LAGOS, Nigeria — WITH the world’s attention focused on the Nov.
13 attacks in Paris that killed 130 people, there was a flurry of debate about
how much more media coverage France had received than Beirut, where, a day
earlier, suicide bombers sent by the Islamic State killed 43 people. In Nigeria,
we expect most terrorist attacks to go unnoticed by the world.
Considering the global attention paid to the Islamic State, you would not guess
that Boko Haram is actually the world’s deadliest terrorist organization,
according to the Global Terrorism Index. While the Islamic State operates in an
oil-rich region and directly threatens the West, Boko Haram’s brutality remains
largely confined to remote, sparsely populated parts of Nigeria. The group has
reinforced this isolation by attacking telecommunications towers.
At the turn of the year, the group occupied territory estimated to be the size
of Belgium. In March, its leader, Abubakar Shekau, released an audio message,
pledging allegiance to the Islamic State. But he has not appeared in public
since then, fueling speculation that he is dead or incapacitated. And Boko Haram
has been pushed on the defensive, pummeled by a coalition of troops from
Nigeria, Chad, Cameroon and Niger, briefly supported by mercenaries from South
Africa and the former Soviet Union.
In August, I visited Yola — home to at least three camps for internally
displaced persons, as Boko Haram’s refugees are known. The Yola I encountered
was actually a less beleaguered place than it had been a year earlier, when Boko
Haram fighters were virtually knocking on its doors, having overrun a string of
nearby towns.
In Maiduguri, about 250 miles away, where Boko Haram first burst onto the
national scene in a bloody uprising six years ago, the airport reopened to
commercial flights in July, after being closed for about 18 months. The city’s
public secondary schools, shuttered since early 2014, started reopening in
October.
While Boko Haram may have been weakened, it has yet to lose its capacity to sow
terror. The suicide bomb attacks — some carried out by young girls, not even
teenagers — now blur with surreal intensity into one another. Many attacks go
unclaimed; everyone assumes it’s Boko Haram, as usual.
There’s a lesson in Boko Haram’s rise about how quickly terror metastasizes. It
is difficult now to remember a time when Nigerians did not fear suicide
bombings. Yet I can recall that when Boko Haram detonated a car bomb outside the
police headquarters in the capital city, Abuja, in 2011, the widespread
sentiment was that the suicide bomber couldn’t have been Nigerian, because
Nigerians love their lives too much.
We’ve long since purged ourselves of those notions. When Western media reported
that the suicide bombing in Paris was the first by a woman on European soil, I
could only think, “that was Nigeria two years ago.” The first recorded such
attack here took place in June 2013. Since then, there have been more than 30 by
women and girls, while thousands of civilians have been killed by Boko Haram
fighters.
More than two million people have been displaced by the conflict, but the world
is largely oblivious, perhaps because these refugees are not a threat to
Europe’s security and Western civilization. Many are holed up in camps like
Yola’s, but most are squatting with family or friends in safer areas. If there’s
a unifying emotion among them, it’s homesickness. They’re terribly eager for
peace so they can return home and rebuild their lives: farming, fishing,
trading, traveling.
At one of the camps I visited, I met a Muslim man who, as soon as he heard I was
from the southwest, switched flawlessly to my Yoruba language. He was a frequent
traveler to Ibadan and Lagos, hundreds of miles away, buying lace and coconuts
to sell at home in Borno state, heartland of the Boko Haram insurgency. Another
man I interviewed was a cross-country cattle merchant and local politician; one
of his daughters had been missing for a year, since they fled their town.
Many people are now returning to villages and towns the Nigerian military has
liberated. In August, President Muhammadu Buhari gave the newly appointed
military chiefs an improbable December deadline to defeat Boko Haram.
Even if, by a miracle, Boko Haram was routed once and for all, the work would
only just have started. All those displaced persons have to be rehabilitated — a
task likely to prove harder even than the protracted military operation. A
reintegration program in the restive Niger Delta has cost more than a billion
dollars; repairing the damage done by Boko Haram will surely cost more.
How will Nigeria, facing dwindling revenues, restore two million people to their
homes? How can all the children who have now lost almost two years of education
catch up — especially in a region like Borno with historically abysmal
attendance rates (about seven out of 10 children didn’t go to school, even
before Boko Haram started destroying their schools)? And what about all those
burned-out schools, hospitals, bridges and houses? That’s before even thinking
about support or treatment for the psychological trauma of witnessing massacres,
or being victims of forced marriage and sexual abuse.
Sadly, unlike France or America, Nigeria will never know the names of most of
the terrorists’ victims. Here, there are no official tallies of casualties, and
news agencies proclaim death tolls in hedged terms — “at least,” “more than,”
“as many as.” Much about this tragedy plays out in the realm of speculation. The
vagueness extends from the loss of life itself to the dignity of its
acknowledgment.
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editorial board and contributing writers from around the world.
Soldiers fare no better. Often, they’re buried with little ceremony, as though
there was something shameful about dying for one’s country in this fight. There
are no flags flying, no televised military funerals, no profiles of dead
soldiers in the media. When tributes emerge, they’re from family and friends,
confined to social media. Mr. Buhari’s decoration of a handful of war heroes in
Yola in November was the first such event dedicated to soldiers fighting Boko
Haram.
Admittedly, there’s nothing new about these attitudes toward suffering and loss
in Nigerian history. We fought a brutal civil war nearly 50 years ago, in
Biafra, but there’s no way to tell that from visiting the National Museum in
Lagos. And a planned National Museum in Abuja has never been built. If the
devastation of Boko Haram teaches us anything, it should be that if we do not
memorialize terror’s victims, then we can hardly complain when nobody else does.
Tolu Ogunlesi is the West Africa editor for The Africa Report and
the author, most recently, of the novella “Conquest and Conviviality.”
A version of this op-ed appears in print on December 3, 2015, on page A35 of the
New York edition with the headline: Terror’s Nameless Victims in Nigeria.
IN 2008, Barack Obama won the presidency promising that he would
heal our political divisions. Instead, Mr. Obama has been as polarizing as any
president in the history of modern polling. The debate over the Syrian refugee
crisis illustrates why.
The civil war in Syria has created one of the worst refugee crises since World
War II, and the president has instructed his administration to admit at least
10,000 refugees in fiscal year 2016. Republicans in Congress, in the aftermath
of the massacre in Paris on Nov. 13, called for a pause in this process, in part
because of their fear that terrorists might pose as refugees. The president,
rather than trying to persuade his critics, mocked them.
“Apparently they’re scared of widows and orphans coming in to the United States
of America as part of our tradition of compassion,” Mr. Obama said. “That
doesn’t sound very tough to me.” According to the president, the most potent
recruitment tool for the Islamic State isn’t jihadist social media or
battlefield victories but Republican rhetoric. “They’ve been playing on fear in
order to try to score political points or to advance their campaigns,” he said.
The president flippantly dismissed worries about the vetting process despite the
fact that, as James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, said
in September, the possibility that the Islamic State might infiltrate operatives
among Syrian refugees is “a huge concern of ours.”
Administration officials also acknowledge that there are limitations on
determining the history of Syrian refugees since we’re in no position to collect
vital information from Syria. Even if the president believes the case for
accepting refugees overrides those concerns (as I basically do), he should
acknowledge their legitimacy.
What made Mr. Obama’s assault on Republicans particularly outrageous is his
hypocrisy, by which I mean the president’s failure to act in any meaningful way
to avert the humanitarian disaster now engulfing Syria. It’s not as if options
weren’t available to him.
In 2012 Mr. Obama rebuffed plans to arm Syrian rebels despite the fact that his
former secretaries of defense and state, his C.I.A. director and the chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff supported them. He repeatedly insisted he would not
put American soldiers in Syria or pursue a prolonged air campaign. He refused to
declare safe havens or no-fly zones. And it was also in 2012 that Mr. Obama
warned the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, that using chemical weapons would
cross a “red line.” Yet when Mr. Assad did just that, Mr. Obama did nothing.
The president, perhaps fearful of offending the pro-Assad Iranian government
with which he was trying to negotiate a nuclear arms deal, chose to sit by while
a humanitarian catastrophe unfolded. As Walter Russell Mead wrote in The
American Interest, “This crisis is in large part the direct consequence of
President Obama’s decision to stand aside and watch Syria burn.” Some of us find
it a bit nervy for the president to lecture the opposition party for
heartlessness because cleaning up after his failure raises security concerns.
A reasonable approach would take account of both the humanitarian crisis in
Syria and the concerns of critics of the president’s proposal. Doing so might
result in a pause in the process to reassess our security procedures, make
improvements where necessary and then proceed. Under the leadership of the new
speaker, Paul Ryan, the House has passed just such a proposal with a broad
bipartisan majority — 47 Democrats sided with Republicans — but Mr. Obama has
promised to veto it if it passes the Senate. In his Manichaean conception of
politics, such balance has no place, it seems.
What we have seen and heard from Mr. Obama during the Syrian crisis —
self-righteousness without self-reflection, taunting, exasperation that others
don’t see the world just as he does, the inability to work constructively with
his opponents — have been hallmarks of his presidency. The man who promised to
strengthen our political culture has further disabled it.
The president doesn’t bear full responsibility for the fractured state of our
politics. The causes are complicated. They predate the Obama presidency, and
Republicans have certainly played a role. (For some on the right, compromise is
in principle capitulation.)
Yet it was Barack Obama who in 2008 wanted us to “rediscover our bonds to each
other” and put an end to the “constant petty bickering that’s come to
characterize our politics.” He utterly failed in that and has to own his part in
it. According to a new Pew Research Center study, 79 percent of Americans view
the country as more politically divided than in the past.
Today our political discourse barely allows us to think clearly about, let alone
rise to meet, the enormous challenges we face at home and abroad. Trust in
government has reached one of its lowest levels in the past half-century.
Americans are deeply cynical about the entire political enterprise; they are
losing faith in the normal democratic process.
This creates the conditions for the rise of demagogues, of people who excel at
inflaming tensions. Enter Donald J. Trump, who delights in tearing down the last
remaining guardrails in our political culture.
Mr. Obama is hardly responsible for Mr. Trump, and it’s up to my fellow
Republican primary voters to repudiate his malignant candidacy. Not doing so
would be a moral indictment of our party. But in amplifying some of the worst
tendencies in our politics, Mr. Obama helped make the rise of Mr. Trump
possible.
Peter Wehner, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy
Center, served in the last three Republican administrations and is a
contributing opinion writer.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on November 28, 2015, on page A21 of
the New York edition with the headline: President Obama’s Hypocrisy on Syria.
Turkey’s downing of a Russian fighter jet on Tuesday is just the
kind of volatile incident that has been feared since Moscow’s military
intervention added new uncertainty to the already complicated Syrian civil war.
The attack adds to tensions between Ankara and Moscow, which support different
factions in Syria, and threatens to worsen relations between Russia and Turkey’s
NATO allies, which have been going downhill since Russia invaded Ukraine.
President Vladimir Putin of Russia said the downing would have “serious
consequences for Russian-Turkish relations.” He did not spell out what he meant,
but the situation cannot be allowed to escalate. The only winner in a
confrontation between Russia and the West is the Islamic State, the terrorist
organization that controls large parts of Syria and Iraq.
A video shows the Russian jet being hit before crashing in a mountainous region
near the Turkish-Syrian border. Mr. Putin announced that the Russian plane had
been hit by an air-to-air missile launched from a Turkish F-16. A Turkish
official told The Times that the Russian plane was “repeatedly warned” it was 15
kilometers or less from the Turkish border.
Mr. Putin insisted the jet was in Syrian airspace when it was hit and never
threatened Turkish territory. Although the incident is still officially under
investigation, an American official told The Times it appears that at least one
Russian jet crossed into Turkish airspace.
Jets flying at high speeds can move from one airspace to another in the blink of
an eye. Even so, Russia should have been aware of the risk of flying near or
over the border. Turkey has a right to defend itself, but it could have chosen
to escort the Russian jet out of its airspace rather than firing on it. Since
Russia intervened militarily in the Syrian war in late September, its jets have
intruded on Turkish airspace at least twice before, drawing Turkish warnings.
President Obama has urged both Ankara and Moscow to avoid confrontations.
American officials say they are trying behind the scenes to make that happen.
Turkey could play a constructive role by helping the Russians recover their
aircraft and pilots, whose fate is unclear.
When Russia first intervened in Syria, it worked with the Americans on rules of
engagement to reduce the chance of accidental confrontations in the heavily
trafficked Syrian skies. Since October, Turkey has conducted five meetings with
Russian officials on airspace violations. It’s time for a better approach, like
having NATO and Russia tighten the rules of engagement to better avoid incidents
like the one on Tuesday.
The incident came at an awkward time. President François Hollande of France and
Mr. Obama have been trying to persuade Mr. Putin to accept a political deal that
would eventually remove Russia’s ally, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, from
power and make defeating the Islamic State the priority. Achieving this
objective has not been made any easier by the downing of the jet and the
inflamed tensions between Russia and Turkey — which itself is so eager to see
Mr. Assad gone that it has allowed its border to be a crossing point for the
rebels who oppose him.
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A version of this editorial appears in print on November 25, 2015, on page A30
of the New York edition with the headline: One Jet Closer to a Wider
Confrontation.
LONDON — “Sectarianism failed,” Bahrain’s foreign minister,
Sheikh Khalid bin Ahmed al-Khalifa, told a news conference attended by Secretary
of State John Kerry in Washington last week. It had not gained “a foothold in
our country,” he went on, “but we will continue to be on our toes facing it.”
Mr. Kerry spoke, too, about military cooperation against Daesh, the group also
known as the Islamic State or ISIS, and about working to “reduce the sectarian
divisions together in Bahrain, which we saw resulted in a boycott of an election
and challenges internally within the country.”
Characterizing the boycott that led opposition groups to call off participation
in Bahrain’s November 2014 general election as sectarian is fundamentally wrong.
The sectarianism that exists in Bahraini society is almost the reverse of what
Mr. Kerry and Sheikh Khalid described: It comes not from the political
opposition, but from within the state itself.
In November 2011, the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry completed an
investigation into human rights violations during the Bahraini government’s
crackdown on Arab Spring protests earlier that year, and presented its findings
to King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa. The king accepted the report’s recommendations
as the basis for a reform program.
But the promised change never came. Instead, as a new report from Human Rights
Watch details, the Bahraini security forces have continued to torture detainees
using methods identical to those the commission documented in 2011. Violence and
arbitrariness are widespread from arrest to prison, where collective punishment
and beatings are well documented.
The opposition political societies (actual parties are illegal in Bahrain) had
simple demands: the formation of a credible, independent judiciary and
meaningful steps toward democratization. Because neither of these moderate
demands was met in the four years following the Arab Spring, the opposition
groups decided to boycott the elections.
With hindsight, this strategy was a mistake. It gave the government of Bahrain
carte blanche after the elections, imprisoning opposition leaders like Ebrahim
Sharif and Ali Salman. Human rights defenders like Nabeel Rajab suffered
arbitrary arrest. Another rights defender, Abdulhadi al-Khawaja, is serving a
life sentence, as is the blogger and activist Abduljalil al-Singace. According
to a coalition of Bahraini human rights organizations, as many as 4,000 doctors,
teachers, students, journalists, photographers and others are detained as
political prisoners in Bahrain’s prisons; many have endured torture.
The same week that Sheikh Khalid spoke in Washington, two men had their death
sentences upheld by Bahrain’s top appeals court. Mohammed Ramadan and Husain Ali
Moosa were convicted of taking part in a bombing that killed a policeman in
2014, but both men claim they were tortured into confessing to the crime.
In 2014, five United Nations human rights experts, including the special
rapporteur on torture, expressed concern that Mr. Ramadan, Mr. Moosa and other
prisoners had made confessions under severe duress. Yet nothing now separates
the two men from the firing squad save King Hamad’s whim — since he may sign
either their death warrant or a royal pardon.
While Bahrain imprisons political activists and rights advocates at home, it
also participates in the American-led coalition against the Islamic State. The
bitter irony of this is that the Islamic State’s Bahraini recruits come not from
among the government’s opponents, but from within its own ranks.
Unlike the United States, Britain and France, where typically the Islamic State
recruits among alienated young people, in Bahrain the group finds willing
jihadists in the establishment. The most prominent Bahraini member of the
Islamic State, the terrorist preacher Turki al-Binali, comes from a family
closely allied with the Khalifa royal family. Other recruits have come directly
from the security forces of Bahrain. (Mr. Rajab, the human rights advocate, was
imprisoned for six months recently for pointing out links between the Bahraini
military and the Islamic State.)
Another Binali family member who has defected to the Islamic State, Mohamed Isa
al-Binali, is a former Interior Ministry officer. He worked in Jaw Prison, a
facility notorious for overcrowding and harsh conditions. One former prisoner
told me that he’d witnessed Mr. Binali overseeing the ill treatment of juvenile
Shiite inmates, not long before Mr. Binali disappeared in 2014 to join the
Islamic State.
Mr. Binali was acclimated to violence and hatred in Bahrain’s prison system.
This is not something Bahrain will ever admit to: For the government, the
embarrassment is too great. But until it does, it cannot possibly combat
extremism effectively at home.
This is an extremism of its own making, born out of the destruction of Shiite
mosques and the sectarian language that many in government use — as Sheikh
Khalid does — in an attempt to undermine the credibility of the democratic
opposition. Bahrain, I fear, is heading in the direction of Saudi Arabia, where
radical Salafism has fostered sectarianism and terrorism.
On Jan. 31, I discovered that my Bahraini citizenship had been revoked when I
woke in London to find my name on a list published by the Bahrain News Agency.
Alongside mine were the names of some 50 other activists, journalists and
political figures — as well as those of about 20 affiliates of the Islamic State
and Al Qaeda, including Turki al-Binali and Mohamed al-Binali.
The reasons for revocation ranged from serious terrorism charges to “advocating
regime change.” The message could not be clearer: For Bahrain, my human rights
work was equivalent to terrorism.
How can a country that willfully refuses to differentiate between peaceful calls
for democratic rights and terrorism deal with sectarian extremism? Earlier this
year, President Obama promised to have the necessary “tough conversation” about
these issues with Persian Gulf state allies. Yet Mr. Kerry just gave Bahrain a
pass on the sectarianism at home that is feeding the Islamic State abroad.
Sayed Ahmed Alwadaei is the director of advocacy at the Bahrain
Institute for Rights and Democracy.
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*BAMAKO, Mali — In a ransacked room on the third floor, a
television set eerily broadcasted the France 24 news channel, where images of
the attack were playing. In a room on the fourth floor, a half-eaten chicken
sandwich sat next to a Turkish man’s passport on a bedside table. In an adjacent
hallway, French troops serving with the United Nations stepped around drapes
soaked with blood.
When gunmen stormed the Radisson Blu hotel in Mali’s capital, Bamako, Friday
morning and killed at least 19 people (reportedly now as many as 27), they
struck at the heart of West Africa’s engagement with the rest of the world. The
Radisson was Bamako’s best hotel and the identities of the victims represent a
snapshot of who has stakes in the region’s fight against terrorism.
Three Chinese railway executives on a business trip concerning a $1.5 billion
plan to upgrade colonial-era train tracks that connect landlocked Mali with a
seaport in neighboring Dakar, Senegal, were killed. Among the dead were also six
Russian employees of a freight airline company that services the French military
and United Nations mission in Mali, an American development consultant, Anita
Datar, and a Belgian parliamentary official, Geoffrey Dieudonné, as well as
citizens of Israel, Mali and Senegal.
Businesspeople from India, along with Turkish Airlines and Air France staff were
holed up for hours before Malian special forces came to their rescue. Africa’s
richest man, Aliko Dangote, took to Twitter to deny initial reports that he,
too, had been among the hostages.
Mali, which was just recovering from traumatic years that saw a coup d’etat, a
jihadist occupation, a French military intervention and a massive United Nations
mission, has much to lose if international investors and diplomats stay away.
The Radisson was considered a secure place for to stay; now, there are no safe
havens.
“The railway deal with the Chinese will be put on hold. Investors are likely to
back off Mali,” said Mamadou Coulibaly, who heads a Malian employers’
organization.
Because of the attack’s international nature, it brought swift and unanimous
condemnations from President Obama, as well as the presidents of France, Russia
and China: François Hollande, Vladimir V. Putin and Xi Jinping. Mali is no
stranger to jihadist militancy, but no other attack has ever hit so directly at
the country’s power center.
Offshoots of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb occupied the north of the country
for nine months in 2012, implanting themselves in local communities and creating
ties that have not yet been cut. French troops dislodged the jihadists in 2013,
but since then the security situation has deteriorated, with terrorist attacks
occurring further south, in areas once considered safe.
Over Mali’s northern border, the power vacuum that followed the NATO
intervention in Libya has allowed arms to circulate freely. Jihadist groups have
won back greater influence in the region.
