PARIS — Since the devastating Nov. 13 attacks in Paris, the French police have offered only a fragmentary outline of their response and of how they deployed antiterror teams and other forces. The somberness and solidarity in the weeks since have muted public criticism. No review of the police’s performance has been announced.
Yet accounts from survivors and police officials, as well as the analysis of outside experts, make clear that there were substantial periods when the terrorists operated with little or no hindrance from the authorities, and that France’s top-heavy chain of command, which has diminished neighborhood patrols in favor of specialized units, contributed to delays.
The first officer to reach the worst of the carnage — at the Bataclan concert hall, where 90 of the 130 victims that night were killed — got there roughly 15 minutes into the attack. Armed with only a service sidearm, he managed to stall the killing by shooting one attacker, blowing up the terrorist’s suicide vest while sparing the victims around him.
Yet the officer was ordered to withdraw in favor of a more specialized antiterrorism unit, which arrived half an hour into the assault after initially being sent to sites where the violence had already ended. Another specialized unit nearby was apparently never deployed, according to a French news report.
In the meantime, the remaining two attackers at the Bataclan fortified themselves with hostages, while scores of wounded — pretending to be dead or paralyzed with fear — lay scattered in eerie silence, bleeding on the concert-hall floor among dozens of corpses. It would be nearly three hours before the police brought the assault to an end.
By any measure, the events of Nov. 13 were a nightmare scenario: three teams of terrorists, the country’s president under threat, and suicidal killers with military-grade weapons striking six sites within minutes of one another. There is no doubt the French police acted bravely. A seamlessly choreographed response by any police force may well have been impossible.
Still, several French police experts, and a look at the chronology, suggest that the delayed response points to weaknesses in the highly centralized French police structure. A greater local police presence might have limited the killing, several experts said.
“We have a big machine, and a relatively heavy one,” said Christian Mouhanna, the leader of a unit focused on law and order at the National Center for Scientific Research, one of France’s main research institutions.
“By the time the information gets out and reaches up, mobilizing the specialized units takes a relatively long time,” Mr. Mouhanna said. “Our police are not organized along local lines. Everything has to filter up to the central organization at the prefecture.”
A colleague of his, René Lévy, a police expert, said the response raised the question of whether that system needs to be changed. As with the deadly assault on the Charlie Hebdo satirical newspaper, terrorists eluded the authorities in the heart of Paris after nimble and deadly attacks.
“It made me think about the strategy, which is that one does nothing and one waits for the arrival of the specialists,” Mr. Lévy said. “Maybe there is something to think about, because in fact, ordinary police might have limited the damage.”
But the local police — officers patrolling a beat by foot — essentially do not exist in France. An attempt at “neighborhood police” in the late 1990s was unpopular with the police unions and was stopped once political power shifted to the right a few years later.
“We have a police force that is disconnected from the terrain,” Mr. Mouhanna said.
That disconnect was a decided disadvantage with so much shooting and bombing happening at so many locations at once, leaving the cartography of the November attacks unclear for critical stretches for a force under centralized command.
Beyond the Bataclan, the Paris police faced attacks that played out quickly across miles and threatened President François Hollande, who was at the soccer stadium where two suicide bombers blew themselves up. Scores were wounded, overwhelming hospitals.
So great was the confusion that the specialized antiterrorism unit — the Search and Intervention Brigade, known by its French initials, B.R.I. — initially headed toward restaurants on Rue de Charonne where the killing had ended more than 20 minutes before, according to the French news media. By then, the terrorists were long gone.
It then took half an hour for the B.R.I. to reach the Bataclan. They arrived at about 10:15 p.m., by which time the slaughter on the concert-hall floor was over, according to police statements in the French news media.
“Right there, we skidded,” the B.R.I.’s chief, Christophe Molmy, told the newspaper Libération, acknowledging the mistake.
Another two hours passed before the B.R.I. ended the siege at the Bataclan, storming an upstairs room where the terrorists had taken refuge behind a group of terrified hostages.
Other experts emphasized the importance of speed. “Your job is to reduce the time on target, which is how long is that person in there, actively engaged in killing, before you can get in there and stop it,” said John J. Miller, the deputy commissioner for counterterrorism and intelligence at the New York Police Department.
