Carnage returned to Paris yesterday, ten-months after the al-Qaeda-ISIS-inspired Charlie Hebdo attacks Jan 7, 2015, killing 12, injuring 11 in response allegedly to cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed. Yesterday’s six-venue attack murdered 129 around the 10th and 11th arrondissements, with 89 killings happening at the Bataclan theatre where over 1,000 concert-goers watched an American heavy-metal rock band Eagles of Death perform. Terrorist strapped with suicide vests and firing Kalasnikov semi-automatic rifles shot attendees like fish-in-a-barrel. French President Francois Hollande said ISIS actions were a “declaration of war,” prompting this weekend’s G20 summit at the Regnum Carya Hotel Convention Center in Antalya, Turkey to address the mayhem. While Hollande won’t attend, the NATO alliance will no doubt discuss a coherent military response.
No matter how much U.S. President Barack Obama resisted putting boots on the ground in Iraq and Syria to confront ISIS, it’s clear that the June 15, 2014 U.S. bombing campaign in Iraq and Sept. 22, 2014 air strikes in Syria haven’t done enough to stop the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, consolidating some 30% of sovereign lands seized from Iraq and Syria. While not formally claiming responsibility of the Friday, Nov. 13 Paris attacks, ISIS celebrated on Internet’s social media. “To teach France, and all nations following its path, that they will remain at the top of Islamic State’s list of targets, and that the smell of death won’t leave their noses as long as they partake in their crusader campaign,” read an ISIS communiqué. France—and the entire Western alliance—faces an implacable enemy, requiring collective military action to end what’s become a scourge on the civilized world.
When the U.S. was attacked by Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda terror network Sept. 11, 2001, former President George W. Bush. began Operation Enduring Freedom Oct. 7, 2007, the war against the Taliban, in Afghanistan. U.S. officials tried to target Bin Laden but he was too slippery for the Pentagon, fleeing Afghanistan with his Taliban friends Dec. 15, 2001. Sixteen years later, the war still rages on. Bush eventually detoured into Iraq March 20, 2003, toppling Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein April 10, 2003, creating the power vacuum that eventually gave rise to ISIS. When the G20 meets in Antalya today, they need to see the differences and similarities between the Iraq and Afghan wars. “Faced with war, the country must take appropriate action,” said Hollande, hinting that France is finally ready to join a military alliance to send ground troops to Iraq and Syria to expel ISIS from its safe haven.
Hollande minced no words blaming ISIS, like the Charlie Hebdo attacks last January, for the Paris bloodbath, causing France the largest death toll since WWII. Hollande called ISIS attacks “an act of war committed by Daesh [ISIS] that was prepared, organized and planned from outside [of France]” with the help of local ISIS sympathizers. ISIS learned well from Bin Laden’s recruiting tactics, providng guns-and-butter to wayward youth, readily available from the Mideast’s failed states and terrorist breeding grounds in Europe’s ghettoized suburbs, abundantly housing large numbers of unhappy Muslims from the Mideast and North Africa. When Hollande talks about outside or inside forces, he’s referring to ISIS’s command-and-control in Raqqa, Syria, influencing Mideast and North African refugees housed in French slums, vulnerable to ISIS’s recruiting practices.
When 39-year-old U.S. Army psychiatrist Major Nidal Malik Hasan massacred 13 soldiers at a Fort Hood, Texas deployment center Nov. 5, 2009, the Obama administration denied any terrorist involvement for weeks. When Hasan’s email train with Yemen’s U.S.-born al-Qaeda chief Anwar Awlaki became undeniable, it showed the power of radical Islam’s recruitment techniques. More information about the eight dead terrorists in Paris shows that at least some were radicalized in the Paris slums by ISIS, easy picking for disenfranchised youth seeing no future other than martyrdom by Islamic extremist groups. One of the AK-47-wielding terrorists at the Batcalan theater reportedly blamed Hollande for France’s attacks on Muslim lands. Whether or not there’s any connection to the Jan. 15, 2015 thwarted Belgium terror attack, ISIS has no problem recruiting suicide-bombing martyrs.
Law enforcement around the globe has an impossible task of uncovering terror attacks in the making. Former U.S. President George W. Bush got one thing right in the war on terror: It’s a military, not a police, operation. Meeting in Antalya, Turkey, G20 leaders with a dog in the fight must finally coordinate a coherent military response to ISIS. Leaving ISIS alone has only emboldened its global recruitment. “Indeed you have been ordered to fight the infidel where you find him—what are you waiting for?” said Abu Maryam in an ISIS video. “Know that jihad in this time is obligatory on all,” proving that there’s no stopping ISIS recruitment. Western powers, as Bush did with Operation Enduring Freedom, must take the battle to ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Only defeat on the battlefield will weaken ISIS’s intoxicating call to disenfranchised youth looking to survive or eventually find paradise.