A group named Al Mourabitoun, led by the veteran one-eyed Algerian jihadist
Mokhtar Belmokhtar, claimed responsibility for the attack. In August, the
Qaeda-aligned group attacked a hotel in Sévaré, in central Mali, killing 17. A
United Nations security analyst, who asked to remain anonymous because he is not
authorized to talk to the press, said that the munitions and tactics were
similar in both assaults.
Jihadists who’d been involved in the 2012 occupation, before melting away when
the French intervened, he said, “are reappearing, with new recruits.” This
attack on civilians at Bamako’s most prestigious hotel could be a response to
the Islamic State — a bid by Qaeda loyalists to remain relevant in a global
jihadi scene that has evolved.
What is certain is that this type of assault — led by a small group of militants
armed with AK-47s and grenades, and ready to die — is becoming the universal
modus operandi of terrorism. The threat of similar attacks in Belgium have
forced the government there to virtually shut down Brussels, at the heart of
Europe.
In Mali, where the government’s grip is more tenuous, such an option is hardly
feasible. The easy availability of assault weapons in Mali means that “as long
as there are people willing to go on suicide missions,” the security analyst
said, “this type of attack will be difficult to stop.”
By the end of Friday, a curious crowd had gathered across the street from the
Radisson, filming with their smartphones the comings and goings of soldiers and
rescue workers. When the unit of Malian special forces that had led the rescue
mission emerged from the hotel late in the day, the crowd cheered and broke into
a chant of “Mali! Mali! Mali!”
The mood changed from gloom and horror to joy and pride: If it weren’t for the
brave efforts of the Malian soldiers, things could have been much worse. One man
shouted, “we’re proud of our army” — words not often heard in a country that was
forced to call on the former colonial power, France, to come to its aid in 2013.
“Attacks like this are almost impossible to prevent,” said Mr. Coulibaly. “What
is important is how we manage the fallout.”
Like their European counterparts, West African governments are struggling to
deal with the threat posed by jihadist groups. Boko Haram in Nigeria and Al
Qaeda and its offshoots in Mali have killed indiscriminately for years and
consistently thwart Western and African efforts to eliminate them. Mali’s
security forces and the spirited crowd who gathered to show them support have
their work cut out for them.
Joe Penney is the co-founder of the West African news website
Sahelien.com.
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A version of this op-ed appears in print on November 23, 2015, in The
International New York Times.
JERUSALEM — Five people were killed on Thursday in two stabbing
and shooting attacks carried out by Palestinian assailants in Tel Aviv and the
West Bank, according to the Israeli authorities, in a renewed burst of deadly
violence that came after a few days of relative calm.
The fatalities included three Israelis, an 18-year-old American yeshiva student
and a Palestinian passer-by.
In the first attack, a Palestinian from the West Bank stabbed Israelis at the
entrance of a store that served as an informal synagogue in Tel Aviv, killing
two Israeli men and wounding a third. Witnesses said the attacker had then tried
to force his way into the prayer room, but worshipers blocked the door.
Soon after, in the Etzion settlement bloc in the West Bank, a Palestinian man
opened fire with a submachine gun from a car as he passed vehicles stopped in
traffic. He then crashed his car into another vehicle, according to witnesses
and police reports. Three people were killed and several others were injured.
The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, wrote on his Facebook page,
“Behind these terrorist attacks stands radical Islam, which seeks to destroy us,
the same radical Islam that struck in Paris and threatens Europe.”
Seeking more understanding from around the world for Israel’s security
challenges, Mr. Netanyahu added, “Whoever condemned the attacks in France must
condemn the attacks in Israel. It’s the same terrorism. Anyone who does not do
so is acting hypocritically and blindly.”
Mr. Netanyahu said that Israel would “settle accounts” with the perpetrators,
exact a price from their families and destroy their homes. The homes of several
Palestinians charged in attacks have been demolished in recent weeks in what the
Israelis describe as a deterrent.
The victims of the Tel Aviv attack were identified as Aharon Yesayev, 32, and
Reuven Aviram, 51, both from central Israel.
Of the three victims in the West Bank, an Israeli man who died was identified as
Yaakov Don, 51, a resident of a nearby settlement who worked in education and
was a father of four. The Palestinian victim was named as Shadi Arafa, 24, an
employee of a Palestinian cellphone company.
Acquaintances of the American victim, Ezra Schwartz, from Sharon, Mass., said he
had been spending a gap year in Israel between high school and college and was
participating in a program of study and volunteering at a yeshiva in the Israeli
city of Beit Shemesh. On the day he was killed, according to Ynet, an Israeli
news site, Mr. Schwartz and fellow students had distributed food and candy to
Israeli soldiers in the Etzion district and visited a memorial for three Israeli
teenagers who were kidnapped and killed in June 2014 after they hitched a ride
near where Thursday’s shooting attack took place.
The police identified the assailant in the Tel Aviv stabbing as a father of five
from the village of Dura in the southern West Bank. The Israeli news media said
he had a permit to work in Israel and was employed at a restaurant near the
scene of the attack. He was overpowered by passers-by and taken into custody.
Shimon Vaknin, who was praying in the synagogue at the time, told Israeli
television that a victim fell inside the room, covered in blood. He said that 15
worshipers blocked the door as the attacker tried to get inside, shouting in
Arabic.
At least 16 Israelis have been killed in stabbing, vehicular and shooting
attacks by Palestinians since the beginning of October, and an Eritrean man was
killed by a mob after he was mistaken for an assailant. About 90 Palestinians
have been killed over the same period, some of them while attacking or trying to
attack Israelis, and others in clashes with Israeli security forces. Thursday
was the deadliest day in the recent wave of violence.
Thursday’s killings came hours after Israel and the Palestinian Authority signed
a long-awaited agreement granting Palestinian cellphone carriers 3G high-speed
cellular services in the West Bank. The move, intended to bolster economic
development, had indicated a possible effort, or desire, to return to calm after
weeks of violence.
“We always agreed to confidence-building measures with the Palestinians and to
help with their economy,” an Israeli minister, Yuval Steinitz, said in a
briefing with foreign reporters this month. But Mr. Steinitz said Israel
expected action from Palestinian leaders to end what he described as incitement
to violence in the news media.
West Bank cities have many smartphone users and a burgeoning high-tech industry,
but Palestinian carriers have been forced to make do with 2G data bandwidth,
which was introduced to the area in 1998.
Under the interim peace accords of the mid-1990s, Israel controls the allocation
of radio frequencies in the West Bank, where the Palestinian Authority exercises
limited self-rule. For the Palestinians, the lack of 3G service has been a sore
point and, they say, a symbol of how the Israeli occupation has held them back.
Israeli officials said that 3G services would most likely be available to
Palestinian carriers within the next few weeks. It was not clear when, or if,
the same service would be made available in Gaza, the Palestinian coastal
territory dominated by Hamas, the Islamic militant group.
Two Palestinian cellular companies, Jawwal and Wataniya, operate in the
Palestinian areas.
Durgham Maraee, the chief executive of Wataniya Mobile, welcomed the news and
said that the company had held a license to operate 3G services since its
inception in 2006. “However we were not able to offer these services,” he said,
“due to the fact that the frequencies were not assigned by the Israeli side
until now.”
Ammar Akel, the chief executive of Palestine Telecommunications Group, of which
Jawwal is a subsidiary, said, “We have been asking for this for more than five
years.”
Israel estimates that the introduction of 3G will increase investment in the
West Bank by $120 million.
Rami Nazzal contributed reporting from Ramallah, West Bank.
A version of this article appears in print on November 20, 2015, on page A6 of
the New York edition with the headline: 5 Killed in Tel Aviv and West Bank by
Palestinian Attackers.
VERVIERS, Belgium — Black smudges and faded traces of gunfire on
a red brick rowhouse here in eastern Belgium mark the death foretold of
Abdelhamid Abaaoud. It is the spot where, 11 months before the announcement on
Thursday that he had been killed outside Paris, he began plotting an elaborate
campaign of terror across Europe.
Mr. Abaaoud’s inaugural terror mission here ended in disaster for his cause and
cost the lives of two of his jihadist friends — both from his old Brussels
neighborhood, Molenbeek — when Belgian security forces stormed their hide-out on
Jan. 15.
But Mr. Abaaoud was not there. A telephone call he made shortly before the raid
in Verviers to pass on instructions to those in the hide-out, a senior Belgian
counterterrorism official said, was the last trace anybody had of him until the
French police found on Wednesday what turned out to be his mutilated body after
an early-morning shootout just north of Paris.
His whereabouts had remained a constant source of mystery and suspected
misinformation from his Islamic State handlers. That was, until the bloody raid
in the Paris suburb of St.-Denis revealed the gaping holes in Europe’s system of
open borders that allowed him to infiltrate France under the noses of the
intelligence services across the Continent.
“Not a single piece of intelligence from a European country that he might have
transited through before arriving in France was communicated to us suggesting
that he might be in Europe and was heading towards France,” the French interior
minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, said Thursday at a news conference.
Even as he defended the performance of the French service, Mr. Cazeneuve pleaded
for more intelligence sharing, saying, “It is urgent for Europe to come
together.”
Along the way, Mr. Abaaoud, 27, is believed to have organized a string of
attacks that made him the most talked-about — and, in jihadist circles, feted —
terrorist since Osama bin Laden.
French intelligence officials have concluded that Mr. Abaaoud was involved in at
least four of six terrorist plots foiled in France since the spring, Mr.
Cazeneuve said.
Before his deadly ambitions culminated in the massacres in Paris on Friday that
killed 129 people, they included a thwarted attack on a Sunday-morning
congregation at a Paris church and an attack on a Paris-bound train this summer
that was halted when passengers overpowered the gunman.
The Paris prosecutor, François Molins, said in confirming Mr. Abaaoud’s death on
Thursday that the delay in identifying the body, which was virtually pulverized,
had been because it required fingerprint analysis. “We do not know at this stage
whether Abaaoud blew himself up or not,” Mr. Molins’s office said.
Also killed in the raid was a woman identified by two French intelligence
officials as Hasna Aitboulahcen, 26, who fired on police officers and then blew
herself apart with a suicide vest.
While Mr. Abaaoud’s death ended one chapter of the intense criminal
investigation that began Friday night, a manhunt continued for one of his
partners in Friday’s attacks, Salah Abdeslam, 26, a French citizen and another
friend from Molenbeek.
The Belgian authorities also arrested nine people in a series of raids on
Thursday — seven of them as part of an investigation into Bilal Hadfi, 20, also
from Molenbeek, who detonated his explosive vest outside the Stade de France in
the attacks last week.
Mr. Abaaoud, a former drug dealer from the same borough of Brussels, had been on
the radar of Western security forces since early 2014, when he moved to Syria,
apparently via Cologne Bonn Airport in Germany, and began starring in ghoulish
propaganda videos filmed by the Islamic State.
But he emerged as an immediate menace when he began making telephone calls from
Greece with instructions for a terrorist plot to comrades hiding here at No. 32
Rue de la Colline, a sleepy residential street near Belgium’s border with
Germany.
Belgian security listened in on his calls for days, a senior Belgian
counterterrorism official involved in tracking him said.
Describing him as the “hyphen” connecting the militant group in Syria and
operatives in Europe, the official said Mr. Abaaoud had been planning to carry
out “a huge attack” from Verviers, a down-on-its-luck former industrial town
with many immigrants and few jobs.
But in January, tipped off to his plans by the telephone surveillance, Belgian
antiterrorism forces stormed the three-story home that two of Mr. Abaaoud’s
friends and fellow militants had rented through an intermediary a few weeks
earlier.
After a fierce gun battle that foreshadowed the one in St.-Denis that claimed
Mr. Abaaoud’s life, the security force uncovered a cache of explosives and
automatic weapons. Two suspected militants — both from Molenbeek, where Mr.
Abaaoud grew up — were killed.
Information about his whereabouts and plans was so closely held that
intelligence officials in Brussels kept even the mayor of Verviers and its
police chief unaware that the Islamic State had set up a safe house in their
town and was planning a major attack.
“I only heard about Abaaoud and what he was doing by reading the press,” said
Marc Elsen, the town’s mayor at the time of the Jan. 15 assault on the hideaway
controlled by Mr. Abaaoud.
He said he had gotten a call just 15 minutes before the raid to tell him that a
“large-scale operation” by the federal police was about to take place a few
hundred yards from his office. “Then I heard all the shooting,” he said. “It
sounded like heavy artillery.”
By Mr. Abaaoud’s own account of what happened, published in the Islamic State
magazine Dabiq, the two men killed in the raid had been “together in the safe
house and had their weapons and explosive ready.”
But they were overpowered by “more than 150 soldiers from both French and
Belgian special forces” and “blessed with shahadah,” or martyrdom, he told the
magazine, saying that was “what they had desired for so long.”
Belgium officials said that this was a lie and that only Belgian forces had
taken part.
For Mr. Abaaoud, the police operation delivered a humiliating personal blow. The
Islamic State had entrusted him with beginning what one of the group’s senior
leaders, Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, had promised a few months earlier would be a
campaign of terror in Europe.
The blow was made worse by two brothers’ success just a week earlier in
attacking the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo. A rival terrorist group in
Yemen, affiliated with Al Qaeda, claimed responsibility for that. The Islamic
State claimed a separate attack two days later on a Jewish supermarket in Paris,
but that was more a “lone wolf” assault, inspired rather than directed by the
group.
Jihadist groups are “always competing,” said Jelle van Buuren, an
expert on jihadists at Leiden University, in the Netherlands. “Who’s the best,
who’s the most violent, who’s the most successful?”
Mr. Abaaoud’s failure so soon after the successful Charlie Hebdo attacks may
have galvanized him to organize and conduct an even more spectacular assault
like the one in Paris last week, Mr. van Buuren added.
He described Mr. Abaaoud as “a type who is so proud of his image, the big
warrior of the caliphate, that he was more than willing to take this role.”
To add to the pressure to perform, Mr. Adnani, the Islamic State’s chief
propagandist and champion of its expansion into the West, issued an appeal
shortly after the Verviers fiasco that cursed any Muslim “who has the ability to
shed a single drop of crusader blood but does not do so, whether with an
explosive device, a bullet, a knife, a car, a rock, or even a boot or a fist.”
It was the duty of all Muslims, he said, “in Europe and the disbelieving West
and everywhere else, to target the crusaders in their own lands and wherever
they are found.”
Mr. Adnani, following the Islamic State’s custom of casting defeats as
victories, still added the failed operation in Belgium to a list of successes
that included a shooting at the Canadian Parliament and the January attacks in
Paris. But he put Belgium last.
If the Verviers debacle helped fire Mr. Abaaoud’s zeal, it also prompted him to
improve his terrorist tradecraft. He stopped using the telephone, or at least
one that could be listened in on.
Security officials believe that the Paris attackers used some
kind of encrypted communication, though they let their guard down by tossing a
cellphone into a trash can near the Bataclan theater, the site of the most
deaths in Friday’s attacks. The geolocation services on the phone led
investigators to one of the attackers’ hide-outs.
With the carnage on Friday, Mr. Abaaoud put the Verviers disaster behind him. A
dropout, he became, in the words of the French prime minister, Manuel Valls,
“one of the brains” behind the deadliest assault on Paris since World War II.
Where Mr. Abaaoud was at the time of the Verviers raid is unclear. He suggested
in his interview with Dabiq that he had been somewhere in Belgium and had
managed to evade detection and travel back to Syria.
But the Belgian security official, noting that much of what the Islamic State
says is untrue, said Mr. Abaaoud had not been in Belgium: He had called from
Greece with instructions shortly before the house was stormed. That call, the
official said, was the last trace security agencies had of him.
Whether Mr. Abaaoud was in Belgium at all in this period is not known, the
official said. It is easy, he added, to move around Europe without leaving a
trace, especially for a citizen of Belgium, part of the 26-nation zone in Europe
that allows visa-free travel.
Who knew what, and when, about Mr. Abaaoud’s travels is now a source of friction
among European countries, which have opened their borders to one another but not
their intelligence.
Far-right politicians, in particular, have seized on his travels to rally public
support to end what was the proudest achievement of Europe’s postwar push for
more integration: the so-called Schengen Area of visa-free travel.
“It seems that just about anybody can freely enter France now, with no checks,
including somebody as dangerous and well known as Abdelhamid Abaaoud,” Marine Le
Pen of France’s National Front said on Thursday.
“The absence of national borders is criminal madness,” Ms. Le Pen said. “The
French elites have given themselves over to this surreal myth of a country
without borders. Open your eyes, now!”
Andrew Higgins reported from Verviers, and Kimiko de
Freytas-Tamura from Brussels. Aurelien Breeden contributed reporting from Paris,
and Milan Schreuer from Brussels.
A version of this article appears in print on November 20, 2015, on page A1 of
the New York edition with the headline: Paris Suspect Drafted an Elaborate Plot
of Terror Across Europe.
LONDON — One of the militants in the Paris attacks traveled to
Syria from his hometown in France and back, officials said, even after his
passport had been confiscated and he had been placed under judicial oversight.
So did another, despite having been arrested eight times in petty crimes and
having been listed as a national security risk in France.
Even the man suspected of organizing the massacre on Friday, Abdelhamid Abaaoud,
a well-known figure in the Belgian jihadist scene, is believed to have traveled
between Islamic State-controlled territory and Europe a number of times —
including for an attack plot in Belgium in January.
The Paris attacks, the deadliest in France to date, have sharpened the focus on
the inability of security services to monitor the large and growing number of
young European Muslims who have fought alongside the Islamic State or to spot
terrorist plots in their early stages, even when the participants are well known
to them.
It appears so far that as many as six of the assailants who killed 129 people
with guns, grenades and suicide bombs at six sites last Friday were Europeans
who had traveled to Syria and returned to carry out attacks at home — precisely
the nightmare scenario security officials have been warning about for the past
two years.
“This is the attack everyone was worried about, and it finally happened,” said
Louis Caprioli, who was the deputy head of France’s domestic antiterrorism unit
from 1998 to 2004. “A high-casualty attack on multiple soft targets executed
with apparent military know-how.”
The failure to detect the plot despite warnings has raised old questions with
new urgency: Can the threat be contained in Europe without a sharply increased
military effort to destroy the Islamic State on its home turf in Syria and Iraq?
Is Europe’s informal system of intelligence sharing adequate in the face of such
threats? And do intelligence services need even more resources and surveillance
powers?
The latest attacks appear to validate concerns that both in scale and scope, the
conflict in Syria represents a novel security threat to Western countries and
Europe in particular: The number of Europeans drawn to fight jihad there has
swelled to more than 3,000 in a little over two years. And the vast territory
controlled by the Islamic State offers militants the opportunity to train in
combat and bomb-making, which they can apply to terrorist operations at home.
More than 1,000 French citizens and 600 Germans are believed to have traveled to
Syria to join the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. Belgium, with its
population of about 11 million, has 520 fighters in Syria, the greatest number
of fighters per capita. More British Muslims have joined the Islamic State —
about 750 — than are currently enrolled in the British armed forces, according
to Shiraz Maher, a senior research fellow at the International Center for the
Study of Radicalization at King’s College London, who has been monitoring the
social media accounts of Western jihadists over the past two years.
The Islamic State, he said, “has mobilized the largest volunteer army of Sunni
fighters in recent history.”
The threat from returning jihadists is not new. In the 1980s, Europeans fought
in Afghanistan against the Soviets, and in the ’90s some went to Bosnia. Since
then, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen and Afghanistan — again — have been destinations. One
of the brothers who shot 12 people at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo is
believed to have spent time in Yemen. The leader of the London bombings in July
2005 had been to Afghanistan three times.
But the traffic to and from Syria is much heavier, because of its easier access
to Europe and a powerful Islamic State propaganda machine that paints a promised
land of religious virtue, Muslim community and righteous revolution with
sound-bite religion, analysts say.
Not all volunteer fighters returning from conflict become terrorists. Some
academic research suggests that one in 10 do, while other sources say the ratio
is as high as one in four. Either way, the end result is a terrorist threat
expanding at a rate that alarms security experts.
“The threat we are facing today is on a scale and at a tempo that I have not
seen before in my career,” said Andrew Parker, the director general of Britain’s
domestic security service, MI5, in a lecture last month. Over the past year, he
said, his service has foiled six attacks in Britain alone.
Intelligence officials frequently complain that their ability to eavesdrop on
suspects is increasingly being abridged by concerns about personal freedoms. The
problems have only increased, they say, with the availability of sophisticated
encryption technology in instant messaging services like WhatsApp and iMessage,
and in less mainstream platforms like Telegram.
Others bemoan a lack of trust and intelligence sharing in Europe. One senior
Belgian counterterrorism official said that Turkey routinely failed to respond
to requests for information, and suggested that this might have played a role in
suspects’ slipping through the cracks. A Turkish official, however, said that
his agency had twice told France the name of one of the Paris attackers, most
recently in June, but did not hear back until after the massacre.