Major tragedies are bound to expose flaws. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks,an independent federal commission found that the response of the police and fire departments had been undermined by poor planning, inadequate equipment, faulty communication and generations-old interagency rivalries.
The Paris police prefecture, which oversees all police units in the city under the Interior Ministry, declined to make officers available for interviews, as did the Interior Ministry and a leading police union.
But several officers spoke on television and in newspapers in the days immediately after the attacks. Their graphic accounts of the Bataclan siege underscored the horror of what they had found. “It was an incredible scene,” Mr. Molmy told the Figaro newspaper.
But the accounts also speak to the segmented nature of French policing.
The downside of France’s system of deploying specialized units like the B.R.I. is that “the beat officers are not highly trained, and so you’ve got to wait for the specialists to arrive,” Mr. Mouhanna, of the research institute, said.
“There is a question of quickness of reaction,” he added. “We have a lot of officers in offices. On the ground, we don’t have that many.”
The first police officer to penetrate the Bataclan was a member of the Brigade Anti-Criminalité, an anti-crime unit known as the BAC: a quasi-local officer whose unit would have been assigned to patrol the area by vehicle. There are few such night patrols in Paris, experts said.
In an interview on French television that was posted online, a man said to be the officer, unidentified and his face blurred, recalled a scene of “indescribable horror.” “We open the door, nothing,” he said. “It was surreal. Hundreds of bodies stretched out everywhere.”
The officer described seeing one of the terrorists on the left of the stage, taking aim at a group of hostages, hands on heads, “who were walking toward him very calmly, very dignified, but who seemed totally resigned to their fate.”
Quickly, the officer fired, he said, and there was an explosion. He had hit the terrorist’s suicide belt. At that point, the killing stopped, and the remaining two terrorists retreated to the floor above, grabbing hostages.
Some 15 minutes later, Mr. Molmy arrived at the Bataclan with his men from the B.R.I.
“It was absolute silence,” Mr. Molmy said in an interview with AFPTV posted online. “Even those who were still alive didn’t dare move.”
No one knew where the terrorists were. It was dark, and the ground floor of the concert hall was carpeted with bodies. It would take another two hours to end the terrorist attack and retrieve all the wounded.
“We were freeing hostages continuously,” Mr. Molmy told a television interviewer. “Each time somebody came toward us, we had to make sure they were not wearing a suicide belt.” But there were no more gunshots.
About an hour after arriving, Mr. Molmy’s force divided into two thin columns. They were proceeding along a narrow corridor when they finally heard a voice: a hostage, shouting from behind a door, who was being made to serve as the spokesman for the two remaining terrorists.
Hurried exchanges with the terrorists followed over a cellphone for about an hour.
“They were very nervous,” Mr. Molmy told a television interviewer. The attackers threatened to decapitate the hostages and spoke of the caliphate sought by the Islamic State extremist group. “At 12:18, we understood that we had to get on with it, because they had become extremely nervous and were threatening to blow themselves up,” Mr. Molmy said.
The first B.R.I. column opened the door, protected by a 176-pound shield. “We found ourselves in a corridor, faced by about 20 terrified hostages, and behind them, the terrorists,” Mr. Molmy said. The terrorists opened fire immediately.
The shield sustained dozens of bullet impacts. Then it slipped from the hands of the officers, leaving them exposed.
At that moment, one of them shot at a shadow, hitting the suicide vest of an attacker and causing it to explode. A second explosion quickly followed when the other terrorist detonated his own vest. The assault was over, and to the wonder of the officers, none of the hostages had been killed.
“This scenario, certainly, was a nightmare,” Mr. Mouhanna said. “Very, very difficult to manage.” http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/01/world/europe/response-to-paris-attacks-points-to-weaknesses-in-french-police-structure.html?_r=0
West Still Grapples for a Response to Islamic State: By Yaroslav Trofimov in The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 31, 2015 5:30 a.m. ET
Feeling the pressure on its home turf in Syria and Iraq, Islamic State has taken the war to its enemies’ homes by launching terrorist attacks overseas—and promised more such carnage in 2016.
How to respond to the threat is becoming the focus of political debate on both sides of the Atlantic—with consequences that shape the future of the Middle East and the West.
