SYRIA: French Attack on Islamic State at Raqqa

French aircraft undertook a fierce bombing campaign against Islamic State positions inside Syria late Sunday, less than 48 hours after gunmen killed at least 132 people and wounded hundreds more in the worst terror attack on French soil in modern history.

The French Defense Ministry said in a statement posted on its website that the intense bombing campaign against the Islamic State’s defacto capital, Raqqa, destroyed “a command post, a jihadist recruitment centre and arms and munitions depot” as well as “a terrorist training camp.” It offered no estimate of casualties but said that its objectives had been destroyed.

The 12 French planes flew from bases in the United Arab Emirates and Jordan, and the mission was coordinated with the United States, the ministry said. The aircraft dropped 20 bombs.

French President Francois Hollande had promised Saturday that France would respond without mercy to Friday night’s terrorist attacks, which struck at six crowded nightspots in the French capital and a suburb, Saint-Denis.

The French retaliation came as French police acknowledged that they had been wrong when they’d said earlier that all the shooters responsible for Friday night’s horror were dead.

French police said at least one suspect had escaped, and they issued a Europe-wide alert for the man, Abdeslam Salah, 26, a Belgian citizen who police said had rented a Volkswagen Polo that was found parked outside the Bataclan concert hall, the scene of the bloodiest of Friday night’s attacks.

Other evidence suggests that at least one more suspect might be at large.

French officials have said the bodies of seven terrorists have been located – six who had triggered their suicide belts and one who was shot by police. Salah would make eight.

But French prosecutors have said the assailants worked in three “teams,” while witnesses at the locations of the attacks have consistently described three attackers at each, indicating nine assailants in all.

Additionally, three assault rifles were found in an abandoned car believed used in drive-by shootings that killed at least 38 people at restaurants, suggesting three shooters had been in the car. Only one of those shooters has been accounted for, a terrorist who blew himself up.

The other dead terrorists included three who blew themselves up outside the national soccer stadium and the three attackers thought responsible for killing 89 people at the Bataclan concert hall; two of those killed themselves by detonating their explosive belts and the third was shot by police.

Police did not address the issue of whether other assailants were still at large.

The rise in the official death toll – it had been 129 on Saturday – was expected, and it was likely to rise further. An estimated 352 were wounded in the attacks and more than 90 of those remain in critical condition.

France remained on high alert. President Francois Hollande canceled his appearance at the G-20 summit meeting, which began Sunday in Antalya, Turkey. The French military said that 10,000 soldiers would be assigned to patrol duties around the country.

Parisians remained on edge. Hundreds of mourners who had gather outside the Petite Cambodge and Le Carillon restaurants, where at least 19 people were killed, scattered at the sight of a suspicious car, and police drew their weapons.

Shortly after that, several thousand mourners who’d gathered at the nearby Place de la Republique to pay tribute fled, quickly left after what was described as a possible, though unconfirmed, gunshot.

For a second day, theater and museums were closed, and the police and military presence was heavy.

Meanwhile, French and U.S. officials said they had determined that the assailants had been in contact with Islamic State figures in Syria, cementing that group’s claim of responsibility. U.S. and French officials said they had agreed on joint measures to combat the Islamic State, including sharing intelligence on Islamic State targets in Syria and Iraq.

If the official narrative is accurate, the cafe attackers were either extremely proficient at navigating crowded Paris streets or extremely lucky with traffic on narrow one-lane cobbled roads.

Confusion still surrounded the official description of what took place Friday night. If the official narrative and timing of the attacks are accurate, the attackers were either extremely proficient at navigating crowded Paris streets on a Friday evening, extremely lucky with traffic on narrow one-lane cobbled roads or more numerous than has yet been reported.

This much is certain. The attackers’ plans for much greater bloodshed were thwarted when two assailants were prevented from entering the crowded Stade de France soccer stadium in the suburb of Saint-Denis where thousands of spectators and President Hollande were watching a friendly match between France and Germany.

Alert security guards stopped one of the assailants when they subjected him to a pat-down as he attempted to enter through the stadium turnstiles. Turned away, he detonated his explosive belt outside the stadium’s Gate D at 9:20 p.m., killing a single passerby.

The explosion could be heard clearly on the broadcast of the game but the crowd inside the stadium was apparently unaware of what had taken place, and the game continued for more than another 70 minutes of play to its conclusion.

During that time, two other assailants detonated their bombs outside the stadium – one at 9:30 p.m., the other at 9:53 p.m. – apparently killing only themselves.