“What we need is the systematic sharing of information in real time,” said Mr.
Caprioli, the former counterterrorism official.
Continue reading the main story
Finding Links Between the Paris Attackers as the Manhunt Continues
Here’s the latest on the search for the militants who carried out Friday’s
attack.
Pointing to an initiative after the Sept. 11 attacks to form a Europe-wide
intelligence task force with representatives from the biggest services that went
nowhere, Mr. Caprioli said that some form of institutionalized sharing of
electronic and human intelligence was “essential,” particularly given Europe’s
open borders. The Schengen area of passport-free travel, he said, made it easier
for the Paris attackers to prepare in Belgium.
The biggest challenge, counterterrorism experts and officials said, was not so
much identifying those who represent a potential threat, but knowing whom to put
under the tightest surveillance. In France alone, about 3,000 people are
considered potential threats, officials said.
“It’s an issue of volume,” said Raffaello Pantucci, the director of
international security studies at the Royal United Services Institute. “The
system is overwhelmed. There are so many individuals and cases they are worried
about by now, historic and current, that they cannot keep up.”
As in other recent attacks, many of the Paris militants were well known to the
authorities, but they still managed to slip through the net.
Samy Amimour, a 28-year-old French bus driver whom officials identified as one
of the gunmen at the Bataclan concert hall, was charged with terrorist
conspiracy in 2012. Suspecting he was planning to go to Yemen to fight, the
authorities confiscated his passport and placed him under judicial control,
meaning he was barred from traveling and had to report regularly to the
authorities.
Nevertheless, a year later Mr. Amimour managed to make his way to Syria
undetected. At least once a month he communicated with his family via Skype, the
French newspaper Le Monde reported last December in an article about how his
67-year-old father had traveled to Syria to try to bring him back. But the
father said that when he returned, the police did not try to debrief him.
Another attacker at the concert hall, identified as Ismaël Omar Mostefaï, 29,
had a “fiche S,” a police file denoting him as a potential security threat. But
he, too, was able to travel to Turkey in 2013, and is believed to have crossed
into Syria from there.
Two brothers the police say were involved in the attacks — Salah Abdeslam, who
is still at large, and Ibrahim Abdeslam, who detonated a suicide bomb at a cafe
on Friday — are also believed to have spent time in Syria, although
investigators are still trying to determine when. When Ibrahim tried to go in
February, he reached only Turkey before he was sent back, a spokesman for
Belgium’s federal prosecutor’s office said on Wednesday.
“There’s always a possibility that he went later,” the official said. Syria is
so accessible, he added, that “we can’t very realistically keep an eye on
everyone” who travels there.
Perhaps the most striking example of the apparent ease with which jihadists can
move between Europe and Syria is the man thought to have orchestrated the
attacks, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, who was the target of an early-morning raid
Wednesday. He is believed to have first gone to Syria in 2014, and may have
returned there twice undetected. The last time he claimed to have returned —
after escaping a raid by the Belgian police in January — he gloated to an
Islamic State magazine about making it back “despite being chased by so many
intelligence agencies.”
One result of the traffic between Europe and Syria is that many of those
returning have had training, suggesting that the litany of failed attempts with
crude explosive devices in Europe over the last decade may be a thing of the
past.
“Real-life training trumps instructions downloaded from the Internet,” Mr. Maher
said.
In August, French security services interrogated a young Frenchman returning
from Syria, Le Monde reported. The man described the Islamic State as a
“factory” of terrorist plots.
Asked what attack might be planned, he said: “All I can tell you is that it will
happen very soon. They really want to hit France and Europe.”
Dan Bilefsky contributed reporting from Paris, and Kimiko de
Freytas-Tamura from Brussels.
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A version of this article appears in print on November 19, 2015, on page A14 of
the New York edition with the headline: Assaults Highlight Jihadists’ Easy Path
to Syria and Back.
The mass murder of civilians in Paris has inevitably reignited
the debate over using military force in the Middle East to attack the Islamic
State. The debate, like anything that gets tangled up in American presidential
politics, is divorced from reality. The United States, and other nations, is
already engaged in military action with some ground forces in Iraq and Syria.
The panicked reactions, fanned by right-wing politicians in the United States
and Europe, to “declare war” on the Islamic State are mostly just noise. None of
those proposing that kind of response offer the slightest idea of how it would
be done; all they have is an understandable desire, which we share, to
obliterate the terrorist group also known as ISIS.
President Obama struck the right note in his remarks on Monday: Military action
can be only one part of a broader strategy that the United States and its
partners will have to pursue over many years. Important Muslim nations, notably
Saudi Arabia, will simply have to stop paying for and politically enabling the
mosques, imams and paramilitary groups that fuel extremists and their virulent
perversions of Islam. Moderate Muslims need to redouble efforts, begun after
9/11, to ensure that their vision of a more tolerant and inclusive Islam
prevails.
In retaliation for the Paris massacres, President François Hollande of France
was entirely justified in sending fighter jets to strike Islamic State targets
in Raqqa, Syria. In the past year, the United States has carried out more than
8,000 strikes against ISIS targets in Syria and Iraq, and Mr. Obama has said
there will be many more.
Given the expanded threat, it is time to engage diplomatic mechanisms that
legally and politically bind the international community in a common cause. On
Tuesday, France formally requested that its European partners help. What should
follow is passage of a United Nations Security Council resolution formally
authorizing the use of force against the Islamic State and, if France requests
it, a NATO decision to invoke Article 5 of its treaty, which obligates the
alliance to defend its members under attack.
The nation and the world would be better off if Congress took a break from
partisanship and finally debated a legal framework for the American military
action that has been underway for more than a year without any such grounding.
Republican lawmakers prefer to simply blame President Obama rather than earn
their paychecks.
What sensible — and effective — further military action, if any, might flow from
such a debate is unclear. America must not repeat past errors and commit
thousands of troops in a Middle East ground war, as some Republicans are urging.
On Monday, Mr. Obama wisely refused to agree to escalate America’s involvement,
which in addition to airstrikes already includes 3,500 troops in Iraq ostensibly
devoted to training, and about 50 Special Operations forces in Syria.
The Islamic State is not a challenge America can handle on its own. Should more
ground troops ever be needed, they should come from countries in the region with
the backing of air power, intelligence, logistics and possibly other support
from the United States, France, Russia and other nations.
One major problem is that Arab countries are divided on who the main enemy is,
making it impossible to focus resources on defeating ISIS. Saudi Arabia is more
concerned with Iran and toppling President Bashar al-Assad of Syria; Turkey
wants to oust Mr. Assad and put down separatist Kurds; Iraq’s central government
is primarily interested in preserving its Shiite-majority rule.
Only if America, Russia and other governments agree on a political settlement to
end the Syrian war will there be a realistic opening for the warring parties to
shift from fighting Mr. Assad to fighting the Islamic State. The bombing of the
Russia airliner over Egypt should persuade Moscow that it needs to help ease Mr.
Assad out of power in a way that doesn’t destabilize Syria further and get
serious about confronting the Islamic State.
On Monday, America and France expanded intelligence-sharing; other countries
should be included. Even before the killings in Paris, the United States last
week intensified attacks on facilities that help finance the Islamic State
through the sale of oil. More effort must be made to shut down all revenue
streams to ISIS; the porous Turkish border with Syria remains a huge problem on
this front.
It is impossible to prevent all violence by hate-filled sociopaths and
ideologues who are willing to die, and confronting the extremist threat from
ISIS and other terrorist groups will require many strategies. But none of them
require demolishing the values that are the heart of democratic societies,
including the free flow of people and information. Banning all refugees, as some
in America and Europe are demanding, would be an ineffective and tragic
capitulation to fear. Governments should improve border controls and vigilance,
but expanding wiretapping and other surveillance in free societies must be
resisted.
A version of this editorial appears in print on November 18,
2015, on page A26 of the New York edition with the headline: What It Will Take
to Fight ISIS.
By the time the United States withdrew from its long bloody
encounter with Iraq in 2011, it thought it had declawed a once fearsome enemy:
the Islamic State, which had many names and incarnations but at the time was
neither fearsome nor a state.
Beaten back by the American troop surge and Sunni tribal fighters, it was
considered such a diminished threat that the bounty the United States put on one
of its leaders had dropped from $5 million to $100,000. The group’s new chief
was just 38 years old, a nearsighted cleric, not even a fighter, with little of
the muscle of his predecessor, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the godfather of Iraq’s
insurgency, killed by the American military four years earlier after a
relentless hunt.
“Where is the Islamic State of Iraq you are talking about?” the Yemeni wife of
one leader demanded, according to Iraqi police testimony. “We’re living in the
desert!”
Yet now, five years later, the Islamic State is on a very different trajectory.
It has wiped clean a 100-year-old colonial border in the Middle East,
controlling millions of people in Iraq and Syria. It has overcome its former
partner and eventual rival, Al Qaeda, first in battle, then as the world’s
pre-eminent jihadist group in reach and recruitment.
It traces its origins both to the terrorist training grounds of Osama bin
Laden’s Afghanistan and to America’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, and it achieved
its resurgence through two single-minded means: control of territory and, by
design, unspeakable cruelty.
Its emblems are the black flag and the severed head.
Since last spring the group, also known as ISIS or ISIL, has been
expanding beyond its local struggle to international terrorism. In the last two
weeks, it did that in a spectacular way, first claiming responsibility for
downing a Russian planeload of 224 people, then sending squads of killers who
ended the lives of 43 people in Beirut and 129 in Paris. As the world scrambles
to respond, the questions pile up like the dead: Who are they? What do they
want? Were signals missed that could have stopped the Islamic State before it
became so deadly?
And there were, in fact, more than hints of the group’s plans and potential. A
2012 report by the United States Defense Intelligence Agency was direct: The
growing chaos in Syria’s civil war was giving Islamic militants there and in
Iraq the space to spread and flourish. The group, it said, could “declare an
Islamic state through its union with other terrorist organizations in Iraq and
Syria.”
“This particular report, this was one of those nobody wanted to see,” said Lt.
Gen. Michael T. Flynn, who ran the defense agency at the time.
“It was disregarded by the White House,” he said. “It was disregarded by other
elements in the intelligence community as a one-off report. Frankly, at the
White House, it didn’t meet the narrative.”
No report or event can stand in hindsight as the single missed key to the now
terrifyingly complex puzzle of the Islamic State. And assigning blame has been
part of the political discourse in the United States and beyond: The decision by
President George W. Bush and allies to marginalize Iraq’s political and military
elite angered and disenfranchised some who formed the heart of the Islamic
State. More recently, President Obama and his allies have been criticized as not
taking seriously enough the Islamic State’s rise.
Having declared itself a caliphate — the successor to past Islamic empires,
ending with the Ottomans — the Islamic State has made Syria and Iraq the central
arena for global conflict.
American warplanes and soldiers are once again engaged in the region, along with
some from its allies. In an echo of the Cold War, Russia has committed its own
planes and missiles, a challenge to the West’s perceived indecision and
inaction. Wider struggles in the Middle East, between Iran and Saudi Arabia,
between Shiite and Sunni, are also playing out. And fleeing the war and poverty
of Syria and Iraq has been a continuous flow of migrants.
“There was a strong belief that brutal insurgencies fail,” said William McCants
of the Brookings Institution and a leading expert on the Islamic State,
explaining the seeming indifference of American officials to the group’s rise.
“The concept was that if you just leave the Islamic State alone, it would
destroy itself, and so you didn’t need to do much.”
A Belief in Brutality
There is no evidence that the two central figures in the Islamic
State’s ascendance ever met, but a faith in brutality — as a strategy unto
itself — was a shared belief. Both came from Iraq, seemingly a key to top
leadership in the Islamic State. Otherwise, they could not be more different.
The first, Mr. Zarqawi, a onetime thief, was a tattooed Jordanian and a reformed
drinker of extreme personal violence whose own mother had proclaimed him not
very smart. The full details of the second, an Iraqi now known as Abu Bakr
al-Baghdadi, the group’s current and reclusive leader, are incomplete, but he is
known more as a quiet Sunni cleric, likely with an advanced degree in Islamic
studies, whose tribe traces its lineage to the Prophet Muhammad himself. He
likes soccer.
Each was shaped by the larger forces of the Islamic world, in particular
religious zeal, Al Qaeda and America’s war with Iraq. Each rejected the secular
culture of the West, which many say was the target of the attacks in Paris.
As difficult as it might be for Americans after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks
and more than a decade of thinking of Bin Laden as the basest terrorist planner,
Mr. Zarqawi was perhaps more violent and more apocalyptic in his outlook than
the Qaeda leader. He grew up poor in the industrial Jordanian city of Zarqa, in
a two-story concrete house, with seven sisters and two brothers.
His youth was spent as a petty criminal, but after adopting a strict form of
Islam he turned to jihad and traveled to Pakistan and Afghanistan, where he
actually met with Bin Laden. Al Qaeda, though, was hesitant about letting him
join — an early sign of a rivalry that would fester into a final split years
later.
While he had a reputation as a thug, Mr. Zarqawi demonstrated keen instincts for
strategic thinking. He clearly saw that the United States would invade Iraq,
slipping into the country in 2003, by some accounts setting up sleeper cells to
attack the invaders. Later, he took full advantage of America’s marginalization
of Saddam Hussein’s ruthless Baathist soldiers and bureaucracy.
Stoking both attacks against American soldiers and tensions with Shiites, he
built an insurgency responsible for keystone moments of the early war: assaults
on the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, the Shiite Imam Ali Mosque and
others large and small.
The United States raised the bounty on him to $25 million, equal to that of Bin
Laden. But the videoed decapitations and wanton sectarian killings of Muslim
civilians — along with his desire to proclaim an Islamic state — also provoked
an unusual rebuke in 2005 from Bin Laden’s No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahri (now the top
leader of Al Qaeda).
Beheadings, Mr. Zawahri wrote, may stir the passions of “zealous young men” but
ordinary Muslims “will never find them palatable.”
An American airstrike finally killed Mr. Zarqawi in June 2006. Four months
later, his successors declared the founding of the Islamic State of Iraq. It was
one of scores of Sunni groups fighting mostly in northern Iraq, and accounts
differ about how effective or distinct it was. Still, Rod Coffey, in March 2008
an American lieutenant colonel, recalls vividly finding the Islamic State’s
black, gold-fringed banner some 50 miles north of Baghdad.
“These were people who, unlike Bin Laden, said, ‘We are going to control ground
now, create a government, create a society, run this place on a steppingstone to
creating a caliphate,’” Mr. Coffey, now 54 and retired, recalled.
Near the flag, he found a mass grave of 30 bodies, executed.
‘Jihadi University’
Mr. McCants, the Brookings scholar, has done deep research into
the origins of Mr. Baghdadi, the current leader of the Islamic State, but much
remains unclear. In his book “The ISIS Apocalypse,” he traces the rise of a
lower-middle class man born in 1971 in the hard-line Sunni city of Samarra,
Iraq. His family ties to Saddam Hussein’s army were strong. His own bad eyesight
would prevent him from active duty.
Apart from his piety, one fact is not in dispute: Mr. Baghdadi is a former
inmate of Camp Bucca, the American prison in southern Iraq now widely agreed to
have been crucial in the formation of Iraqi jihadists, housed in proximity
behind blast walls and spools of razor wire. It earned names like “the Academy”
or the “Jihadi University,” where the United States would unintentionally create
the conditions ripe for training a new generation of insurgents.
In “ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror,” the authors Michael Weiss and Hassan
Hassan quote Maj. Gen. Douglas Stone, a prison commander in Iraq: “If you were
looking to build an army, prison is the perfect place to do it. We gave them
health care, dental, fed them, and most importantly, we kept them from being
killed in combat.”
One who spent time there was Hajji Bakr, a former Iraqi colonel nicknamed the
“Prince of the Shadows,” who later became Mr. Baghdadi’s second in command. He
was killed in 2014 while setting up Islamic State operations in Syria. Mr.
Baghdadi himself was imprisoned for 10 months in 2004. He was remembered not as
an agitator but as calm and deeply religious, an organizer, good at settling
disputes and bringing inmates together.
Looking back this week, John O. Brennan, the C.I.A. director, recounted in a
speech to a Washington think tank that the Islamic State was “pretty much
decimated when U.S. forces were there in Iraq.”
“It had maybe 700 or so adherents left,” Mr. Brennan said. “And then it grew
quite a bit.”
There is little dispute about that initial success. The American military and
Sunni tribesmen, banded together in what became known as the Awakening, left Al
Qaeda, the Islamic State and other Sunni jihadists in disarray by 2010. In June
of that year, Gen. Ray Odierno, leader of the American troops in Iraq, said that
“over the last 90 days or so we’ve either picked up or killed 34 of the top 42
Al Qaeda in Iraq leaders,” using one early name for the Islamic State.
Americans wanted to believe that the Iraq war had ended in triumph, and the
troops were soon withdrawn. But almost immediately tensions began rising between
the Sunnis and the Shiite-dominated government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki
— supported by the United States and Iran, the Shiite giant to the east.
Salaries and jobs promised to cooperating tribes were not paid. There seemed
little room for Sunnis in the new Iraq. The old Sunni insurgents began to look
appealing again.
“The Sunnis were just trying to survive,” recalled Col. Kurt Pinkerton, who was
an American battalion commander in Iraq at the time. “It was more about survival
and assimilation.”
Mr. Baghdadi was named head of the Islamic State in 2010, and his group seemed
particularly adept at exploiting these fears. Mr. McCants recounts how they
entered a period of concentrated “reflection,” developing a detailed, militarily
precise plan for resurrection in 2009.
The document, parts of which are translated in Mr. McCants’s book, is strikingly
self-critical, acknowledging that the Islamic State had lost some of its
aggressiveness and did not control territory. It advised adopting the American
tactic of co-opting the Sunni tribes, conceding that recruiting “the tribes to
eliminate the mujahadis was a clever, bold idea.”
The document also makes clear the need for a media strategy — a recommendation
the group went on to follow with great success, exploiting social media to
spread its message and to attract recruits, many in the more technologically
savvy West.
A Promising New Front
Then a civil war broke out in Syria — a new and promising front for the Islamic
State’s ambitions.
Protests erupted against the government of Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad,
in 2011 amid the wider Arab Spring in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and elsewhere. The
world struggled with how to help — with a weary America unenthusiastic about
engaging anymore — and after a brutal crackdown by government forces, Syrian
protest groups morphed into fighters. At first many were army defectors and
locals, focused on defending their communities and overthrowing Mr. Assad. But
because foreign fighters, some steeped in extremist ideologies, often proved to
be the best organized and funded, they gained momentum on the battlefield.
One distinguishing trait of the Islamic State, as opposed to other groups like
the Nusra Front and the smaller, more secular groups calling themselves the Free
Syrian Army, was its focus on establishing the structures and trappings of a
state and giving that priority over battling Syrian government forces. (This has
led to widespread belief of a secret truce between Mr. Assad and the Islamic
State, given credence recently when the group was left off the list of first
targets when Russia intervened to shore up Mr. Assad.)
As the Islamic State established itself – at first not just in Raqqa and eastern
Aleppo Province and much of Deir al-Zour, but also in villages and outposts
scattered in Idlib and western Aleppo — its fighters drew curiosity, attention
and sometimes ridicule for their presumption. They put up road signs at the
beginnings of territory they held saying, “Welcome to the Islamic State.”
Early on, the Islamic State’s rivals underestimated it, only to face deadly
attacks from the group later. They were not the only ones — Mr. Obama likened
the group to the “J.V. team.” And the Islamic State fighters often did seem like
buffoons, especially the foreign ones, who came from across the Middle East,
Central Asia and Europe. Many could not speak Arabic. And some barely knew
anything of Islamic theology. They posted on social media pictures of themselves
mugging for the camera as they swam in the Euphrates River, or complaining that
it was difficult to find Nutella in the shops.
But some were serious, determined and ideologically motivated. “I have chosen
the state,” one man who identified himself as a Saudi fighter said in an online
interview, explaining that his interest was less in overthrowing Mr. Assad than
in striving for a caliphate, “because I support its method of unification and
implementation of the Shariah of God.”
The Islamic State did, in fact, succeed in building the semblance of a state,
providing services as well as imposing the harshest of rules. It worked to
self-finance, through oil, trade in priceless antiquities and, many say, simple
criminal enterprises like kidnapping and extortion.
And, as it always promised, the Islamic State was brutal, frightening fellow
groups and the wider world with practices like sexual slavery, immolations,
crucifixions and beheadings. Those included well-produced killings on video, and
spread through social media, of the journalist James Foley and others, ending
often with a shot of a bloody severed head.
