middle of Paris where 89 people were gunned down, and the other a black Seat in the suburb of Montreuil. Both were rented in Belgium and their drivers and other passengers had just casually got in and crossed the border through the highway without anyone suspecting anything.
Further investigations have revealed that three brothers of Arab origin who lived in Belgium had close links with Daesh and at least one of them had been to Syria a number of times.
The eldest of these brothers named Ibrahim Abdeslam killed himself after attacking a café on Friday night, but the other two, Mohammad and Salah Abdeslam safely made their way back to Belgium where Mohammad was arrested while Salah quietly disappeared and is still being hunted by the French and Belgian police forces.
One of the attackers who exploded his suicide vest has been identified as Omar Ismail Mostefai, son of an Algerian baker living in Chartres, some 50 kilometres southwest of Paris. It is only now that the police officials are giving us the details of his visit to Syria in 2012.
Another suspected terrorist named Abdel Hamed Abaoud, shot by the police on Friday, was also a resident of Belgium and was known to the security forces since 2013 as an active jihadist and a close associate of Mehdi Nemmouche who had killed four people in the Jewish museum in Brussels in June last year.
These details may sound banal but they are nevertheless horrifying in the sense that despite being on police records the above-named terrorists could carry out their ghastly missions unhampered and that the security forces intervened and made these facts public only after so many innocent people, including a number of Arab Muslims, had lost their lives.
It will, however, be interesting to know what President François Hollande envisages by way of his riposte to Friday’s attacks, as by now he knows full well that wearing badges and marching in the streets have not served his purpose — one cannot protest to the terrorists about having been mistreated!
As these lines are being written President François Hollande is preparing a 45-minute-long speech that he plans to make before an emergency joint session of the French parliament hastily gathered in the Versailles Palace. In his address the President intends to make it formal that the Friday attack was ‘an act of war, perpetrated by an army of terrorists, guided by the powers based in Syria, prepared and organised with European logistics in view and helped by the accomplices of these powers who live in Europe’.
But not everyone seems to agree that France or the other Western powers including the United States, will be able to resolve this crisis by carrying out air attacks on Daesh bases in Syria alone.
Olivier Roy, a French expert in international affairs and Islamic history who has written a great deal about the Afghan war during the 1990s and is currently a professor at the Florence University says: “The question now is how to translate into action the outrage sparked by the attacks in Paris on Friday night. A major ground operation by Western forces, like the one conducted in Afghanistan in 2001, seems out of the question, if only because an international intervention would mean getting bogged down endlessly in the local Arab conflicts. A joint offensive by local Arab powers seems even more unlikely, given the differences among their ulterior motives and would require reaching a political agreement between regional actors — Saudi Arabia and Iran, to begin with.
“Hence the road ahead is long, unless the extremist Islamic State, or Daesh, suddenly collapses under the weight of its own expansionist aspirations and of divisions between its foreign recruits and local Arab populations. In any event, the Islamic State could eventually turn out to be its own worst enemy.”
The writer is a journalist based in Paris.
Published in Dawn, November 17th, 2015