But while the terrorist team assigned to the stadium failed to cause massive bloodshed, the other two teams were finding greater success, though the routes and timing followed by one makes it difficult to believe it was the only set of shooters involved.

At 9:25 p.m. three attackers arrived in a black Seat Leon vehicle and opened fire at two sidewalk cafes, the Carillon and the Petit Cambodge, which are located across a narrow street from one another. Fifteen people were killed.

Seven minutes later, according to witnesses, at 9:32 p.m., a black Seat Leon vehicle carrying three attackers, pulled up in front of the Casa Nostra Pizzeria and the Bonne Biere bar, which also are across the street from one another. Three men in the Seat open fire, killing five. The two cafes are only a few blocks from the Carillon and the Petit Cambodge, though going from one location to the other quickly would require detailed knowledge of the small one-lane streets in the area.

Four minutes after that, at 9:36 p.m., according to survivors, a black Seat Leon carrying three gunmen opens fire at the Le Belle Equipe restaurant, which is located a little more than a mile south of the Casa Nostra. Nineteen sidewalk café diners are shot to death.

The route between the Casa Nostra and the Belle Equipe would be crowded and difficult to navigate quickly on a Friday night.

Then, at 9:40 p.m., on the Boulevard Voltaire, a terrorist blows himself up in front of a brasserie, injuring a bystander. The next time the black Seat Leon is seen, it is found by police in the suburb of Montreuil, about a half-hour’s drive away. Three Kalashnikov rifles are found inside.

At the same time, at least three and maybe four gunmen entered the Bataclan theater and started shooting. The Bataclan is about a mile from Voltaire attack. The attackers kill many during the initial assault, but they also seized about 100 hostages and began executing them. The siege at the Bataclan lasted till after midnight, when police stormed in, and two attackers detonated their suicide belts. A third terrorist was shot to death by police, though reports now say he too detonated his belt.

The prosecutor believes the six café attacks all involved the same group of attackers. One attacker obviously survived to drive the car back to the Paris suburbs. Witness accounts of the attacks indicate that he would not have been alone.

FRANCE: French Officials Believe 20 Plus Plotters Were Involved In Paris Attacks

European authorities staged an international manhunt on Sunday for a 26-year-old “dangerous individual,” one of three brothers involved in the deadly attacks on Paris, even as an image took shape of a larger network of terrorists that could involve as many as 20 plotters.

At least eight assailants in three death squads are thought to have directly carried out Friday’s assault, which is being dubbed France’s 9/11. Six detonated their suicide belts. Police shot and killed one. French police on Sunday issued an urgent alert and released a photo of an eighth suspect: the 5-foot-7-inch Salah Abdeslam, a Belgian-born French national.

The manhunt came as France detained seven people for questioning and Belgian officials detained seven more in connection with the siege that killed at least 132 people. The international dragnet and investigation now stretch from the Aegean Sea to the teeming Paris suburbs. At the same time, France responded to an act of terrorism it blamed on the Islamic State with airstrikes on the group’s Syrian stronghold, the city of Raqqa.

Yet Europeans and their governments were confronting a chilling reality at home. A rogues’ gallery of homegrown terrorists with links to Islamist groups has become large enough – and is acting stealthily enough – to make tracking them increasingly difficult for the region’s intelligence agencies.

A senior official familiar with the investigation said authorities suspected that as many as 20 people in Europe had been involved in planning, supporting and executing the attack. Just as in January, when two brothers, Said and Chérif Kouachi, staged a bloody siege in Paris, some of the attackers this time were also related. Brahim Abdeslam, 31, blew himself up Friday night inside a busy cafe. His 26-year-old brother, Salah, who allegedly rented a car that was used in one of the attacks, is on the run. A third unnamed brother was apprehended in Belgium.

It became evident, in fact, that Brussels was a major base of operations for the Paris attacks, after French police seized a car rented in Belgium and then uncovered a fortuitous clue: a discarded parking ticket from the Brussels suburb of Molenbeek, a district known as a breeding ground for jihadists.

At least two of the eight known attackers had spent time in Syria, according to two European intelligence officials, who like many interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the ongoing investigation. One of them, Bilal Hadfi, a 20-year-old French national, was known to have returned from the Middle East to Belgium. He then disappeared from the radar of the Belgian security services.

One senior European intelligence official offered a mea culpa: “That so many people, some of whom had been known to police, had been able to plot such a large attack, using suicide explosive belts, weapons, without the intelligence services knowing – that’s a major failure of the intelligence services.”