A Caliphate Declared
The climax of the Islamic State’s rise came in June 2014, when it routed the
Iraqi military police and captured Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, erasing
the century-old border between Iraq and Syria established after World War I. The
caliphate had been declared the month before, but soon after Mosul’s capture,
Mr. Bagdhadi, in a black S.U.V., arrived at the Nuri Mosque in Mosul in a rare
appearance to make that state formal.
Wearing a black turban signifying his descent from Muhammad, he said: “God,
blessed and exalted, has bestowed victory and conquest upon your mujahid
brothers.”
“They rushed to announce the caliphate and appoint a leader,” he said. “This is
a duty incumbent on Muslims, which had been absent for centuries and lost from
the face of the earth.”
There was another victory, which had played out behind the scenes in bitter
missives between Al Qaeda central, the Islamic State and its Qaeda-sponsored
affiliate, the Nusra Front. Mr. Baghdadi rejected demands from Mr. Zawahri,
leader of Al Qaeda after Bin Laden’s death, that he step in line under his rule.
No, Mr. Baghdadi said: The Islamic State was supreme and separate. Al Qaeda
central had become, in some sense, the cautious, increasingly irrelevant uncle.
Paris was the proof of that.
Experts Divided
The carnage of the French capital — young Parisians gunned down by suicide
commandos — has intensified the fears and soul-searching of the West.
What was missed, and what can be done?
America has been bombing the Islamic State for over a year. Russia has joined
the fight, for its own murky reasons. France has begun a new round of airstrikes
of uncertain effectiveness.
At United States Central Command — the military headquarters based in Tampa,
Fla., that is in charge of the American air campaign — intelligence analysts
have long bristled at what they see as deliberate attempts by their bosses to
paint an overly optimistic picture of the war’s progress.
A group of seasoned Iraq analysts saw the conflict as basically a stalemate, and
became enraged when they believed that senior military officers were changing
their conclusions in official Central Command estimates in order to emphasize
that the bombing campaign was having positive effects. The group of analysts
brought their concerns to the Defense Department’s inspector general, who began
an investigation into the complaints.
Similar worries were echoed outside the military. “The Americans have been
bombing targets in Syria for 14 months and that didn’t stop the horrible attacks
in Paris,” said Robert S. Ford, a former American ambassador to Syria and now a
senior fellow at the Middle East Institute. “I’m not saying bombing attacks are
useless, and they probably have some limited value. But we have to know this is
not a long-term solution.”
Only a political solution that finally incorporates Sunnis into Iraq, he said,
will work.
Even in the weeks before the Paris attacks, intelligence analysts were also
deeply divided over the future of the Islamic State’s terrorism campaign. Some
believed that the group was content to keep a local focus — consolidating the
“caliphate” in Iraq and Syria, urging followers around the world to launch
small-scale attacks, but eschewing the centrally planned “spectacular” attacks
that had long been Al Qaeda’s strategy.
But other intelligence analysts were less certain, arguing that it was only a
matter of time before the Islamic State turned to attacks against Europe or the
United States that would grab headlines and sow fear in Western capitals.
Last Friday, it seems, the answer to this debate revealed itself, though to what
end is unknown. Some experts wonder if the Islamic State has moved to complete
its apocalyptic vision in a final battle with the forces of what it calls Rome,
or the West.
A Move Too Far?
The question for the Islamic State, after years of expansion and success on its
terms, even evidence of using mustard agent, is whether Paris proved one move
too far — a brutality the world will not tolerate.
The group has already been under pressure from several angles: Aerial attacks
have in fact damaged its moneymaking oil infrastructure.
After losing the symbolic prize of Kobani last year in northeastern Syria, and
the Iraqi city of Tikrit in the spring, it has more recently lost large
stretches of crucial Syrian territory along the Turkish border to Kurdish
fighters backed by American airstrikes.
The organization has lately shown signs of strain, according to residents of
Raqqa and family members who have fled the area but keep in contact with them.
It is trying to press-gang boys as young as 15 or 16 into fighting the Kurds. It
is shutting down more and more Internet cafes, seeking to control the flow of
information. It has even resorted to hectoring, plaintive advertisements on
social media, showing pictures of Syrian refugees packed into boats bound for
Europe and excoriating them for fleeing to the lands of “the infidels.”
And while many of those refugees are fleeing the government’s and other
combatants, many others have indeed come from “the state” — and are voting
against life there with their feet, a powerful indictment of the caliphate’s
promise to create utopia for Muslims from around the world. Though here again,
there seems evidence that the Islamic State may be taking perverse advantage,
perhaps sending trained fighters back into Europe with the innocents.
Like any organization that expands quickly then faces setbacks, it has internal
tensions.
Some complain that it is controlled by Iraqis who see Syria as a convenient
province. There are reports of dozens of executions and imprisonments of Islamic
State fighters trying to flee the group. There are complaints about salaries and
living conditions, disputes over money and business opportunities, allegations
that commanders have absconded with looted cash and other resources.
And there is growing anecdotal evidence that even some members of the group —
particularly locals who may have joined out of opportunism or a sense that it
was the best way to survive — have become disgusted, like the larger world, by
its extreme violence.
“I still feel sick,” Abu Khadija, a Syrian fighter for the Islamic State, said
recently after witnessing the beheadings of dozens of war prisoners near the
Syrian-Iraqi border.
“I can’t eat, I feel I want to throw up,” he said. “ I hate myself.”
Correction: November 18, 2015
An earlier version of this article misstated the year that the
United States withdrew from Iraq. It was 2011, not 2010.
Ian Fisher covered Iraq regularly in 2003 and 2004 and returned on reporting
trips several times thereafter.
Reporting was contributed by Anne Barnard and Hwaida Saad from Beirut, Lebanon;
Richard A. Oppel Jr., Stephen Farrell and Nicholas Kulish from New York; Matthew
Rosenberg, Mark Mazzetti, Matt Apuzzo and Eric Schmitt from Washington; and C.
J. Chivers.
A version of this article appears in print on November 19, 2015, on page A1 of
the New York edition with the headline: In Rise of ISIS, Many Strands of Blame.
Much of the world agrees that the Islamic State needs to be
crushed.
But how that can be accomplished, and what the unintended consequences may be,
are a lot more complicated.
The group, also known as ISIS, ISIL and Daesh, has proved to be as flexible and
amoebalike as it is apocalyptic and brutal. It thrives under pressure, and a
stepped-up war by the West may be just what it wants, to draw new recruits.
And don’t forget that the group’s predecessor was defeated once before: Al Qaeda
in Mesopotamia, established to fight the Americans after the invasion of Iraq in
2003, was gutted and its leaders killed by 2009. That took thousands of American
lives, many billions of dollars and an ultimately unsustainable effort to pay
Sunni tribal leaders to fight against the group.
But after the Americans left Iraq, the group rose again from the shadows, and in
its reincarnation became even more brutal and determined.
Now that an array of regional and world powers, including rivals like Russia and
the United States, Saudi Arabia and Iran, agree that the group must be crushed,
the question is how to avoid a repeat of past failures.
Talking to a diverse group of experts, officials, religious scholars and former
jihadis makes clear there is no consensus on a simple strategy to defeat the
Islamic State. But there are some themes — like the need to take a decisive role
in the Syrian conflict and to pushing a broader reformation of Islam — that a
range of people who follow the group say must be part of a solution.
ISIS or Assad?
In August 2011, as the Syrian government increased its use of force to crush a
popular uprising, President Obama called for President Bashar al-Assad to go.
“For the sake of the Syrian people, the time has come for President Assad to
step aside,” he said.
Since then, a lot has changed, but not Mr. Obama’s position. Even today, while
willing to tolerate Mr. Assad in power for a brief transition, the United States
has tried to battle the Islamic State inside Syria without appearing to bolster
Mr. Assad.
The Russians, however, insist that the focus should be on defeating the Islamic
State, and that Mr. Assad is an ally in that battle.
Experts say the United States’ position — beating the Islamic State and ousting
Mr. Assad — has been largely ineffective on both counts. Now, they say, it is
time for the United States to abandon the dual focus and take a stand.
One option is for the United States to align with Russia, Iran and the Syrian
government, establishing an alliance to carry out an intensified war against the
group.
“You cannot play two cards at once,” said Kirill V. Kabanov, a Russian security
expert and a former domestic intelligence agent, describing what he sees as the
flawed Western approach of trying to defeat both Mr. Assad and the Islamic
State. He said the solution was choosing the lesser evil — Mr. Assad, in his
view — in the Syrian civil war.
The other option is for the United States to prioritize the removal of Mr.
Assad, whose military has been responsible for far more carnage in Syria than
the Islamic State. As long as Mr. Assad is in power, it will be difficult to get
many Sunni rebels to help in the fight against the group.
“There is probably no solution to ISIS until there is a solution to Assad,” said
J. M. Berger, a scholar at the Brookings Institution and a co-author of the book
“ISIS: The State of Terror.” “That is the factor that paralyzes everything
else.”
Emile Hokayem, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic
Studies, argued that Western powers needed to start identifying Mr. Assad’s
government as part of the problem, because its brutality and sectarianism have
allowed the Islamic State to thrive.
“Assad is not a sideshow,” he said. “He is at the center of this massive
dilemma.”
If the United States went this route, it would immediately have the support of
Saudi Arabia and Turkey, but it would require a great deal of diplomatic
heavy-lifting to persuade Mr. Assad’s two most important backers — the Russians
and the Iranians — to agree to his removal.
“The answer is simple: To beat ISIS, you need the enlistment of the Sunni forces
that won’t happen as long as Assad remains in power in Damascus,” said Ehud
Yaari, an Israel-based fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
“The shortest and most effective way to deal with ISIS is for the United States
and Russia to come to an agreement about the removal of Assad, and they will get
support from others. Then the Sunni forces, the rebels, can deal with ISIS on
the ground.”
Religious Reformation
An effective, long-term strategy to defeat the Islamic State
requires an uncomfortable acknowledgment, some experts say: that there is an
internal conflict within Islam over the direction of the faith, with a radical
strain that has enlisted thousands of fighters to its side.
“The statement that this has nothing to do with Islam is disingenuous,” said
Maajid Nawaz, a former recruiter for a radical Islamist group who was imprisoned
in Egypt from 2001 to 2006.
“We need to have a candid conversation about this and recognize that there is a
correlation between scripture and this,” he said.
This is a complex and delicate problem that must be confronted on multiple
levels, within the religious community, for sure, but also in international
diplomacy, experts say.
In particular, Russian experts said the wellspring of radical religious ideology
was Saudi Arabia and the Sunni states of the Persian Gulf. Their support of
Islamic fundamentalist causes — radical imams and schools — has bred the sort of
extremist ideology that is the backbone of groups like the Islamic State, the
experts said.
“The roots are not in Syria, but far away,” said Gennady V. Gudkov, a former
colonel in the Federal Security Service and former member of Parliament. He says
a source of the problems is the Persian Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia,
which have also supported jihadists as a proxy force fighting Iranian influence.
“The problem is far more serious. All the world leaders should think of this: A
significant part of the Islamic religion is infected with a tumor that is
metastasizing.”
An ultimate defeat of the group cannot happen without a reformation within
Islam, experts say, and that necessitates a recognition that interpretations of
Islam are at the core of the problem, and an outreach to moderate Muslims. The
public, said Amaney A. Jamal, a professor at Princeton University, has to see
Muslims as part of the solution, not just the target of strategies.
“Where is the panel this morning on the Sunday talk shows where you have Muslim
leaders alongside Western leaders to talk about how they’re going to conquer
this problem?” she asked. “Instead, you’ll get panels of Western leaders and
public policy intellectuals telling you what they will do about Muslims, talking
at Muslims.”
Nothing short of a sustained effort among Muslims to offer an alternative to
extremist versions of the religion is needed, religious leaders say. “ISIS is
the one that is saying, ‘We have something to offer you: a sense of purpose, a
sense of fulfillment.’ That is what is missing,” said Imam Mohamed Magid, a
spiritual leader in Virginia.
“We need to have a strong religious identity that calls people to action, but
action in a way that is constructive, not destructive, and promotes life, not
death,” he said.
The Fight
When the Obama administration began carrying out a bombing
campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria last year, it did so with
caution to minimize civilian casualties. That meant, for example, it did not go
after known targets in Raqqa, Syria — the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed
capital — where more than one million people live.
The campaign has no American advisers on the ground to pinpoint airstrikes and
has to rely on Iraqis for targeting information in their country, prompting
experts to criticize it as too modest to inflict enough damage on the terrorist
group.
But if the world is wedded to a military solution, it is likely to come at a
high cost in human lives. Some Russian and Israeli experts argue that an
effective military approach would have to meet brutality with brutality. It
could not, they say, be waged only from the air.
Some Russians pointed to the operation to tame an Islamist insurgency in
Chechnya. Russians effectively adopted a scorched-earth policy, devastating the
capital, Grozny, and even holding the families of jihadists hostage.
In Chechnya, the houses of relatives were demolished or burned, and brothers and
other members of militants’ family were abducted. Mr. Kabanov, the former
Russian intelligence agent, said jihadists should be forced to think twice
before strapping on a suicide belt.
“He should understand his relatives will become accomplices,” he said.
Speaking on Israeli radio on Sunday, Shabtai Shavit, a former chief of Mossad,
the Israeli intelligence service, said the international coalition that has been
fighting the Islamic State for more than a year must “stop talking and start
doing.”
He continued: “With this enemy, we have to push aside arguments on law, morality
and comparisons of security and the rights of the individual. That means to do
what they did in World War II to Dresden. They wiped it off the map. That is
what has to be done to all the territorial enclaves that ISIS is holding.”
Unsaid, though, were the thousands of deaths of civilians in Dresden.
While Israel has also gone after families of bombers — demolishing homes, for
example — that approach backfired in Iraq, inflaming Sunni anger toward the
Shiite-led government and enabling the Islamic State’s rise.
Eradicating the group militarily from the territory it controls could come with
another cost.
“Thousands of angry young men who were manning checkpoints and policing the
streets of I.S. will be freed up to commit terrorism instead,” said Mr. Berger,
the Brookings scholar. “The result will probably be a wave of terrorism the
likes of which the world has never seen.”
Government
For the long term, eradicating the Islamic State and other violent jihadi groups
will probably require drastic reforms in the nature of governments in the Middle
East: greater accountability, fair justice, better schools, more job prospects.
“ISIS thrives on the failures of Middle Eastern governments,” said Mr. Hokayem,
the analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
In Europe and the United States, more attention to integrating Muslim
communities, so young men do not turn radical, is also needed, analysts say.
“We need to create a better vision for our own society and better prospects for
young people and make sure they are better integrated in to our society,” said
Joost Hiltermann, the Middle East and North Africa program director for the
International Crisis Group.
In the sweep of history, there is also a deep sense of decline among Muslim
communities that extremist groups exploit, promising to restore a sense of
dignity and prestige to the Islamic world.
“ISIS is tapping into a deep emotional wound amid Arabs and Muslims,” said Ed
Husain, a British activist and author whose book, “The Islamist,” recounts his
own turn away from youthful radicalism. “For more than a millennium, there were
Muslim leaders who upheld Muslim dignity through unity and leadership. The
Ottomans in the Middle East, for example, and their Mamluk or Abbasid
predecessors.”
He said that in establishing its so-called caliphate, the Islamic State has
offered an alternative to this historical decline.
Arab governments, he said, “cannot beat this transnational movement with secular
nationalism, but learn from the E.U. on how it reinstated dignity and esteem to
Germany, France and the continent through free movement of people, labor and
ideas.”
This, he said, is the “missing part” to a long-term strategy to defeat radical
Islam.
Reporting was contributed by Scott Shane from Washington, Alissa
J. Rubin and Rukmini Callimachi from Paris; Andrew E. Kramer from Moscow; David
D. Kirkpatrick from London; Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem; Laurie Goodstein
from New York; and Thomas Erdbrink from Tehran.
A version of this article appears in print on November 18, 2015, on page A1 of
the New York edition with the headline: Envisioning How the Global Powers Can
Smash a Brutal Enemy.
BRUSSELS — When the family of Abdelhamid Abaaoud received word
from Syria last fall that he had been killed fighting for the Islamic State, it
rejoiced at what it took to be excellent news about a wayward son it had come to
despise.
“We are praying that Abdelhamid really is dead,” his older sister, Yasmina, said
at the time.
The family’s prayers — and the hopes of Western security officials — were not
answered. Mr. Abaaoud, then 26, was in reality on his way back to Europe to meet
secretly with Islamic extremists who shared his determination to spread mayhem.
He has since been linked to a string of terrorist operations that culminated
with Friday’s attacks in Paris.
“Of course, it is not joyous to make blood flow. But, from time to time, it is
pleasant to see the blood of disbelievers,” Mr. Abaaoud declared in a
French-language recruiting video for the Islamic State released shortly before
his supposed death.
During his travels back to Europe at the end of last year, European security
services picked up his trail and tracked his cellphone to Athens, according to a
retired European military official. But they lost him, and soon after that he
appeared to have made it back to Belgium, where he had grown up in a moderately
successful family from Morocco.
At about the time Mr. Abaaoud began his return journey to Europe, Abu Muhammad
al-Adnani, a leader with the Islamic State — he now has a $5 million bounty on
his head, offered by the United States — made an impassioned plea for the
killings of disbelievers. “If you can kill a disbelieving American or European,
especially the spiteful and filthy French, then rely on Allah and kill him in
any manner or way however it may be,” Mr. Adnani said in a recorded message.
Western intelligence agencies, worried that the Islamic State was planning to
widen its carnage from the Middle East to Europe, tried to track a slow but
steady trickle of fighters in Syria as they headed home to the Continent.
A Belgian television station reported Monday that security services had been
alerted to Mr. Abaaoud’s return to Europe by a telephone call he made from
Greece to an inmate, the brother of a known jihadist, in Belgium.
The realization among security officials that Mr. Abaaoud was back in Europe led
to a major operation to intercept him. A safe house for militants he had helped
set up in eastern Belgium was raided in January.
There, two of his comrades, including the brother of the inmate he had called,
were killed. The Belgian authorities trumpeted the raid as having thwarted “a
major terrorist operation.”
But it missed its principal target, Mr. Abaaoud, who then somehow made his way
back to Syria, which Islamic State refers to by its historical Muslim name,
“Sham.”
“Allah blinded their vision and I was able to leave and come to Sham despite
being chased by so many intelligence agencies,” he later told Dabiq, a slickly
produced magazine published by the Islamic State.
It is not known whether Mr. Abaaoud had any direct contact in Syria with Mr.
Adnani, the architect of what the C.I.A. director, John O. Brennan, on Monday
called the Islamic State’s “external operations agenda.” As a low-level fighter,
Mr. Abaaoud was unlikely to have mixed with senior figures in the militant
group’s hierarchy, experts in Belgium said.
But the two men shared a passion for propaganda, with Mr. Adnani serving as the
Islamic State’s official spokesman and Mr. Abaaoud featured in various
recruitment campaigns.
Mr. Abaaoud also had an invaluable asset for Islamic State leaders eager to take
their battle to Europe — a pool of friends and contacts back home willing to
carry out attacks.
Like many of the jihadists who have carried out attacks in Europe, including the
brothers who attacked the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in January,
Mr. Abaaoud showed far more interest in thievery and drugs when he was a young
man than in Islam, particularly the highly disciplined, self-sacrificing Salafi
strain favored by many militants.
Nor was his family impoverished. His father, Omar, owned a clothing store off
the market square in Molenbeek, a borough of Brussels, and the family lived
nearby in a spacious if shabby corner home on Rue de l’Avenir — Future Street —
near the local police station.
Despite his subsequent denunciations of the mistreatment suffered by Muslims in
Europe, he enjoyed privileges available to few immigrants, including admission
to an exclusive Catholic school, Collège Saint-Pierre d’Uccle, in an upscale
residential district of Brussels.
He was given a place as a first-year student in the secondary school but stayed
only one year. An assistant to Saint-Pierre’s director, who declined to give her
name, said he had apparently flunked out. Others say he was dismissed for poor
behavior.
He then drifted into a group of friends in Molenbeek who engaged in various
petty crimes. Among his friends were Ibrahim and Salah Abdeslam, two brothers
who, like Mr. Abaaoud, lived just a few blocks away and are now at the center of
the investigation into the Paris attacks.
Ibrahim Abdeslam was one of the suicide bombers on Friday, and Salah Abdeslam,
who rented a car in Brussels that was used to transport some of the gunmen in
the attacks on Paris, is the target of an extensive manhunt.
Mr. Abaaoud was arrested for petty crime in 2010 and spent time in the same
prison in Brussels where Ibrahim Abdeslam was being held, according to the
spokesman for Belgium’s federal prosecutor and Ibrahim’s former lawyer. It is
not known if they were in touch while in the prison, but they did not stay long.
After their release, they returned to Molenbeek, often hanging out at a dingy
bar known as a hangout for drug dealers.
To the dismay of his family, which had not seen him show any religious zeal, Mr.