In the main goal of terrorism—to terrorize—Islamic State has already succeeded. Security has become the main issue for the presidential campaign in the U.S., where a recent poll found that more people fear an imminent terrorist attack now than either right after Sept. 11, 2001 or any time since. France has lived in a state of emergency since Islamic State killed 130 people in November in Paris. In Egypt, the struggling tourism industry collapsed after the October downing of a Russian airliner.
Russian state security services have admitted that a bomb brought down a Metrojet aircraft over Egypt
This anxiety feeds, to a large extent, on a sense of impotence. A year and a half since the U.S. began military action against Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, leading a coalition of 65 nations, the extremist group has managed to retain the bulk of its territory while spawning new affiliates around the world.
The entrance of Russia and France into the campaign against Islamic State in Syria in recent months has, so far, produced only limited results. In Iraq, where local forces have managed to recapture most of the city of Ramadi that they lost to Islamic State in March, much of the Sunni heartland remains under the extremists’ sway.
Such an ability to “persist and advance,” in the words of Islamic State’s motto, has allowed the group to grow in the public imagination into a multi-headed monster of near-mythical strength—an image that simultaneously attracts recruits and fuels bigotry in the West.
Considering the indiscriminate nature of Islamic State’s targets, it would be nearly impossible to stop all its terrorist attacks unless the group is physically eradicated from the vast territory it controls in Syria and Iraq—an area that attracts thousands of foreign volunteers and serves as a training ground for future terrorists. Even that ground war would only mitigate, and not completely eliminate, the threat—especially by self-radicalized “lone wolves.”
These independent operators, however, generally inflict only a fraction of the damage caused by Islamic State-directed efforts. And as long as Islamic State maintains access to the industrial base and resources of eastern Syria and western Iraq, it can develop a capacity to launch truly catastrophic attacks, terrorism experts warn.
“The learning curve facilitates their operations,” said Bruce Hoffman, director of the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University and a former U.S. government adviser on counterterrorism. “They have the former engineers and scientists and military officers. The longer they have the sanctuaries and the safe havens, the closer we tip toward the potentiality of them using nonconventional weapons.”
Despite Iraq’s recent success in Ramadi, by now it is also increasingly apparent that no regional Muslim coalition could dislodge Islamic State from its safe havens in Raqqa and Mosul anytime soon without significant military involvement by the U.S.
Many Arab countries say they would be ready to join such a broad coalition, along the lines of the one President George Bush assembled in 1990 to liberate Kuwait. So far, however, the Obama administration has been steadfast in its determination to avoid a new ground war in the Middle East, though it increased the tempo of air operations in Iraq and sent small numbers of special-operations forces to Iraq and Syria.
In the administration’s calculations, the cost, including in lives, of any conventional invasion still far outweighs the potential damage that Islamic State could cause to America. Whether that is true depends on one thing: how successful the U.S. and allies will prove in thwarting Islamic State’s overseas plots in the months to come.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/west-grapples-for-a-response-to-islamic-state-1451557801
ISIS is Not a Terrorist Organization: by Ajit Maan in Small Wars Journal, Dec 29, 2015 at 2.14pm
The writer, Vice-President for Research and Analysis, ENODO Global, is author of Counter-Terrorism: Narrative Strategies.
Given the climate of U.S. public opinion about U.S. intervention in the Middle East it is not surprising that the current administration has focused its foreign policy objectives on counter-terrorism.
But that priority limits our position to a defensive one. Further, the term “terrorist organization” offers little insight and limits our understanding and approach. ISIS is an insurgent organization using terrorism as a tactic.
The American public is wary of getting into what it views as quagmires, particularly in the Middle East, but is less hesitant when it comes to fighting terrorists who we view as a direct threat to the US. As a result, we have intervened in Syria to fight ISIS but not Assad.
While ISIS certainly employs terrorism as a tactic, and the label is one that de-legitimizes an opponent, the label also obscures the facts. To call it a terrorist organization is to mislabel it.
Traditionally, groups were identified as terrorist groups if their goal was ultimately to effect policy through intimidation. The policies in question were regionally specific: Ireland, Israel, even as specific as the green line separating Muslims and Christians in Beirut. What we are witnessing now is something closer to criminal psychopathology than terrorism. And the aims of these groups are not regionally specific but often international in scope. Moreover, the tactics have gone beyond intimidation to affect policy.