This secular city, consecrated to personal liberties, found itself plunged into a new normal of tension. Police found a car with Kalashnikovs inside in the eastern suburb of Montreuil. On Wednesday, President François Hollande will present a bill to the National Assembly calling for a three-month state of emergency – a move granting exceptional police powers to restrict freedom of movement and gatherings at public places.

On Sunday night, the sound of what may have been a firecracker, or a light fixture blowing a circuit breaker at a restaurant near the Place de la Republique, where a vigil was taking place, ignited an extraordinary panic. People stampeded out of restaurants, bars and stores across a two-mile-wide sector of the city as false warnings of gunshots erupted on Twitter. Some dived into news vans. Hotels turned off their lights as employees huddled behind chairs. One woman flung herself into the Canal St. Martin.

“Suddenly people were running and screaming everywhere, going in every direction,” said Omar Zahiri, a 50-year-old lawyer attending the vigil. “I said, ‘Stop running like a crazy person, calm down.’ But they didn’t. They kept running.”

An incomplete picture of the perpetrators began to emerge. A Syrian passport was found at the stadium where three suicide bombers blew themselves up; it may have belonged to one of them. A senior European security official said the name in the passport was Ahmad Almohammad. According to the passport, he was 25 and was born in Idlib, Syria.

Officials have not conclusively connected the document to any of the bombers. But Greek authorities, following through on a request from the French, traced the Syrian passport to a refugee who arrived on the Aegean island of Leros on Oct. 3 with 198 other people on a migrant boat. The possible link was enough to ignite fresh calls by some to end the huge flow of refugees pouring into Europe.

At a Group of 20 summit in Antalya, Turkey, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker urged world leaders not to treat asylum seekers as terrorists in the wake of the Paris attacks. The people who organized and carried out the attacks “are exactly those who the refugees are fleeing,” he told reporters, adding that “there is no need to revise the European Union’s entire refugee policy.”

Other assailants, however, appeared to fit an emerging pattern among Europe’s homegrown extremists – petty criminals who were radicalized and became far more religious than their parents.

A case in point is Ismael Omar Mostefai, a 29-year-old French national who blew himself up after gunning down victims alongside two other suicide bombers at a Paris music hall. He had a criminal record, French officials said, and was picked up for eight minor offenses between 2004 and 2010, including driving without a license.

In 2010, however, Mostefai came on the radar screen of French intelligence because of his association with radical Islamists at a mosque in Lucé, near Chartres, a city southwest of Paris. The mosque is a modest, wooden-shuttered building surrounded by wrought-iron railings. Its leaders were bewildered to find themselves in the limelight Sunday. They called a news conference to deny any connection to extremism. The current administration, they said, took over in 2013 – after Mostefai had left the area – and they said no one recalled ever seeing him there.

Mostefai is thought to have traveled to Syria in the winter of 2013, a French police official familiar with the case said. “That is when we lost track of him,” the official said.

During his youth, Mostefai lived in a middle-class, predominantly Arab neighborhood in the Paris suburb of Courcouronne. Kamel Ousti, 53, a neighbor and family friend, said Mostefai grew up in a modest apartment on Rue Pont Amar, with three brothers; two sisters; a father, who was a deliveryman of Algerian descent; and a mother who was a Portuguese convert to Islam.

When Mostefai was 13, the family received an eviction notice because of his criminal tendencies. “Ismael was kind of a troublemaker, he used to steal things, like mobile phones,” Ousti said. Ousti recalled one traumatic event in the family’s history. During a trip to Algeria, in 2000, Ousti said they went to the beach, where Mostefai’s brother-in-law and two nephews drowned in the surf.

The family eventually moved to Chartres, where residents today recall his family as religious but not extremely so. Mostefai’s mother wore a headscarf, but his sisters did not.

Ousti last saw Mostefai four years ago. “He was the kind of kid who wouldn’t talk that much. If you ask me, the little lamb turned into a monster.”

Mostefai’s brother, who surrendered for questioning in a southeastern suburb of Paris, told the Agence France-Presse news service that he had broken off all ties with his brother years ago. The 34-year-old man, who was not identified, said Mostefai had moved back to Algeria with his young daughter. He said he was shocked to learn that his brother was involved in the attacks.

French SWAT teams searched the brother’s home and that of Mostefai’s father, outside Paris, for three hours Saturday night, according to RTL radio.

“What does this have to do with us?” the brother’s wife asked in tears. “We haven’t spoken to him in years. I hope we'll be left alone. We have a quiet little life, and this is starting to worry me.”