Abaaoud suddenly moved to Syria in the beginning of 2014, according to jihadi
experts tracking Belgian militants.
Soon after his arrival in Syria, where he stayed for a time in a grand villa in
Aleppo used to house French-speaking jihadists, he explained his choice in a
video: “All my life I have seen the blood of Muslims flow. I pray that God
breaks the backs of those who oppose him” and “that he exterminates them,” he
said.
Early this year, the French magazine Paris Match found a film that showed Mr.
Abaaoud grinning and making jokes as he dragged corpses with a pickup truck.
“I suddenly saw my picture all over the media,” he told Dabiq. He added that
“thanks to Allah, the infidels were blinded by Allah” and did not spot him when
he returned to Europe at the end of last year.
He also somehow persuaded his younger brother, Younes, who was still in
Molenbeek and only 13, to join him in Syria. The boy left Belgium for Syria on
his own without raising any suspicion from the authorities.
Mr. Abaaoud’s father joined a state prosecutor’s case against his son in May for
having recruited Younes.
“I can’t take it anymore,” Omar Abaaoud told local reporters at the time. “I am
on medication,” he said, adding that his son had dishonored the family. “He
destroyed our families. I don’t ever want to see him again.”
His father is now living in Morocco and wants to put the property on Future
Street up for sale, a family friend said.
Now, Mr. Abaaoud is suspected of being a leader of a branch of the Islamic State
in Syria called Katibat al-Battar al Libi, which has its origins in Libya. This
particular branch has attracted many Belgian fighters because of language and
cultural ties, said Pieter van Ostaeyen, who tracks Belgian militants.
Many Belgian Muslims are of Moroccan origin, he said, and speak a dialect found
in eastern Morocco that is similar to a Libyan dialect. Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi,
who studies jihadi groups at the Middle East Forum, a research center in
Washington, said there was no evidence yet that the Paris attacks had been
ordered by Mr. Adnani or the Islamic State’s overall leader, Abu Bakr
al-Baghdadi.
But he added that the soldiers at the Libyan branch that includes Mr. Abaaoud
had played a prominent role in exporting violence. One of their tasks, he said,
has been to organize plots that “involved foreign fighters, sleeper cells in
Europe that were connected with an operative inside of Syria and Iraq, usually
in a lower to midlevel position.”
About 520 Belgian fighters have gone to Syria or Iraq to fight, making Belgium
the biggest suspected source, per capita, of foreign fighters for ISIS.
According to posts on Twitter and other social media accounts, the two men who
were killed during the raid in Verviers, Belgium, in January were members of
Katibat al-Battar.
Rukmini Callimachi and Milan Schreuer contributed reporting.
A version of this article appears in print on November 18, 2015, on page A13 of
the New York edition with the headline: An ISIS Fighter With Family in Belgium
Who Wanted Him Dead.
BEIRUT, Lebanon — Ali Awad, 14, was chopping vegetables when the
first bomb struck. Adel Tormous, who would die tackling the second bomber, was
sitting at a nearby coffee stand. Khodr Alaa Deen, a registered nurse, was on
his way to work his night shift at the teaching hospital of the American
University at Beirut, in Lebanon.
All three lost their lives in a double suicide attack in Beirut on Thursday,
along with 40 others, and much like the scores who died a day later in Paris,
they were killed at random, in a bustling urban area, while going about their
normal evening business.
Around the crime scenes in south Beirut and central Paris alike, a sense of
shock and sadness lingered into the weekend, with cafes and markets quieter than
usual. The consecutive rampages, both claimed by the Islamic State, inspired
feelings of shared, even global vulnerability — especially in Lebanon, where
many expressed shock that such chaos had reached France, a country they regarded
as far safer than their own.
But for some in Beirut, that solidarity was mixed with anguish over the fact
that just one of the stricken cities — Paris — received a global outpouring of
sympathy akin to the one lavished on the United States after the 9/11 attacks.
Monuments around the world lit up in the colors of the French flag; presidential
speeches touted the need to defend “shared values;” Facebook offered users a
one-click option to overlay their profile pictures with the French tricolor, a
service not offered for the Lebanese flag. On Friday the social media giant even
activated Safety Check, a feature usually reserved for natural disasters that
lets people alert loved ones that they are unhurt; they had not activated it the
day before for Beirut.
“When my people died, no country bothered to light up its landmarks in the
colors of their flag,” Elie Fares, a Lebanese doctor, wrote on his blog. “When
my people died, they did not send the world into mourning. Their death was but
an irrelevant fleck along the international news cycle, something that happens
in those parts of the world.”
The implication, numerous Lebanese commentators complained, was that Arab lives
mattered less. Either that, or that their country — relatively calm despite the
war next door — was perceived as a place where carnage is the norm, an
undifferentiated corner of a basket-case region.
In fact, while Beirut was once synonymous with violence, when it went through a
grinding civil war a generation ago, this was the deadliest suicide bombing to
hit the city since that conflict ended in 1990. Lebanon has weathered waves of
political assassinations, street skirmishes and wars; Israeli airstrikes leveled
whole apartment blocks in 2006. But it had been a year of relative calm.
The Islamic State emerged from a group of militants in Iraq to take over large
portions of Iraq and Syria, and now threatens other countries in Europe and
elsewhere.
(A reminder of the muddled perceptions came last week, when Jeb Bush, the
Republican presidential candidate, declared that “if you’re a Christian,
increasingly in Lebanon, or Iraq or Syria, you’re gonna be beheaded.” That was
news to Lebanon’s Christians, who hold significant political power.
The disparity in reactions highlighted a sense in the region of
being left alone to bear the brunt of Syria’s deadly four-year war, which has
sent more than four million refugees fleeing, mostly to neighboring countries
like Lebanon. For the Lebanese, the government has been little help, plagued as
it is with gridlock and corruption that have engendered electricity and water
shortages and, most recently, a collapse of garbage collection. Many in the
region — both supporters and opponents of the Syrian government — say they have
long warned the international powers that, if left unaddressed, the conflict
would eventually spill into the West.
To be sure, the attacks meant different things in Paris and Beirut. Paris saw it
as a bolt from the blue, the worst attack in the city in decades, while to
Beirut the bombing was the fulfillment of a never entirely absent fear that
another outbreak of violence may come.
Lebanon seemed to have recovered over the past year and a half from a series of
bombings claimed by Sunni militant groups as revenge for the intervention by
Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based Shiite militia, in the Syrian civil war to provide
critical support for the Syrian government.
Some blamed news coverage for the perception that Beirut is still an active war
zone. They cited headlines — including, briefly, a Times one that was soon
changed to be more precise — that refer to the predominantly Shiite neighborhood
where the bombing took place as a “stronghold” of the militia and political
party Hezbollah.
That is hard to dispute in the political sense — Hezbollah controls security in
the neighborhood and is highly popular there, along with the allied Amal party.
But the phrase also risks portraying a busy civilian, residential and commercial
district as a justifiable military target.
Meanwhile, Syrians fretted that the brunt of reaction to both attacks would fall
on them. There are a million Syrians in Lebanon, a country of four million; some
have become desperate enough to contemplate joining the accelerating flow of
those taking smugglers’ boats to Europe.
But now, the attacks could rally political pressure in Europe to stop admitting
them. When evidence emerged that at least one of the Paris attackers may have
posed as an asylum seeker to reach Europe, some opponents of the migration
quickly used that to argue for closing the doors.
That drew sharp reactions from Syrians, who said refugees were fleeing to Europe
precisely to escape indiscriminate violence.
“This is the sort of terrorism that Syrian refugees have been fleeing by the
millions,” declared Faisal Alazem, a spokesman for the Syrian Canadian Council.
The compassion gap is even more evident when it comes to the situation in Syria
itself, where death tolls comparable to the 129 so far in the Paris attacks are
far from rare and, during the worst periods, were virtually daily occurrences.
“Imagine if what happened in Paris last night would happen there on a daily
basis for five years,” said Nour Kabbach, who fled the heavy bombardment of her
home city of Aleppo, Syria, several years ago and now works in humanitarian aid
in Beirut.
“Now imagine all that happening without global sympathy for innocent lost lives,
with no special media updates by the minute, and without the support of every
world leader condemning the violence,” she wrote on Facebook. Finally, she said,
ask yourself what it would be like to have to explain to your child why an
attack in “another pretty city like yours” got worldwide attention and your own
did not.
Back in southern Beirut over the weekend, as the government announced the arrest
of seven Syrians and two Lebanese in connection with the attack, the street
where the bombings took place was strewn with lettuce and parsley from pushcarts
overturned in the blast. Men washed blood from sidewalks. A shop’s inventory of
shoes — from small children’s slippers to women’s clogs — was scattered across
the pavement. Several funeral processions were massing, ready to march to
cemeteries.
Residents mourned Ali Awad, 14, passing around his picture in a scouting
uniform. He had run out to see what had happened after the first blast, and was
caught in the second, relatives said.
Nearby, Abdullah Jawad stood staring glumly into a shop. His friend, the owner,
had died there, just after Mr. Jawad had painted the place.
“The government can’t protect us,” he said. “They can’t even pick up the trash
from the streets.”
As for Facebook, it declared that the high level of social media activity around
the Paris attacks had inspired the company to activate Safety Check for the
first time for an emergency other than a natural disaster, and that a policy of
when to do so was still developing.
“There has to be a first time for trying something new, even in complex and
sensitive times, and for us that was Paris,” wrote Alex Schultz, the company’s
vice president for growth, adding that Safety Check is less useful in continuing
wars and epidemics because, without a clear end point, “it’s impossible to know
when someone is truly ‘safe.’”
Hwaida Saad contributed reporting.
A version of this article appears in print on November 16, 2015, on page A6 of
the New York edition with the headline: Beirut, Also the Site of Deadly Attacks,
Feels Forgotten.
ANTALYA, Turkey — For President Obama, the short-term response to
the terrorist attacks in Paris was straightforward and relatively easy: The
American military and intelligence agencies provided information to help French
warplanes bomb Islamic State targets on Sunday in the group’s stronghold in
northern Syria.
Determining the long-term response, however, may be exponentially harder. Even
as Mr. Obama searched for ways to step up the war against the terrorist group,
which has expanded its operations beyond its territory in Iraq and Syria, senior
White House officials on Sunday again ruled out the introduction of substantial
numbers of American ground troops.
The French airstrikes may have been a potent show of defiance, but it was not
clear that they represented a major shift in the American coalition’s overall
strategy.
Before the attacks in Paris on Friday, the French confined the majority of their
airstrikes against the Islamic State to targets in Iraq. With the strikes on
Sunday, President François Hollande, who called the Paris attacks an “act of
war” and vowed to be “merciless” against those responsible, made it clear that
he would no longer be deterred by the border between Iraq and Syria.
But the Americans have been bombing on both sides of the border for more than a
year with mixed results, and the recent entry of Russia, with its own air power,
into Syria has not changed the overall picture. The emotional statements from
France appeared to do little to fundamentally change Mr. Obama’s view of the
high cost of drastically expanding the American role in Iraq and Syria.
And so, senior administration officials said, Mr. Obama is looking to do more of
what he has already been doing and to do it better. The possibilities, they
said, include more airstrikes, Special Operations raids, assistance to local
allies and attacks against Islamic State targets outside Syria and Iraq, like
the strike in Libya over the weekend.
“We don’t believe U.S. troops are the answer to the problem,” Benjamin J.
Rhodes, the president’s deputy national security adviser, told reporters on
Sunday at the Group of 20 meetings here in Turkey, where Mr. Obama consulted
with other world leaders. “The further introduction of U.S. troops to fully
re-engage in ground combat in the Middle East is not the way to deal with this
challenge.”
The summit meeting here came less than 48 hours after gunmen and suicide bombers
killed at least 129 people in simultaneous attacks across Paris, even as other
challenges roiled international relations. Given its setting, just a few hundred
miles from Syria, the meeting was already likely to focus on the Islamic State
as well as the related refugee crisis that has engulfed Europe. Moreover, Mr.
Obama was still grappling with Russia’s intervention in Ukraine and keeping an
eye on the South China Sea, where China maritime claims put it at odds with its
neighbors.
The Paris attacks clearly upended not only the summit meeting but also the
administration’s view of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or Daesh, and the
range of its threat. A day before the attacks in the French capital, Mr. Obama
said in a TV interview that the Islamic State had been contained in Iraq and
Syria.
At a meeting with his national security team on Saturday before leaving for
Turkey, Mr. Obama gave orders to the nation’s intelligence agencies to overhaul
their assessment of the group, given the attacks.
“This was a game changer,” said a senior intelligence official who, like other
American officials, requested anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. “We
have to look hard at what happened in Paris, at the trajectory of the group and
the potential threat it poses to the entire international community.”
Intelligence analysts working over the weekend had already put aside Mr. Obama’s
comment about the Islamic State being contained.
“This clearly shows ISIS is looking at an international level and is capable of
carrying out large-scale attacks outside Iraq and Syria,” the intelligence
official said. “There will be a greater sense of urgency in how we go about
trying to combat these kinds of attacks. Paris shows that they can attack soft
targets on any day, anywhere, including in any major American city.”
Under fire back home over the “contained” comment, White House officials
rejected any suggestion that the administration had underestimated the threat
posed by the Islamic State and said the president had been referring to success
in halting territorial gains in Iraq and Syria.
The Islamic State emerged from a group of militants in Iraq to take over large
portions of Iraq and Syria, and now threatens other countries in Europe and
elsewhere.
“A year ago, we saw them on the march in both Iraq and Syria, taking more and
more population centers,” Mr. Rhodes said on “This Week” on ABC. “The fact is,
we have been able to stop that geographic advance and take back significant
amounts of territory in both northern Iraq and northern Syria.”
In his only public comments here on Sunday, Mr. Obama vowed to stand with
France, calling the massacre in Paris “an attack on the civilized world.”
White House officials said Mr. Obama agreed with Mr. Hollande that the killings
in Paris were an “act of war,” and they promised that the United States would
deepen cooperation with French officials. Mr. Rhodes said a French two-star
general was now stationed in the headquarters of United States Central Command,
which is coordinating the American airstrikes in Syria and Iraq.
But officials were less clear about how far that cooperation would go. And while
no one in the French government has yet said that France will take the next
logical step and ask other NATO members to defend it under Article 5 of the NATO
treaty, many experts on international security talked about the need for joint
action. Mr. Hollande’s use of the phrase “act of war” complicated Mr. Obama’s
deliberations.
Aides said the president had discussed the need for more cooperation with the
Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, especially along Turkey’s border with
Syria. And the last-minute addition of a meeting here between Mr. Obama and King
Salman of Saudi Arabia was described as an effort to urge more support from the
Saudis.
Mr. Obama also met with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, again broaching
their longstanding disagreement about how to confront the Islamic State and
resolve the civil war in Syria. The two spoke for 35 minutes at a reception,
their first meeting since Russian planes began bombing targets inside Syria in
an effort to bolster the government of President Bashar al-Assad, who Mr. Obama
has said must step down.
American officials described the meeting as “constructive,”
emphasizing that the two leaders agreed on the need for a cease-fire in Syria
and a political transition to a new government. But Russian officials described
the meeting in less glowing terms, saying that Mr. Obama and Mr. Putin remained
at odds about how to achieve those goals.
“On tactics, the two sides are still diverging,” Yuri Ushakov, Mr. Putin’s
foreign policy adviser, told reporters.
The intricate diplomatic picture complicated the administration’s options. With
Russia and Iran also fighting the Islamic State but having different regional
interests from the United States, American officials said they wanted to be sure
that military action did not impair the shared diplomatic goal of ending the
violence in Syria. Secretary of State John Kerry was in Vienna over the weekend
seeking a consensus to try to stop the Syrian civil war, which helped give rise
to the Islamic State.
“It’s a matter of making sure it’s all been thought out,” a senior Defense
Department official said. “If it looks like a shift in our posture would be
beneficial in terms of diplomacy, or would have a negative impact, that is
something that the administration wants to consider.”
While the White House tried to distance itself from the idea of containment, a
senior administration official said, “What we had in essence was a containment
policy” based on the belief that efforts to counter the Islamic State’s ideology
had to be led by Sunni Muslim states, with backup from the United States.
Yet Mr. Obama’s strategy was also based on intelligence assessments that the
Islamic State was overextended and vulnerable to a cutoff in its oil and
black-market revenues — and that, in the long war against extremism, there was
still time to bolster the most capable local forces and bring Arab states to the
fight.
“If Paris changes anything,” an American official said, “it’s the recognition
that we can’t wait for those two events to happen, if they ever happen.”
Michael D. Shear reported from Antalya, Turkey, and Peter Baker
from Washington. Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington.
A version of this article appears in print on November 16, 2015, on page A1 of
the New York edition with the headline: Obama Loath To Add Troops To ISIS Fight.
Hanover, N.H. — SURVEYING the aftermath of the terror attacks in
Paris, most Americans probably feel despair, and a presentiment that it is only
a matter of time before something similar happens here. Even as Americans have
felt the pain of the French, they have worried, not surprisingly, considering
9/11, about whether their country is next.
But such anxiety is unwarranted. In fact, it’s a mistake to assume that
America’s security from terrorism at home is comparable to Europe’s. For many
reasons, the United States is a significantly safer place. While vigilance
remains essential, no one should panic.
The slaughter in France depended on four things: easy access to Paris, European
citizens happy to massacre their compatriots, a Euro-jihadist infrastructure to
supply weapons and security agencies that lacked resources to monitor the
individuals involved. These are problems the United States does not have — at
least not nearly to the degree that Europe does, undermining its ability to
defend itself.
American policy makers have eyed Europe’s external border controls skeptically
for many years: The Schengen rules, which allow for free border-crossing inside
most of the European Union, have made life simple for criminals.
Complicating matters is the ease with which a terrorist might slip out of Syria,
cross through Turkey and enter Greece and the European Union, as at least one of
the Paris killers appears to have done. Counterterrorism often boils down to a
search for a few individuals, and the chaos surrounding the flood of refugees —
a record 218,000 entered the European Union just last month — has exacerbated
the difficulty of keeping track of such incoming security threats.
But the United States doesn’t have this problem. Pretty much anyone coming to
the United States from Middle Eastern war zones or the radical underground of
Europe would need to come by plane, and, since 9/11, we have made it tough for
such people to fly to the United States.
And it helps that America’s two immediate neighbors, Mexico and Canada, have
extremely cooperative security authorities, which prevents would-be terrorists
from slipping across our land borders.
Then there’s the domestic challenge. It appears the Paris attacks involved both
Middle Eastern operatives and Muslims from France and Belgium. But some
high-profile exceptions aside, American Muslims are much less attracted to the
Islamic State and its ideology than European Muslims seem to be. Americans have
traveled to ISIS-controlled territories at a rate of roughly a third that of
their European Union coreligionists.
Yes, some of the worst attacks of recent years here at home have been by deeply
alienated Muslims, including Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, and the
Tsarnaev brothers, perpetrators of the Boston Marathon bombing. But the
incidence of such malcontents is lower than in Europe, whose larger Muslim
communities, social science data shows, are markedly less integrated.
Although European governments have been working to ameliorate grievances,
European Muslims remain poorer, more ghettoized and more discriminated against
than American Muslims, whose levels of education and income mirror those of the
entire American population.
We should be thankful for the paucity of American extremists, given our
superabundance of weapons. The Islamic State’s innovation over its predecessors
from Al Qaeda, who relished the drama of bomb strikes, is indiscriminate attacks
with firearms. Many of the guns are from government stocks in places like Libya
and Syria, which has changed the equation in formerly gun-free Europe.
The United States has another advantage: an intelligence, law enforcement and
border-control apparatus that has been vastly improved since the cataclysm of
9/11. Post-9/11 visa requirements and no-fly lists weed out most bad actors, and
both the Bush and Obama administrations demanded that countries in our visa
waiver program provide data on extremists through information-sharing pacts
called HSPD-6 agreements. Improvements continue, like an advance passenger
information/passenger name recognition agreement with the European Union of
2012.
In fact, America has spent more than $650 billion since 9/11 on homeland
security, or around $47 billion a year. In contrast, after the Charlie Hebdo
killings, France announced a multiyear $786 million effort to combat terrorism.
The annual budget for Germany’s entire intelligence service is $660 million. The
resulting gaps in France’s counterterror regime are self-evident: Already, there
are indications that the Paris crew operated undetected because of surveillance
shortcomings, as was true with the Charlie Hebdo attacks.
None of this should lead American authorities, or the American people, to settle
into a false sense of security. The foremost task for the years ahead is to
double down on our intelligence collection and press our European partners to
dramatically expand theirs.
If anything, what the Paris attacks show is that the world needs America’s
intelligence and security resources even more than its military might. The
American intelligence community is the indispensable hub of global
counterterrorism efforts, but the large numbers and geographic spread of the
Islamic State mean that the United States must commit even more resources.
