France Responds to Attacks with Airstrikes, Police Raids

France launched punitive airstrikes against the Islamic State on Sunday night in response to a coordinated set of bombings and shootings on Friday night that killed 129 people across Paris. Residents of the Islamic State’s de facto capital, Raqqa, Syria, “said they counted at least 30 bombs, which they said hit, among other things, a local football stadium, a museum and medical facilities,” the Washington Post reports. The United States also conducted airstrikes against the Islamic State’s oil smuggling network this morning, which had previously not been targeted because of concerns about civilian casualties. French authorities also conducted a series of raids on suspected Islamic extremists, arresting 23 people; police actions are also underway in Brussels, where some of the perpetrators of the Paris violence are believed to have prepared for the attack.

The attack was quickly tied back to the Islamic State, which asserted its responsibility. Reports have noted that intelligence from multiple countries suggested the Islamic State would try to attack Paris, which contributed to France’s decision to begin carrying out airstrikes in Syria on Oct. 8. At least one of the eight attackers, who has been identified as Omar Ismael Mostefai, a French citizen and petty criminal living in Chartres, may have traveled to Syria in 2012. Others seem to have been in communication with members of the Islamic State. A Syrian passport belonging to a refugee who arrived in Greece on Oct. 3 was found at the scene of one of the attacks, but officials have not confirmed he was one of the gunmen; still, the attacks and suspicion of refugees has already prompted a backlash. European leaders are reportedly reconsidering plans for resettlement, and U.S. governors in Michigan and Alabama said they will refuse any plans to resettle Syrian refugees in their states.

U.S. and Britain Push Russia on Islamic State after Syria Talks

After international talks in Vienna reaffirmed a framework for a political solution in Syria this weekend, U.S. President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron are meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the meeting of the G20 in Antalya, Turkey, to discuss military actions against the Islamic State. “We have our differences with the Russians, not least because they’ve done so much to degrade the non-Isil opposition to Assad, people who could be part of the future of Syria,” Cameron said ahead of his meeting this morning. “But the conversation I want to have with Vladimir Putin is to say look, there is one thing we agree about which is we’d be safer in Russia, we’d be safer in Britain if we destroy ISIL.” In Antalya yesterday, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called the plan for Syria discussed in Vienna “encouraging and ambitious.”

Headlines

• Lebanese officials announced yesterday that they had arrested seven Syrian and two Lebanese individuals suspected of plotting attacks, including the twin suicide bombings that killed 43 people in South Beirut on Friday.

• The United States carried out an airstrike against the leader of the Islamic State’s operations in Libya, an Iraqi named Wissam Najm Abd Zayd al Zubayadi and also called Abu Nabil.

• Five Yemeni Guantanamo Bay detainees who were never charged with crimes and had been cleared for release were transferred to the United Arab Emirates, the U.S. Department of Defense said Sunday; 107 people remain at the detention facility, including 48 individuals who have been cleared for release.

• A gunman opened fire on a car near Hebron on Friday, killing an Israeli man and his son and wounding a woman and boy; Israeli officials believe the attacker was part of a Hamas cell.

• The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has assessed that 26 people were killed in Yemen by a pair of rare cyclones that caused severe flooding along the country’s southern coast; 1,500 families remain displaced on account of damage from the storms.

Arguments and Analysis

“What Paris Taught Us About The Islamic State” (Clint Watts, War on the Rocks)

“Al Shabaab’s violent path in Somalia over the past few years is instructive of what we currently see with the Islamic State. By 2010, al Shabaab had reached its peak before a containment strategy slowly shrunk its harshly enforced sharia state and pushed it out of key urban strongholds. As the group retracted, its strategy and operations shifted from conventional fighting and insurgency to terrorist attacks, first in Somali cities like Mogadishu before expanding regionally throughout the group’s support network and support base in the Horn of Africa. Today, al Shabaab holds a fraction of the territory it once dominated, but continues to launch fierce terrorist attacks against soft targets. The lesson is this: If an extremist group that has seized territory starts to lose it, it will be highly incentivized to turn to terrorist operations that allow for maximizing effects at a lower cost. The Islamic State propelled its recruitment and resourcing over the past three years by sustaining the initiative, growing its state through battlefield successes and acquisitions. But the group has now peaked: It is losing territory, many of its fighters are dying in battle, defections from their ranks continue to increase, recruitment flows are slower and smaller, and new regional Islamic State affiliates in countries like Libya and Egypt now provide a range of options for potential recruits to join a group locally rather than travel to Syria.”

“ISIS Executed My Son. I’m Not Done Fighting.” (Diane Foley, Esquire)

“Can we learn as an American government to be shrewder, and to be willing to talk to enemies so we can better understand them and outsmart them? In Jim’s situation, they outsmarted us in a big way. They were hugely ahead of the curve in terms of their ability to encrypt their messages and to use platforms like Twitter and such. They were very shrewd. And to me it’s appalling that our government with all the brilliant people and assets we have could not be equally as shrewd and engage them in a shrewd way to capture them if you will. But instead there was all this miscommunication, and people—people’s hands felt tied, so therefore we were left alone as an American family to attempt to deal with these terrorists. Which was ludicrous. And a lot of that is cultures and little turf wars within our own government. But you know, we’re people. People in government are people, right? Unfortunately, that’s why we need the sacrifices of courageous young Americans to point out the lack of coordination, lack of communication, that still persists.”

-J. Dana Stuster

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