Terrorist organizations do not typically hold territory. They are generally comprised of small numbers, and they cannot prevail in a military confrontation. They pose an asymmetric threat. ISIS, however, has impressive military capabilities, has an estimated 30,000 man army, and conducts itself as a global criminal enterprise looting its victims, exchanging hostages for millions in ransom, stealing and selling antiquities, imposing taxes, routinely engaging in extortion, creating and imposing laws. It has demonstrated a disregard for national borders and is holding territory in Iraq and Syria. In the first six months of 2014 it took Fallujah, Ramadi, Mosul, Tikrit, and al Qaim, while the world watched in disbelief.
And ISIS has a decidedly genocidal aspect. Its victims are not just means to an end. The “end” of the mass executions by ISIS is to rid the earth of targeted populations – never mind the effect on the rest of us. Terrorism is just one tactic groups like ISIS employ in addition to conventional military operations, unconventional warfare techniques, state-building and even humanitarian aid. ISIS has even issued its own currency.
If we understand ISIS as an insurgency using terrorist tactics, their goals are comprehensible. Insurgency is the strategy; terrorism and guerrilla warfare are its tactics.
Because ISIS is not simply a terrorist organization, what is required to deal with this threat goes beyond the CT strategies of any one country. It is going to require joint military tactics to contain its expansion on the ground and to protect soft power initiatives designed to counter its media appeal, stem recruitment, and ensure diplomatic progress.
A light military footprint may be tactically advantageous in short-term local conflicts, but our focus on counter-terrorism strategy leaves us unfocused on other forms of instability in the region that can undermine our interests in the Middle East.
In order to get ahead of the game we should focus on preventing and mitigating regional conflicts. Regional instability and non-functional states create a vacuum that terrorist organizations are ready to fill. Even if it were possible to kill off every member of ISIS, new groups would form to take its place as long as core grievances are not addressed. When governments are too fragile to operate, and when fringe groups have greater capacity to address the needs of populations than their governments, some organization is going to take advantage of that vacuum.
Robust diplomacy combined with conflict resolution and mitigation strategies can potentially disrupt conflicting tensions and reduce the level and scope of the antagonisms and civil disorder that extremist groups require in order to flourish.
We should not think of the marker of success as having the solution to every problem. Success would be the reduction and containment of conflict. And it is not our job to do this alone but we have a vested interest in partnering with vulnerable states, like Yemen and Iraq, to help invigorate their governance and defense capacities. Insurgency happens when governance fails.
The real threat from these groups to the US isn’t the acts of terror they perpetrate. The real threat results from the regional instability they create or take advantage of. When they become insurgencies or function as states we are in big trouble. And that is where we are now. Containment from here on means stabilizing the region through partnerships and protecting civilian refugees.
Now is the time to take preventative action. This does not mean exporting democracy. It means resolving, or at least mitigating, conflict with the goal of making states less vulnerable to civil war and promoting regional stability by providing local support and capacity building to regional allies and creating new ones.
The situation in Syria has left over 12 million people displaced, has de-stabilized much of the Middle East, has created an unprecedented refugee crisis that has not been addressed – and the situation rages on with no end in sight.
The refugee crisis threatens to become something more if not for intervention.
Sustained military attacks kill a few fighters, more civilians, and heighten the instability that generates mass exoduses and the desperation that ISIS capitalizes on. It also reiterates the narrative of extremist Sunnis that they are under attack. Military attacks presented on social media and the instability they create on the ground as well as the feeding they do to the extremist narrative provide a perfect breeding ground for further recruitment.
ISIS’s real or imagined attractions may fail to deliver but so have countries like Syria failed to deliver. Removing ISIS militarily, even if it were possible, without removing the elements that enable it to flourish is not a good strategy.
Frustrated with the complexity of the problem, some voices have called for a conventional war. But to fight a conventional war against an unconventional enemy is a losing proposition that would deplete our resources and the majority of the American public simply would not get behind such a move. We would not win. Do we withdraw and take an isolationist stance? We cannot. Our own stability and security is too interdependent on the rest of the world’s stability and security.
We must cooperate with other countries that are equally or more threatened by ISIS’s advance and advocate joint diplomatic endeavors to assist refugees and local forces like the Kurdish Pesh Merga. And together we must wake the UN out of its slumber. When millions of people are ousted from their homes by a global criminal enterprise it is time for the UN to act.http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/isis-is-not-a-terrorist-organization
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