Europe must step up and help build the basis for a deeper, more far-reaching
collaboration.
Europe, already disadvantaged by geography, has to try a lot harder. It’s a
daunting but not insurmountable challenge, and America must be ready to help,
for Europe’s sake and its own.
Steven Simon and Daniel Benjamin are scholars at Dartmouth College and the
authors of “The Age of Sacred Terror.” Mr. Simon was the senior director for the
Middle East and North Africa at the National Security Council from 2011 to 2012
and Mr. Benjamin served as the coordinator for counterterrorism at the State
Department from 2009 to 2012.
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A version of this op-ed appears in print on November 16, 2015, on page A21 of
the National edition with the headline: Could Paris Happen Here?
The terrorist attacks in Paris on Friday, along with twin
bombings in Beirut on the day before and the downing of a Russian jetliner over
the Sinai Peninsula on Oct. 31, show a new phase in the Islamic State’s war
against the West, a readiness to strike far beyond areas it controls in Iraq,
Syria, and increasingly, Libya.
The challenge for threatened countries is huge. The sort of attacks the Islamic
State, or ISIS, has launched are hard to anticipate or prevent, yet in Europe
each one intensifies the raucous xenophobia of far-right nationalists ever ready
to demonize Muslim citizens, immigrants and refugees, and shut down Europe’s
open internal borders. The Islamic State must be crushed, but that requires
patience, determination and the coordination of strategies and goals that has
been sorely lacking among countries involved in the war on ISIS, especially the
United States and Russia.
President François Hollande of France defiantly declared the attacks in Paris
“an act of war” and vowed a “pitiless” response. On Sunday, French warplanes
bombarded Raqqa, the Syrian city that is an ISIS stronghold. Mr. Hollande is
expected to offer other proposals when he addresses the French Parliament at a
special session in Versailles on Monday. France already has some of Europe’s
most intensive antiterrorist policing; adopting draconian measures of the sort
demanded by far-right nationalists like Marine Le Pen of the National Front can
only further alienate France’s Muslim population of five million, without
offering any assurance against more attacks.
The discovery of a Syrian passport near one of the attackers, which matched one
used by an asylum-seeker who had entered Europe through Greece, was bound to
intensify anti-refugee sentiments and calls to close Europe’s open internal
borders. There is no proof that the owner of the passport was one of the gunmen.
And even if one of the attackers had entered Europe in the guise of a refugee,
the first gunman to be conclusively identified, Omar Ismail Mostefai, was not a
refugee, but a French citizen born and raised in a town just south of Paris.
Pouring fuel on the passions swirling around refugees and Muslims in Europe was
no doubt a major goal behind the ISIS attack. The choice of the neighborhoods
where most attacks occurred, an ethnically diverse area in eastern Paris
increasingly populated by young professionals, seemed designed to send the
message that tolerance would be no protection against what ISIS described in a
communiqué as the coming “storm.”
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editorial board and contributing writers from around the world.
France must take measures to protect its citizens, as must the United States,
Russia and all the other countries — Western and Middle Eastern — threatened by
the Islamic State’s murderous dream of a new caliphate. At the same time, it’s
clear that the prevention of further ISIS attacks will require threatened states
to find a way to end the Syrian civil war, which has made it possible for this
terrorist group to gain wealth, territory and power. That means closely
coordinating action among countries already engaged in the fight — most notably
the United States and Russia — and it means persuading more European and Middle
Eastern nations to join in the mission.
Until the latest spate of ISIS attacks, America’s focus on that terrorist
organization as the primary enemy had not been fully shared by Russia, which has
used its military actions more to defend its ally, President Bashar al-Assad of
Syria. But there have been several promising moves of late toward greater
cooperation.
At a meeting in Vienna on Saturday, representatives of more than a dozen
countries with an urgent interest in ending the Syrian war, including Secretary
of State John Kerry and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov of Russia, agreed on a
tentative plan for a phased transition to an interim government and elections in
Syria. And at the Group of 20 summit meeting underway in Turkey, Syria and ISIS
have been a topic of urgent discussion, as they presumably were when President
Obama met separately with President Vladimir Putin of Russia.
The attacks in Paris sent a major shockwave around the world, and the Beirut
bombings and the downing of the Russian civilian jetliner were every bit as
horrific. ISIS has demonstrated that there is no limit to its reach, and no
nation is really safe until they all come together to defeat this scourge.
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A version of this editorial appears in print on November 16,
2015, on page A20 of the National edition with the headline: What Will Come
After Paris.
WASHINGTON — When the Islamic State stormed onto the scene in
Syria and Iraq, it seemed focused on seizing territory in its own neighborhood.
But in the last two weeks, the so-called soldiers of the caliphate appear to
have demonstrated a chilling reach, with terrorist attacks against Russia, in
Lebanon and now in France.
The seemingly synchronized assaults that turned Paris into a war zone on Friday
came just days after a bombing targeted a Shiite district of Beirut controlled
by Iran’s ally, Hezbollah, and a Russian passenger jet was downed over Egypt.
The rapid succession of strikes, all claimed by the Islamic State, suggested
that the regional war has turned into a global one.
For President Obama and American allies, the attacks are almost certain to force
a reassessment of the threat and may prompt a more aggressive strategy against
the Islamic State, known variously as ISIS, ISIL or Daesh. Mr. Obama met with
national security aides Saturday before his scheduled departure for Antalya,
Turkey, where he was to consult with other world leaders in a Group of 20 summit
meeting now sure to be dominated by discussion of the Paris attacks.
“ISIS is absolutely a threat beyond the region,” said Frances Fragos Townsend,
the top White House counterterrorism adviser under President George W. Bush. “We
must not continue to assume that ISIS is merely an away threat. It clearly has
international ambitions beyond its self-proclaimed caliphate.”
The situation was already complex enough, with varied players with separate
interests involved in the war.
Iran is fighting the Islamic State, but is hardly an ally of the United States.
Russia says it is fighting the Islamic State as well, but mainly seems to be
trying to bolster the government of President Bashar al-Assad, who Mr. Obama has
said must step down.
To an extent, the United States had viewed the Islamic State as a regional
problem to fence in; indeed, just the day before the Paris attacks, Mr. Obama
told ABC News that “we have contained them” in Iraq and Syria. But now the
debate will be transformed and Mr. Obama may have to rethink the contours of the
war he has been waging.
“Truthfully, I can’t imagine how it doesn’t change their approach,” said Michael
E. Leiter, who was the director of the National Counterterrorism Center under
Mr. Bush and Mr. Obama. “When you give this kind of organization this much
freedom of movement and go after it this incrementally, people shouldn’t be
surprised by things like the aircraft bombing.”
Matthew G. Olsen, another former director of the counterterrorism center, said
the series of major attacks would compel the White House to take additional
steps. “All of this raises the stakes for the U.S. and increases pressure on the
U.S. and the West to respond more aggressively,” he said.
Escalating action against the Islamic State carries its own risks. The Russian
airliner was attacked after Moscow intervened in Syria. And the Islamic State
has warned it would step up strikes against those countries that have joined the
American-led coalition fighting the group in Iraq and Syria.
“The operational tempo is increasing on both sides,” Mr. Olsen
said. “We’re increasing our attacks in Syria and Iraq, and ISIS is increasing
their attacks as well.”
Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the ranking Democrat on the
Intelligence Committee, said the attacks should dispel any illusions about the
nature of the Islamic State. “It will add another sense of urgency to defeating”
it, he said, “and that will be very hard to do without eliminating its
sanctuary. If this doesn’t create in the world a fierce determination to rid
ourselves of this scourge, I don’t know what will.”
The Paris attacks will inevitably raise the question of whether to escalate
American and Western military operations in Syria and Iraq. Mr. Obama has
authorized airstrikes and sent small teams of Special Operations forces acting
as advisers to aid Iraqi military units, Syrian rebels and Kurdish fighters on
the ground. But he has strongly resisted a more extensive involvement of
American ground troops to avoid repeating what he sees as the mistakes of the
Iraq war.
In Mr. Obama’s view, the United States made things worse after Sept. 11 by
invading Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein, stoking a wider anti-American
militant movement that ultimately led to the rise of the Islamic State. While
critics fault him for pulling American troops out of Iraq in 2011, leaving a
vacuum, he has long believed that a greater involvement by the United States
would only entangle it in another quagmire without successfully resolving the
conflict.
Ms. Townsend and others said that the White House had been too reluctant to
acknowledge an “inconvenient truth” — that the Islamic State threat extends
beyond the Middle East and could easily lead to a Paris-style attack in the
United States.
If there were doubts about that before, American agencies on Saturday were busy
trying to make sure that that was not the case, scouring passenger manifests on
airliners bound for the United States and searching surveillance resources for
chatter about plots.
Mr. Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry made it clear in statements after
the Paris attacks that the United States would stand firm against terrorism,
whatever its source. In Vienna, where Mr. Kerry was trying to negotiate a
settlement of the Syrian war, which helped give rise to the Islamic State, he
said the Paris attacks would “stiffen our resolve” to fight back.
“You’re going to see several things,” said Steven Simon, a former Middle East
adviser to Mr. Obama. “Tighter border controls, more intensive surveillance in
the U.S. and more outreach to local communities in the hope that extremists will
be fingered by their friends and family. And a tightening of already intimate
cooperation with European intelligence agencies.”
Juan Carlos Zarate, a former counterterrorism adviser to Mr. Bush, said the
spreading threat would require action on multiple fronts. “In the wake of the
Paris, Beirut and Sinai attacks, the U.S. government and allies may now realize
that there may not be time to contain this threat — and instead need to be much
more aggressive in disrupting terrorists’ hold on territory, resources and the
minds of Muslim youth.”
The Paris attacks, coming so soon after the deadly shootings at Charlie Hebdo,
the French satirical newspaper, in January will force American analysts to
review their assumptions about the potential threat at home.
While attacks in places like Mumbai, India, have been highly coordinated, much
attention in the United States has focused on the possibility of lone-wolf
attackers inspired by, if not directed by, radicals overseas, as manifested by
the shootings at Fort Hood, Tex., in 2009 or the bombing of the Boston Marathon
in 2013.
“The multiple coordinated attacks defy the lone-wolf narrative we had
constructed,” said Juliette Kayyem, a former assistant secretary of homeland
security under Mr. Obama. “The fact this could happen is remarkable, and not in
a complimentary way. We can withstand random guys with low-level attacks and
minimal consequences. This means the ‘war’ we thought we had put to rest has
resurfaced.”
Bruce Hoffman, director of the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown, said
it was never an either-or choice between lone wolves and foreign attackers.
“The emphasis on lone wolves was all part of the wishful thinking that ISIS was
purely a local phenomenon that could be contained to Syria and Iraq,” Mr.
Hoffman said.
Indeed, the initial assumptions on Friday were that the Paris attacks must be
the work of Al Qaeda, a group that traditionally has had wider reach and
aspirations than the Islamic State.
In 2010, Mr. Hoffman recalled, Osama bin Laden called on Qaeda franchises to
stage Mumbai-style attacks in European cities, but his order fell on deaf ears
because there was no group then capable of such an operation.
Today, the Islamic State seems to have filled that void.
“They wanted to be considered a global terrorist organization,” said John D.
Cohen, a Rutgers University professor who was a senior Department of Homeland
Security counterterrorism and intelligence official until last year. “If so,
they’ll have sent a loud message they are.”
WASHINGTON — Defying Western efforts to confront the Islamic
State on the battlefield, the group has evolved in its reach and organizational
ability, with increasingly dangerous hubs outside Iraq and Syria and strategies
that call for using spectacular acts of violence against civilians.
But even as the militant attacks were playing out across Paris on Friday night,
the United States carried out an airstrike — planned days in advance — against
the leader of the Islamic State in Libya, which has emerged as a pivotal
stronghold for the group in North Africa. American and British Special
Operations forces have for months been conducting secret surveillance missions
in Libya to monitor the rise of fighters aligned with the Islamic State.
The massacre in Paris on Friday, following bombings in Beirut, Lebanon, and the
downing of a Russian passenger jet over Egypt, all claimed by the Islamic State,
reveals a terrorist organization that has changed in significant ways from the
West’s initial understanding of it as a group focused on holding territory in
Syria and Iraq and building a caliphate, or Islamic state.
And actions by the United States and its allies — including a Western bombing
campaign of Islamic State-held fighting positions and oil facilities,
coordinated with a ground offensive by Kurdish forces to cut off a major supply
line — foreshadow how the West might respond to the growing menace in the coming
weeks.
The Islamic State, also known as ISIS, ISIL or Daesh, has for the first time
engaged in what appears to be a centrally planned campaign of terrorist attacks
aimed at inflicting huge civilian casualties on distant territory, forcing many
counterterrorism officials in the United States and in Europe to recalibrate
their assessment of the group.
“They have crossed some kind of Rubicon,” said William McCants, a scholar at the
Brookings Institution and author of “The ISIS Apocalypse.” “They have definitely
shifted in their thinking about targeting their enemies.”
When the Islamic State’s Egyptian arm claimed responsibility for blowing up a
Russian charter plane over Sinai two weeks ago, some analysts wondered if the
group’s so-called Sinai Province of the Islamic State had acted on its own and
leapt out in front, even at the cost of risking a Russian military backlash on
the parent group in Syria and Iraq.
But the attacks last week in Paris and Beirut, which the Islamic State also said
it carried out, appear to have settled that question and convinced even skeptics
that the central leadership was calling the shots.
“There is a radical change of perception by the terrorists that they can now act
in Paris just as they act in Syria or Baghdad,” said Mathieu Guidère, a
terrorism specialist at the University of Toulouse. “With this action, a
psychological barrier has been broken.”
Indeed, at a time when many Western officials were most concerned about Islamic
State-inspired, lone-wolf attacks — terrifying in their randomness but
relatively low in casualties — the attacks in Paris have revived the specter of
coordinated, high-casualty attacks planned with the involvement of a relatively
large number of perpetrators.
American and European authorities said the Paris assault bore the hallmarks of
complex attacks conducted by Al Qaeda, or of the Mumbai plot in 2008, when 10
Islamic militants carried out a series of 12 shootings and bombings in the
Indian city, lasting four days and killing 164 people.
“Their goal is an unconventional urban guerrilla war,” said Franck Chaix, an
officer of the Gendarmerie, France’s semi-military police force, and a former
head of its special intervention force, G.I.G.N.
Al Qaeda, the Islamic State’s principal forebear, built its identity around
spectacular terrorist attacks because its leaders saw themselves as insurgents
seeking to overturn Arab governments that they deemed apostates. Al Qaeda wanted
to bait the West into military actions that would destabilize Arab states. The
Islamic State, in contrast, has increasingly styled itself a state and, in many
ways, behaved like one.
The ideology and motivation behind the change may be opaque for years. Analysts
suggest that the messianic and apocalyptic side of its jihadist ideology may
have gotten the better of the pragmatic impulse that had previously appeared to
guide the group’s expansion. Or, experts say, the Islamic State may be seeking
to use large terrorist attacks the way a more conventional power might use an
air force as a tool of its defense policy, to retaliate against enemy attacks
and seek to deter them.
But, if so, its tactics may be shortsighted, causing redoubled Western attempts
to crush the militant organization — even as the spreading Islamic State
structure makes those efforts more challenging.
The attacks come against a backdrop of signs that the Islamic State’s leaders
based in Raqqa, Syria, may have been building closer cooperation with its two
most significant affiliates, or “provinces,” in Libya and Egypt.
The main Libyan arm of the Islamic State — known as the Tripoli Province and
centered in the midcoastal city of Sirte — has long demonstrated the closest
coordination with the group’s Syrian hub. The two operations began advertising
their cooperation as early as February with a video of Islamic State fighters
beheading at least a dozen Egyptian Christians.
Western intelligence agencies say Islamic State fighters with experience in
Syria and Iraq have often turned up in Darnah, a militant stronghold east of
Sirte, although the group’s affiliate there was routed earlier this year in a
dispute with militant rivals.
The United States broadened its fight against the Islamic State in Libya on
Friday night, targeting the group’s senior leader there, the Pentagon said on
Saturday. The airstrike took place in Darnah shortly after the attacks in Paris
began, but had been in the works for several days and was not related to the
events in France, American officials said.
The strike was aimed at Abu Nabil, also known as Wissam Najm Abd Zayd al
Zubaydi. He is an Iraqi national who led Qaeda operations in western Iraq from
2004 until 2010. He later moved to eastern Libya to lead Islamic State
operations there, the officials said.
Pentagon officials said they believed the strike, first reported by The Daily
Beast, had killed Abu Nabil, though it would take a few days to confirm. It
marked the first time the United States has targeted a senior Islamic State
operative outside Iraq or Syria.
Libyan news media reported last week that a senior Islamic State leader had
personally visited Sirte, stirring speculation about the main group’s plans for
its local branch. The leader, known as Abu Ali al-Anbari, arrived “by the sea,”
the Libyan news network 218TV reported, according to a translation by the SITE
Intelligence Group.
Mr. Anbari’s arrival may represent what a senior Pentagon official said were
signs that Libya could provide a redoubt for the Islamic State even if the group
was driven completely out of Syria and Iraq.
With no functioning government, Libya provides a variety of havens and hiding
places for Islamic State militants, so airstrikes or other military action on
Sirte would merely push them elsewhere. And unlike Syria and Iraq, Libya is a
failed state surrounded by weak ones.
The timing of the explosion aboard the Russian charter jet with the Islamic
State attacks in Beirut and Paris is the most visible indication yet that the
Sinai Province group may be taking directions from the Islamic State in Syria
and Iraq. If the attacks in all three countries were coordinated, some central
planners must have been involved.
The plane crash was also at least the second time that the Sinai Province has
cited retribution for the Western campaign against the faraway Islamic State —
and not domestic Egyptian governance — as a motive for its acts. It cited the
same reasoning this August when it released a video in the Islamic State’s
trademark style showing the beheading of a Croatian working for a French energy
company.
Eric Schmitt reported from Washington and David D. Kirkpatrick from London.
Katrin Bennhold and Adam Nossiter contributed reporting from Paris.
A version of this article appears in print on November 15, 2015, on page A1 of
the New York edition with the headline: Strategy Shift for ISIS: Inflicting
Terror in Distant Lands.
PARIS — For the second time this year, France has found itself
singled out for calculated terrorist attacks that have at once stunned and
united the country. But perhaps no one was singled out by Friday’s carnage more
than the nation’s leader, President François Hollande.
Mr. Hollande was in the soccer stadium that was the attackers’ most spectacular
target — a thwarted attempt by suicide bombers to blow themselves up under his
very nose.
His name was evoked by the attackers who stormed a rock concert elsewhere in
Paris, declaring, according to a witness, that their carnage “was the fault of
Hollande. This was the fault of your president. He didn’t have to intervene in
Syria.”
It was a strike not only at France but also at his policies, presidency and
leadership, at home and abroad.
That messy reality presents Mr. Hollande with a particularly stark quandary:
Taking the fight even more aggressively to Syria and Iraq, as he pledged to do
on Saturday, carries the risk of inviting still more attacks from the Islamic
State and its sympathizers and of fanning simmering divisions between Muslims
and non-Muslims in France.
Mr. Hollande faced a similar dilemma in January after the attacks on the
satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and a kosher grocery store. But this time,
with more than seven times as many killed and hundreds wounded, it is far harder
to reassure the country, while far fewer palatable options remain for a way
forward.
Mr. Hollande and his government have already taken controversial and
increasingly intrusive steps to track domestic threats. Yet none of those
measures managed to stop Friday’s massacres, raising the uncomfortable question
of what more can be done.
At the same time, Mr. Hollande, never very popular, remains politically
vulnerable. The tensions with France’s Muslim population, the largest in Europe,
are exactly what the far-right National Front party has played on to gain ground
against him and his Socialist Party over the past several years.
After the attacks on Friday, the National Front leader, Marine Le Pen,
criticized the measures Mr. Hollande has taken so far as insufficient and called
for a far more drastic stand against the presence of extremist Muslims on French
soil.
The temptation for Mr. Hollande now is to get tough. He was quick to impose a
temporary state of emergency and declared Friday’s attacks not merely terrorism
but “an act of war.” It is, however, a war in which the battle lines are ever
more blurred between home and abroad.
“Hollande has chosen very firm language — he’s said we will be ‘merciless’ — but
it does raise the question: What more can we do? What laws can we toughen?” said
Camille Grand, director of the Foundation for Strategic Research, a leading
French think tank.
Françoise Fressoz, a columnist for the newspaper Le Monde, described Mr.
Hollande as having few options.
“The political context is very different because we are on the verge of regional
elections and, after that, the presidential elections, and he is being pushed to
harden his rhetoric,” she said, noting that there was not much more that Mr.
Hollande could do to make people feel secure after an attack like the one on
Friday.
The situation France faces has some things in common with the one the United
States confronted after Sept. 11, 2001: how to balance civil liberties and an
open society with security. The United States chose to curtail civil liberties,
tighten its borders and undertake military actions.
Mr. Hollande appears to be tracing a similar path. Having already tightened
domestic security laws, he looks likely to be pushed toward his far-right
opponents’ position against open borders, and he seems to be on the verge of
intensifying military action in Syria and Iraq.
So far, while France has conducted about 280 airstrikes in Iraq, it has carried
out only a handful in Syria. It is unclear whether any of that will make a
difference, political and defense analysts said.
The attacks show “basically the limits of our very successful counterterrorism
efforts,” Mr. Grand said. “We have very good judges, focused intel, and you
always knew there could be gaps; it means that despite all the monitoring and
the intelligence, the Islamic State can organize something quite meaningful.”
“We knew there were limits, and they now have been exposed,” he said.
Most difficult will be future immigration policy. Ms. Le Pen, the National Front
leader, sounded almost pragmatic on Saturday as news emerged from the Paris
prosecutor, François Molins, that at least one of the attackers had come with
the refugees fleeing Syria who had crossed into Europe from Greece.
“The president of the republic announced a state of emergency and temporary
border controls, and that’s all well and good,” Ms. Le Pen said. “But what about
the European Union? It is essential that France takes back control of its
national borders.”
Since 1985, when the Schengen Agreement went into effect, a gradually increasing
number of countries of continental Europe agreed to the free movement of people
across their borders within Europe. Today there are 26 signatories.
This year’s flood of migrants into Europe has frayed the commitment to the
visa-free zone and fanned anti-immigrant sentiments, bolstering far-right
movements in France, Scandinavia and the Netherlands.
But nowhere more so than in France. Ms. Le Pen’s language after Friday’s
terrorist attacks, although vitriolic, received little criticism and left Mr.
Hollande, who has promoted the ideal of a visa-free Europe, with little to back
up his support for that policy.
“France has been made vulnerable. She must rearm,” said Ms. Le Pen, who also
called for radical Islam to be “destroyed.”
“France must forbid Islamic organizations, close radical mosques, exile
foreigners who preach hate on our land,” she said.
Even before the terrorist attacks, the push across much of Europe, with the
major exception of Germany, to stop the ballooning influx of migrants was
weakening the commitment to a borderless bloc. But with terrorism on top of
that, it seems just a matter of time before restrictions are institutionalized
throughout the Continent.
“It’s probably going to lead to more barriers in Europe, because instituting
border controls is becoming the default option,” said François Heisbourg, the
president of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.
“It’s part of the rightward shift of the political center of gravity, of the
political conversation, and this was happening with the refugee crisis, and the
terror attacks will at best be neutral and at worst accelerate it.”
A version of this article appears in print on November 15, 2015,
on page A17 of the New York edition with the headline: Gunmen Single Out
Hollande, and Leave Him With Few Palatable Responses.
PARIS — François Granier, a wine consultant and rock music fan,
thought the concert he was attending Friday night had simply taken a
particularly raucous turn.
Mai Hua, a fashion blogger and video director who was dining a few blocks away,
figured the explosions she heard were just another burst of gang violence.
Erin Allweiss, a publicist from New York who was eating at a restaurant in the
same district, hoped the noise came from fireworks.
One by one on Friday evening, all the ordinary reflexes, expectations and hopes
of urban life fell away as Parisians and visitors to their city confronted
nearly simultaneous attacks that spanned from the Stade de France, the national
sports stadium on the northern edge of the city, to a shabby-chic district
studded with bars and restaurants four miles south.
The dull thuds and sharp cracks that so many thought, or at least hoped, were
just the background noises of a night on the town in one of the world’s great,
vibrant cities turned out to be the ghastly sounds of the worst terrorist
assault on the French capital, even bloodier than the January attacks on the
satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket.
Little seemed to tie the attacks across at least six sites, except that all the
129 victims had been out having fun. But that was very much the point for the
Islamic State militant group, which later took responsibility for the carnage
and said that it had struck France’s symbols of “perversity.”
There were other common elements as well — synchronized attacks, targeting
random victims, by well-equipped and apparently trained militants, who François
Molins, the Paris prosecutor, described as working in three coordinated squads.
The attacks began at 9:20 p.m. on a chilly Friday outside the stadium, in the
suburb of St.-Denis, where France was playing Germany. President François
Hollande was among those in attendance.
“We heard something that sounded like a detonating bomb as well as shooting,”
said Agnès Dupont, who was at the match with her husband and two young children.
Others said they thought youngsters outside the stadium were setting off
firecrackers. Another blast followed 10 minutes later. The teams kept playing.
The prosecutor, Mr. Molins, later said that two of the attackers had detonated
suicide bombs near gates to the stadium, which they apparently had tried to
enter, and killed one person. A third suicide bomber struck much later, at 9:53
p.m. near a McDonald’s.
Across the city, five minutes after the first suicide bomber detonated his
explosive outside the stadium, Betty Alves, a 39-year-old Parisian, was ordering
Chinese food with a friend at a restaurant in the once working-class and now
fashionable 10th Arrondissement. Gunshots rang out.
“It was terrifying,” she recalled. “We saw everyone run down the street. We
jumped on the floor and I hid under the table.”
The restaurant closed its metal shutters and everyone hid inside. When they
opened the shutters, Ms. Alves said she saw one young woman dead on the street
and another man seriously wounded. Her car, a Smart, parked nearby, was riddled
with bullet holes.
In that time, 15 diners were killed at the nearby Le Petit Cambodge, an Asian
restaurant near a canal that runs through the 10th Arrondissement, and at a
restaurant across the street, Le Carillon. Gunmen, according to witnesses,
sprayed the establishments with bullets from a black vehicle and then raced
away.
Emily Murphy, 28, an architect, had gathered at the packed Carillon with about a
dozen of her colleagues. Unable to find a table inside, they stood on the
sidewalk, drinks in hand. As Ms. Murphy was preparing to leave to meet a
girlfriend in another part of town, she heard what sounded like a small
explosion behind her. A man standing next to her pushed her to the ground and
told her not to move.
“I was in the middle of the sidewalk. The shooting was going on and on, and I
was so scared he could see me and was going to come closer,” she said, referring
to a gunman. She said she felt something like a “scratch” on her right leg but
only realized after the shooting stopped that she had been grazed.
At the time, Ms. Hua, 38, the fashion blogger, was eating with three friends on
a terrace at Madame Shawn, a Thai restaurant in the area, when she and her
friends heard a series of loud bangs. She said they had initially thought the
noise was related to gang clashes that sometimes blighted the area.
“It took us a while to register what had happened,” she said. “I looked at my
iPhone and I had many worried calls. This is one of the most densely populated
areas in Paris. There is no place that is more full on a Friday night. This is a
place where young people hang out. It was a hit at the soul of Paris.”
By 9:32 p.m., the same squad of terrorists in the same vehicle, according to the
prosecutor, had already found their next target: the Cafe Bonne Bière, a bar in
the adjacent 11th Arrondissement. At least five people were killed there.
A few blocks away, Ms. Allweiss, the New York publicist, was with friends at the
restaurant Auberge des Pyrénées Cévennes when the shots began.
“They were so loud,” Ms. Allweiss said by telephone. “It felt like they were on
top of us. People screamed to lock the door. We hoped they were fireworks. But
we knew they weren’t fireworks.”
The attacks then came in quick succession: at 9:36, then 9:40, just blocks
apart. Gunmen raked at least four restaurants and bars with gunfire in a
fast-gentrifying area of Paris. At least 19 people died at La Belle Équipe, a
cafe with an outdoor seating area that was hit by sustained gunfire.
“It was not just one or two bullets. The shooting lasted five minutes. They did
not give anybody a chance,” Antoine Bonnier, a witness, told BFM, a French
television news channel.
Nearby, in the Comptoir Voltaire restaurant on Boulevard Voltaire in the 11th
Arrondissement, another suicide bomber detonated a vest identical to the first
two, the prosecutor said. One person in the restaurant was seriously wounded.
The violence came to its climax less than a mile away at the Bataclan, a concert
hall, which three gunmen — apparently a third team of terrorists — reached in a
black car at 9:40 p.m. There, they took more than 1,000 music fans hostage and
shot them indiscriminately before the police regained control in a hail of
gunfire and explosions shortly after midnight.
The attackers, according to witnesses, denounced Mr. Hollande and his support
for the American-led military campaign against the Islamic State. The Paris
prosecutor said they had cited Syria and Iraq during brief encounters with the
authorities.
“This was not a targeted attack but a mass execution,” Mr. Granier, the wine
expert, said of his evening at the Paris concert hall that on Friday became a
slaughterhouse in which 89 of his fellow rock fans were killed.
He had gone there to see the Eagles of Death Metal, a hard-driving band from
California. The band had played about five songs when a series of loud bangs
echoed around the 19th-century hall on Boulevard Voltaire in central Paris.
“I thought this was just part of the show,” Mr. Granier, 24, recalled. “There
was so much noise and shouting you could not tell what was going on at first.”
After seeing fellow concertgoers fall to the ground splattered in blood, Mr.
Granier took refuge in a room backstage as three heavily armed men took control;
he stayed there for nearly three hours until French antiterrorism forces stormed
the building about 20 minutes after midnight.
While Mr. Granier hid in a backstage room, Ginnie Watson, 35, a French-British
actress and singer who had been watching the concert from the balcony, headed
with her friends for a security exit she had noticed earlier. “At first we said,
‘Oh, it’s a joke, the band is playing a joke,’ ” she said. “But then the shots
kept going and kept going and kept going. Then we saw people were crying, and
the members of the band ran offstage. They didn’t come back, and then I saw
people screaming and that’s when I said, ‘O.K., we have to get out of here.’”
She and her friends pushed open the security exit door and rushed down a
staircase leading to the street.
After at least five attacks over 20 minutes, word had quickly spread.
Antoine Griezmann, a player for the French national team who heard the first
explosion at the stadium, learned about the attack at the Bataclan.
His sister had gone there to hear the Eagles of Death Metal. He frantically
tried to find out if she was safe, finally discovering that she had escaped
unscathed. “May God take care of my sister and the rest of France,” the soccer
player wrote on Twitter.
Correction: November 15, 2015
An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to a witness to shooting
in Paris. He is Antoine Bonnier, not Barnier.
Reporting was contributed by Liz Alderman, Lilia Blaise, Dan Bilefsky, Sam
Borden, Aurelien Breeden, Nicola Clark and Rachel Donadio.
SINONE, Iraq — The Islamic State claimed responsibility on
Saturday for the catastrophic attacks in the French capital, calling them “the
first of the storm” and mocking France as a “capital of prostitution and
obscenity,” according to statements released in multiple languages on one of the
terror group’s encrypted messaging accounts.
The remarks came in a communiqué published in Arabic, English and French on the
Islamic State’s account on Telegram, a messaging platform, and then distributed
via its supporters on Twitter, according to a transcript provided by the SITE
Intelligence Group, which tracks jihadist propaganda.
An earlier statement was released but was deemed unlikely to be authentic
because of anomalies in the language, as well as an error in a date provided,
according to experts on jihadist propaganda.
The statement was released on the same Telegram channel that was used to claim
responsibility for the crash of a Russian jet over the Sinai Peninsula two weeks
ago, killing 224 people. As in that case, it made the announcement in multiple
languages and audio recordings.
President François Hollande of France said on Saturday that the Islamic State
was responsible. Analysts said the nature of the attacks was more in keeping
with actions of the Islamic State than with those of Al Qaeda, and the timing
and extent of the celebration expressed online by the group’s supporters added
weight to the claim.
“Eight brothers, wrapped in explosive belts and armed with machine rifles,
targeted sites that were accurately chosen in the heart of the capital of
France,” the group said in the statement, “including the Stade de France during
the match between the Crusader German and French teams, where the fool of
France, François Hollande, was present.”
“Let France and those who walk in its path know that they will remain on the top
of the list of targets of the Islamic State,” the statement added, referring to
the attacks at the Bataclan concert hall and elsewhere in Paris.
The style of the attack was in line with the Islamic State’s tactic of
indiscriminate killings and goes against Al Qaeda’s guidelines. In a 2013
directive, the leader of Al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahri, stated that Qaeda
operatives should avoid attacks that could inadvertently cause the death of
Muslim civilians and noncombatant women or children.
He argued that targeting markets, for example, was unadvisable because innocent
Muslims might accidentally be killed.
Although Qaeda branches have deviated from these guidelines on numerous
occasions, their attacks reflect more carefully defined targeting. That was the
case in the killings at the Charlie Hebdo office in Paris in January, when
cartoonists were singled out and defined as legitimate targets because of what
the group considered to be blasphemy against the Prophet Muhammad.
A Dutch fighter for Al Qaeda’s branch in Syria commented on the distinction in a
series of posts on Twitter. “Al Qaeda focuses mostly on political & military
targets instead of civilians. That’s why this could be an I.S. attack,” wrote
the fighter, who goes by the name Abu Saeed Al-Halabi.
Celebrations by Islamic State supporters online were such that the SITE
monitoring group said they could suggest the Islamic State’s involvement.
“The extent of the celebration far exceeded past online rallying by I.S.
supporters,” SITE said in an analysis. “The way I.S. supporters have embraced
this attack appears much more coordinated at a much earlier stage than massive
reactions to past attacks.”
PARIS — Three teams of Islamic State attackers acting in unison
carried out the terrorist assault in Paris on Friday night, officials said
Saturday, including one assailant who may have traveled to Europe on a Syrian
passport along with the flow of migrants.
“It is an act of war that was committed by a terrorist army, a jihadist army,
Daesh, against France,” President François Hollande told the nation from the
Élysée Palace, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State. “It is an act of
war that was prepared, organized and planned from abroad, with complicity from
the inside, which the investigation will help establish.”
As the death toll rose to 129 — with 352 others wounded, 99 of them critically —
a basic timeline of the attacks came into view.
The Paris prosecutor, François Molins, said the attackers were all armed with
assault rifles and suicide vests. Their assault began at 9:20 p.m. Friday, when
one terrorist detonated a suicide bomb outside the gates of the soccer stadium
on the northern outskirts of Paris. It ended at 12:20 a.m. Saturday when the
authorities stormed a concert hall, the Bataclan. One attacker there was killed;
two others detonated suicide vests. Inside the hall, 89 people, who had been
listening to a rock band, had been shot to death.
The man with the Syrian passport — which Greek officials said had been
registered at the Aegean island of Leros on Oct. 3 — was 25, and died at the
stadium. Another assailant, who died at the concert hall, was 29 and a native of
Courcouronnes, about 20 miles south of Paris. He had a criminal record and was
known to be involved in extremist Islamic ideology, Mr. Molins said.
The hunt for possible accomplices of the terrorists gained steam on Saturday.
Officials in Belgium announced three arrests, one of them linked to a rental car
found in Paris. In Germany, the police were exploring whether a man they
arrested last week with weapons in his car and his GPS navigator set for Paris
was linked to the attacks. But it remained unclear how a plot of such
sophistication and lethality could have escaped the notice of intelligence
agencies, both in France and abroad.
Mr. Hollande declared three days of national mourning, and said that military
troops would patrol the capital. France remained under a nationwide state of
emergency.
Mr. Hollande vowed to “be unforgiving with the barbarians from Daesh,” adding
that France would act within the law but with “all the necessary means, and on
all terrains, inside and outside, in coordination with our allies, who are,
themselves, targeted by this terrorist threat.”
The attacks, and the possibility that the Islamic State was to blame, promised
to further traumatize France and other European countries already fearful of
violent jihadists radicalized by the conflicts in Syria and elsewhere.
The possibility that one of the attackers was a migrant or had posed as one is
sure to further complicate the already vexing problem for Europe of how to
handle the unceasing flow of people from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
It could also lend weight to the xenophobic arguments of right-wing populists
like Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Front party, who on Saturday held
a news conference to declare that “France and the French are no longer safe.”
Mr. Hollande actively stepped up French participation in the military air
campaign in Syria at the end of September. Just last week, France attacked oil
operations under the Islamic State’s control in Syria. On Oct. 8, it conducted a
targeted strike against militants in Raqqa, Syria, apparently against Salim
Benghalem, a Frenchman fighting for the Islamic State.
The attacks, and the threat of the Islamic State, are likely to dominate a
summit meeting of leaders of the Group of 20 nations that starts on Sunday in
Turkey. President Obama will attend; Mr. Hollande is staying in Paris and
sending representatives.
Paris, stricken by shock and grief, remained in a state of lockdown, with public
transportation hobbled and public institutions — schools, museums, libraries,
pools, food markets — closed. Charles de Gaulle Airport remained open, but with
significant delays because of tighter passport and baggage checks.
The archbishop of Paris, Cardinal André Vingt-Trois, said he would celebrate a
Mass at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame on Sunday for the victims, their families
and France. “Our country has once again known pain and mourning and must stand
up to the barbarism propagated by fanatical groups,” he said.
At the Hôpital Européen Georges-Pompidou in west Paris, about 40 people were in
surgery as of the early afternoon. Julien Ribes, 33, was at the hospital to
search for his friend, who was at the concert hall. “I’m in total shock,” he
said.
At the Town Hall for the 11th Arrondissement in Paris, Delphine de Peretti, 35,
said she had learned early Saturday afternoon that her sister Aurélie, who was
at the Bataclan music hall, had been killed. The family had been desperately
trying to reach Aurélie all night.
“They told us my sister was dead, but they did not let us see her,” she said.
“They said they still have to do some medical analysis. I am like a robot. I
don’t know what to do next. I have not watched the news or slept since last
night.”
The death toll far surpassed that of a massacre at the satirical newspaper
Charlie Hebdo and related attacks by Islamic extremists around the French
capital in January. Friday’s attacks were the deadliest in Europe since the 2004
train bombings in Madrid, which killed 191 people. And it prompted Mr. Hollande
to pronounce a state of emergency, the first time in France since 2005, when
riots rocked downtrodden urban areas across the country.
Parisians were left struggling to make sense of their new reality. Parents whose
children slept through the ordeal were facing the difficult task of trying to
explain what had happened, and why so many planned activities had been canceled
and public spaces were closed.
On the Champ de Mars, at the base of the Eiffel Tower and along the pedestrian
promenade that hugs the Left Bank of the Seine, joggers and cyclists tried to
carry on with their Saturday routines.
Pausing from her morning run near the Musée d’Orsay, Marie-Caroline de
Richemont, 32, said she was still trying to process the events, but without
succumbing to fear. “This is not Iraq or Afghanistan,” she said. “We are not at
war here. We need to stay confident and hopeful.”
Bertrand Bourgeois, 42, an accountant, was lost in thought as he cast a fishing
line beneath the Invalides bridge.
He normally avoids fishing in Paris, he said, preferring quieter sections of the
Seine near his home in Poissy, a northwest suburb. But after the violence, he
said he felt drawn to come into the city out of a sense of solidarity.
Although his wife asked him to stay home, “something in me felt like it was
important to be here, to say ‘still alive,’ ” Mr. Bourgeois said.
“I feel sickened, angry,” he said. Coming so soon after the attacks in January,
he said, “It is starting to be too much.”
On the Champs-Élysées, rows of Christmas market stalls stood shuttered. Several
vendors stood idly, awaiting word about whether they would be allowed to open
for business, while clutches of heavily armed police officers patrolled the
largely empty sidewalks of one of Europe’s most famed avenues.
At Charles de Gaulle Airport, it took two and a half hours for some passengers
arriving Saturday morning to reach passport control. Some passengers who had
arrived on overnight flights learned what had happened only when they switched
on their devices; many read the news in a state of stunned silence.
Pope Francis joined a chorus of world leaders — including the heads of
government of Belgium, Burundi, Canada, India, Malaysia, Mexico, Russia, Spain
and the United States — who have condemned the attacks.
“There is no justification for such things, neither religious nor human, this is
not human,” Francis said in a telephone call to TV2000, the television station
of the Italian Episcopal Conference. “It is difficult to understand such things,
done by human beings,” he added, clearly moved. Francis said he was praying for
the families of the victims, for France “and for all those who suffer.”
Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany gave an emotional national address on
Saturday pledging solidarity with the French government and people, and calling
on Europeans to stand together in defiance of an attack on the liberties the
Continent represents.
“We, your German friends, we are so close with you,” said Ms. Merkel, dressed in
black. “We are crying with you. Together with you, we will fight against those
who have carried out such an unfathomable act against you.”
“Those who we mourn were murdered in front of cafes, in restaurants, in a
concert hall or on the open street. They wanted to live the life of free people
in a city that celebrates life,” she said, her voice breaking. “And they met
with murderers who hate this life of freedom.”
The French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, meeting on Saturday in Vienna with
Secretary of State John Kerry and other top diplomats to discuss the continuing
crisis in Syria, said the attacks highlighted the urgency of the talks. “It is
more necessary than ever in the current circumstance to coordinate the
international fight against terrorism,” he said.
In the United States, there was no sign of a direct threat to American cities,
but the F.B.I. was reviewing cases involving the Islamic State as a precaution.
The F.B.I. will send a team of agents to Paris to assist with the investigation,
law enforcement officials said.
The F.B.I. is already heavily focused on the threat from Americans inspired by
the militant group. The government had so many people under surveillance in
those cases that, this spring, officials pulled agents off other cases to help
monitor them.
Adam Nossiter and Aurelien Breeden reported from Paris, and
Katrin Bennhold from London. Reporting was contributed by Lilia Blaise, Nicola
Clark, Rachel Donadio, Rosalie Hughes, David Jolly and Alissa J. Rubin from
Paris; Melissa Eddy from Berlin; Julie Carriat from Brussels; Palko Karasz from
London; Rukmini Callimachi from Sinone, Iraq; Julie Hirschfeld Davis from
Vienna; and Matt Apuzzo and Michael Schmidt from Washington.
A version of this article appears in print on November 15, 2015, on page A1 of
the New York edition with the headline: Paris Attack Was the Work of 3 Teams, an
‘Act of War’ by ISIS, France Asserts.
BEIRUT, Lebanon — A fiery double suicide bombing terrorized a
mostly Shiite residential area of southern Beirut on Thursday, ripping through a
busy shopping district at rush hour. The Lebanese Health Ministry said at least
43 people had been killed and more than 200 wounded in the worst attack to
strike the city in years.
The Islamic State extremist group, which controls parts of neighboring Syria,
claimed responsibility for the attack. The group portrayed its motives as baldly
sectarian, saying it had targeted Shiite Muslims, whom it views as apostates. It
mentioned almost as an afterthought that it had targeted Hezbollah, the Shiite
militant organization that backs the Syrian government in the civil war raging
next door.
Mohammad Jassem, 12, is one of many Syrian refugee children selling flowers and
other items on Hamra Street in Beirut. He has not been in school for the past
three years.
A Refugee Crisis in Lebanon Hides in Plain SightNOV. 12, 2015
Hezbollah maintains tight security control in the district that was hit, and the
bombing seemed aimed at hurting the group by attacking civilians in an area
where it has many supporters. But the stricken area also typifies working-class
Beirut, where Palestinians, Christians and Syrian refugees (mostly Sunnis) live,
work and shop.
While Beirut has endured such attacks periodically, the assault shattered a
relative calm that had prevailed in recent months. It also showed Lebanon’s
vulnerability to the vindictive wrath of the Islamic State.
The Lebanese Army said in a statement that the bombers had struck at 6 p.m.,
during the evening rush hour, apparently to maximize casualties. The army said
that the body of a third bomber had been found near one of the blast sites but
that his explosives belt was still largely intact.
The attack took place in the Bourj al-Barajneh neighborhood of southern Beirut,
an area that includes a Palestinian refugee camp and that has absorbed many
Syrian refugees.
It is a bustling area with narrow streets, many small shops and vendors selling
fruits and vegetables from stalls and pushcarts. Television stations broadcast
images of people carrying the wounded away from flaming rubble. The blasts went
off near a bakery, and just yards from a hospital.
The Health Ministry said that by evening, the death toll had reached at least
43, with 239 wounded. Al Manar, Hezbollah’s news website, said children were
among the victims.
It was the second time in two weeks that the Islamic State, also known as ISIS
or ISIL, claimed to have struck, through civilian targets, the countries and
groups fighting it in Syria. The Islamic State’s Egyptian affiliate claimed
responsibility for the Oct. 31 destruction of a jetliner full of Russian
vacationers from the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt.
Russia, along with Hezbollah and Iran, is a crucial ally of the Syrian
government and says it is fighting the Islamic State in Syria. Talks are set to
begin this weekend in Vienna in a renewed international effort to find a
political solution to the Syria conflict, now in its fifth year.
Thursday was also punctuated by new offensives in Syria and Iraq against the
Islamic State. American-backed Kurdish forces are confronting the group in both
Iraq and Syria; at the same time, the Syrian government, Hezbollah and other
allied forces have made advances against the Islamic State.
Hussein Khalil, a political aide to the leader of Hezbollah,
Hassan Nasrallah, visited the scene and called the attackers “beasts,” according
to local news reports. Lebanon’s prime minister, Tammam Salam, also condemned
the bombings. The government declared Friday a day of national mourning and
announced that schools would be closed.
The American Embassy in Beirut issued a statement saying that the United States
“strongly condemns heinous attack” and that officials extended “condolences to
victims’ families, wish speedy recovery to wounded.”
Since the Syrian civil war erupted in 2011, Beirut and other Lebanese cities
have been subjected to bombings and other attacks carried out in the name of
rival Syrian factions. Hezbollah, an influential political power in Lebanon that
is regarded by Israel and the United States as a terrorist organization, has
sent thousands of fighters to provide pivotal support to the Syrian president,
Bashar al-Assad.
While Hezbollah and the United States are nominally both fighting the Islamic
State, they remain deeply at odds and carry on their military campaigns
separately. American officials say the Syrian government, backed by Russia,
Hezbollah and Iran, is primarily targeting Mr. Assad’s other opponents and not
the Islamic State. The pro-Assad alliance says the United States is not serious
about fighting the Islamic State.
A double bombing last year near an Iranian cultural center in the Hezbollah
enclave killed at least five people and wounded dozens. An offshoot of Al Qaeda
claimed responsibility for that attack and said it would carry out more bombings
against Hezbollah until the group withdrew its fighters from Syria.
The attack on Thursday appeared to be the worst in terms of casualties since
Aug. 23, 2013, when bombs hit two mosques in the northern Lebanese city of
Tripoli, killing at least 42 people and wounding hundreds.
Rick Gladstone contributed reporting from New York.
A version of this article appears in print on November 13, 2015, on page A6 of
the New York edition with the headline: ISIS Claims Responsibility for Blasts
That Killed Dozens in Beirut.
WASHINGTON — Senior House members said Sunday that there was a
mounting consensus among American intelligence officials that a bomb brought
down the Russian charter jet that crashed last month in the Sinai Peninsula in
Egypt, killing all 224 people aboard.
“I think there’s a growing body of intelligence and evidence that this was a
bomb — still not conclusive — but a growing body of evidence,” Representative
Adam B. Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence
Committee, said on the ABC program “This Week.”
Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York and the chairman of the
Homeland Security subcommittee on terrorism and intelligence, went further,
saying on the same program that intelligence officials he had spoken to believed
that the Islamic State or an affiliate was behind the crash.
“Right now all the evidence points in that direction,” Mr. King said.
It is not clear how much American intelligence and law enforcement agencies have
learned about the crash, which occurred Oct. 31. American investigators have not
been invited to visit the crash site, and while the Russian government has asked
the F.B.I. for help, it is not known how much information Moscow has shared with
the bureau.
A Russian flight crashed in the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt on Oct. 31, killing all
224 people on board. Officials are investigating what might have caused an
explosion that brought down the plane.
In the days before the crash, electronic communications in which militants
discussed an aviation attack were intercepted, but American officials said that
type of “chatter” was often picked up.
Mr. Schiff, who was briefed by intelligence officials on Saturday, raised the
possibility that someone working at the airport, in Sharm el Sheikh, might have
helped the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, place a bomb on the plane.
“ISIS may have concluded that the best way to defeat airport defenses is not to
go through them but to go around them with the help of somebody on the inside,”
Mr. Schiff said.
“And if that’s the case,” he added, “I think there are probably at least a dozen
airports in the region and beyond that are vulnerable to the same kind of
approach, which is exactly why we have to harden those defenses.”
Mr. King said the United States and other Western countries “have to play more
of a role as far as firming up the security.”
If the Islamic State was behind the crash, it was able to mount the kind of
attack that Al Qaeda has found difficult to carry out in recent years. At least
three times since 2009, Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen has come close but failed
to bring down an airliner using bombs that were designed to be undetectable.
Western intelligence officials have feared that the Islamic State has larger
ambitions for attacks outside Syria and Iraq — where it seized large stretches
of land in 2014 — especially after the United States and Russia began separate
military operations against the group.
The plane that crashed, an Airbus A321-200, took off from a regional airport
that serves Sharm el Sheikh, a resort town on the Red Sea. The airport does not
have to meet security requirements of the Department of Homeland Security
because it has no direct flights to the United States.
Before the crash, European officials complained that critical equipment,
including explosive-detection and X-ray machines, had been badly maintained or
operated by poorly trained staff members. One Egyptian official told The
Associated Press that he had seen workers unplug a luggage scanner to save
power.
Since the crash, several countries have sent security teams to supervise the
return of passengers and their luggage, which in some cases is being sent on
separate flights.
“We request additional security screening to be provided at departure gates at a
number of overseas airports, including Egypt,” said a spokesman for the
Department for Transport in Britain. “The U.K. does not pay for these checks,
which are separate to the additional precautions now being undertaken on hold
baggage at Sharm.”
The spokesman said he could not give details on those additional measures, but
that “British aviation security experts are working with the Egyptian
authorities and air carriers” to carry out checks at Sharm el Sheikh.
Arkady Dvorkovich, the Russian deputy prime minister in charge of efforts to
repatriate Russians from Egypt, told reporters on Sunday that Russian
specialists would audit airport security systems in Egypt.
Mr. Dvorkovich said that the Russian government would give Egypt recommendations
about “what additional security measures should be introduced.”
Reporting was contributed by Eric Schmitt from Washington; Kareem
Fahim from Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt; Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura from London; and
Neil MacFarquhar from Moscow.
A version of this article appears in print on November 9, 2015, on page A6 of
the New York edition with the headline: Intelligence Consensus Grows for Bomb as
Cause of Russian Crash, U.S. Officials Say.
Frustrated by the resilience of the Islamic State terrorist
organization, the Obama administration is taking steps to expand a military
campaign that remains untethered to any coherent strategy. Instead of
challenging an escalation of American military forces in the Syrian war, several
prominent members of Congress are irresponsibly demanding even more hawkish
approaches.
Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter, testifying before the Senate Armed Services
Committee on Tuesday, called the administration’s new strategy the “three R’s”
plan. The first two R’s are Raqqa and Ramadi, cities in Syria and Iraq from
which the United States hopes to dislodge the Islamic State. To do so, the
administration is considering deploying American ground troops to support local
forces that are expected to do the bulk of the fighting and call in airstrikes.
The third R stands for “raids,” which will be used to capture and kill Islamic
State leaders.
The Pentagon continues to call the military campaign in Syria and Iraq an
“advise and assist” mission, a characterization that was misleading when the
campaign began and is now absurd. By incrementally increasing its combat role in
a vast, complicated battleground, the United States is being sucked into a new
Middle East war. Each step in that direction can only breed the desire to do
more. Commanders will want to build on battlefield successes when things go
their way, and they will be driven to retaliate when they don’t.
There is no question that containing the threat posed by the Islamic State will
take a strong international response. The group, also known as ISIS and ISIL,
remains firmly in control of large swaths of Iraq and Syria and has found allies
in Afghanistan, Libya and Yemen.
But before contemplating a more forceful military plan, Congress and the
administration must confront the fact that the current one, which includes
airstrikes and support for select bands of rebels, lacks a legal framework and
an attainable goal. The first problem could be fixed if the White House and
congressional leaders were willing to work together to set clear limits on what
the Pentagon is allowed to do. Preposterously, the military campaign that began
more than a year ago, and has cost more than $4 billion, is still being waged
under the authority of the congressional authorization passed to pursue the
perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks.
With a few exceptions, lawmakers seem completely unconcerned that they are
allowing a president to go to war without formal authorization from Congress.
Instead, many are calling on the administration to take even bolder steps that
range from establishing a no-fly zone over parts of Syria to using American
firepower to oust Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president. At least on these two
tactics, the White House appears rightly skeptical.
A no-fly, or “buffer” zone, to protect civilians would take significant
resources, and troops, to enforce. “To keep it safe would require fighting,” Mr.
Carter told senators on Tuesday. “You need to think in each case … who’s in, who
is kept out and how the enforcement of it is done.”
Taking on Mr. Assad, a murderous leader who has lost all legitimacy, has obvious
appeal in principle. But doing so would almost certainly be catastrophic because
it would put the United States directly at war with Russia and Iran, which aid
him militarily. Even if Washington were to prevail in forcing him from power,
that could serve to embolden the Islamic State, which would only lead to more
carnage.
A version of this editorial appears in print on October 28, 2015,
on page A24 of the New York edition with the headline: The Military Escalation
in Iraq and Syria.
AS awful as war is, it still has rules. These rules, codified by
the Geneva Conventions, aim to restrain warring parties and save lives, even in
the midst of tremendous violence. Enforcing these rules is understandably
difficult, but it is crucial that we recognize, identify and assign
responsibility for grave violations when they do occur.
That is why my organization, Doctors Without Borders, is calling for the United
States to participate in an investigation by the International Humanitarian
Fact-Finding Commission into the recent airstrikes by American forces on our
hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan. The commission is the only body expressly
mandated by the Geneva Conventions to investigate apparent transgressions of
international humanitarian law. It can do this in ways that even the most
thorough American- or military-led investigation cannot.
Many facts about the attacks in Kunduz are already known. For more than an hour
early on Oct. 3, an American AC-130 gunship repeatedly strafed the main building
of the hospital compound — which housed the intensive care unit, the emergency
room and the operating theater — with great precision and tremendous firepower.
The attack happened despite the fact that our staff in Afghanistan and in the
United States had shared the GPS coordinates of the four-year-old hospital with
Afghan and American military contacts as recently as Sept. 29.
The violence continued to unfold despite frantic calls from our staff in Kabul
and New York to military commands in the United States and Afghanistan. And it
occurred despite the fact that hospitals in war zones have protected status
under the law of armed conflict, as enshrined in the Geneva Conventions and
protocols incorporated into United States military law.
Our staff members tried to get themselves and their patients to safety. Those
who weren’t wounded treated the injured however they could, including in an ad
hoc emergency room in an office. Their efforts saved many lives, but the assault
still killed 23 people — 13 staff members and 10 patients, including three
children — and wounded more than three dozen others. The airstrikes destroyed
the only emergency trauma care center in northern Afghanistan.
For us, it was a devastating event, the largest loss of life in a single
incident in more than two decades. We knowingly take the risks associated with
working in active conflict areas. But this attack tore through the protections
afforded to hospitals in war zones, protections on which we rely and must
constantly reinforce in order to establish and maintain lifesaving medical
projects across front lines.
Early statements from the military claiming that the gunship fired in the
vicinity of the hospital and not directly at it quickly gave way to admissions
that American or Afghan forces on the ground requested the airstrikes and that
the hospital building was in fact the target. Assertions that armed Taliban
combatants were on the grounds of our hospital have been discredited, both in
this newspaper and elsewhere. Neither our staff members nor Kunduz residents
reported seeing armed combatants or any fighting within the hospital compound
before the airstrikes.
Even if there had been “enemy” activity within the compound, the warring parties
would still have been obligated to uphold basic tenets of the laws of war,
including respecting the protected status of hospitals, understanding the nature
of targeted structures, and factoring in the potential toll on civilians of any
intended attack.
International law also makes it clear that when a fighter is wounded and is off
the field of battle he ceases to be a combatant and must be afforded treatment
based on his medical needs alone. In fact, failure to provide treatment is a
grievous breach of medical ethics that could itself amount to a war crime.
The United States military, NATO and the Afghan government have begun
investigations. Gen. John F. Campbell, the leader of American forces in
Afghanistan, said that the decision to attack was made in the American chain of
command. President Obama offered his personal apologies to our international
president, Dr. Joanne Liu.
We are cooperating with these inquiries and hope that investigators discover and
disclose the procedural calculations that led to this catastrophic loss of life.
But those findings will understandably be rooted in the context of military
doctrine and practice, not international humanitarian law. They will examine
apparent failures to follow the United States military’s rules of engagement,
but they are unlikely to ask whether or not those rules of engagement themselves
comport with international standards for the rules of war. We also need to know
the degree to which the lines between military and civilian targets have been
blurred, so we can better understand the risks our teams in Afghanistan and
elsewhere will face.
The Switzerland-based International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission, first
defined by the 1977 Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions and
officially established in 1991, exists to deal with situations just like this
one.
A commission investigation could not only review the facts of the Kunduz case;
it could also establish a record of the violations of international law that
appear to have occurred and set objective precedents of what is and is not
tolerable in a conflict.
Our call for an independent international investigation is not a political
gesture, pursued solely because the United States was so prominently involved in
the Kunduz attack. Just as our medical ethics and commitment to international
humanitarian law mandate that we treat all wounded persons in a conflict zone —
regardless of affiliation, race or religion, and regardless of how or why they
were injured — our founding principles compel us to highlight encroachments on
the medical facilities through which we deliver care. We have done so recently
in Yemen, Syria, the Central African Republic, South Sudan and other places.
But if international humanitarian law is flouted, if violations on this scale
can be dismissed as a “mistake,” “the fog of war” or even just “a terrible
tragedy,” then all of our medical staff, projects and patients in conflict zones
could be jeopardized.
In the case of Kunduz, it is not our responsibility to prove that the United
States military violated the laws of war or its own rules of engagement. It is
the responsibility of the party that destroyed a fully functioning hospital,
with some 200 staff members and patients inside, to prove that it did not.
We know our call may not be heeded, but the United States and other nations
should see it as an opportunity. By consenting to an independent investigation,
President Obama could reaffirm America’s commitment to international
humanitarian law, restore its credibility when it comes to denouncing violations
by other states, and help reinforce the protected status of medical facilities
in conflict zones.
What is at stake is the ability of humanitarian organizations to continue their
lifesaving work at the front lines of conflict.
Jason Cone is the executive director of Doctors Without Borders
in the United States.
I HAVE known Bashar al-Assad, the president of Syria, since he
was a college student in London, and have spent many hours negotiating with him
since he has been in office. This has often been at the request of the United
States government during those many times when our ambassadors have been
withdrawn from Damascus because of diplomatic disputes.
Bashar and his father, Hafez, had a policy of not speaking to anyone at the
American Embassy during those periods of estrangement, but they would talk to
me. I noticed that Bashar never referred to a subordinate for advice or
information. His most persistent characteristic was stubbornness; it was almost
psychologically impossible for him to change his mind — and certainly not when
under pressure.
Before the revolution began in March 2011, Syria set a good example of
harmonious relations among its many different ethnic and religious groups,
including Arabs, Kurds, Greeks, Armenians and Assyrians who were Christians,
Jews, Sunnis, Alawites and Shiites. The Assad family had ruled the country since
1970, and was very proud of this relative harmony among these diverse groups.
When protesters in Syria demanded long overdue reforms in the political system,
President Assad saw this as an illegal revolutionary effort to overthrow his
“legitimate” regime and erroneously decided to stamp it out by using unnecessary
force. Because of many complex reasons, he was supported by his military forces,
most Christians, Jews, Shiite Muslims, Alawites and others who feared a takeover
by radical Sunni Muslims. The prospect for his overthrow was remote.
The Carter Center had been deeply involved in Syria since the early 1980s, and
we shared our insights with top officials in Washington, seeking to preserve an
opportunity for a political solution to the rapidly growing conflict. Despite
our persistent but confidential protests, the early American position was that
the first step in resolving the dispute had to be the removal of Mr. Assad from
office. Those who knew him saw this as a fruitless demand, but it has been
maintained for more than four years. In effect, our prerequisite for peace
efforts has been an impossibility.
Kofi Annan, the former United Nations secretary general, and Lakhdar Brahimi, a
former Algerian foreign minister, tried to end the conflict as special
representatives of the United Nations, but abandoned the effort as fruitless
because of incompatibilities among America, Russia and other nations regarding
the status of Mr. Assad during a peace process.
In May 2015, a group of global leaders known as the Elders visited Moscow, where
we had detailed discussions with the American ambassador, former President
Mikhail S. Gorbachev, former Prime Minister Yevgeny M. Primakov, Foreign
Minister Sergey V. Lavrov and representatives of international think tanks,
including the Moscow branch of the Carnegie Center.
They pointed out the longstanding partnership between Russia and the Assad
regime and the great threat of the Islamic State to Russia, where an estimated
14 percent of its population are Sunni Muslims. Later, I questioned President
Putin about his support for Mr. Assad, and about his two sessions that year with
representatives of factions from Syria. He replied that little progress had been
made, and he thought that the only real chance of ending the conflict was for
the United States and Russia to be joined by Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia in
preparing a comprehensive peace proposal. He believed that all factions in
Syria, except the Islamic State, would accept almost any plan endorsed strongly
by these five, with Iran and Russia supporting Mr. Assad and the other three
backing the opposition. With his approval, I relayed this suggestion to
Washington.
For the past three years, the Carter Center has been working with Syrians across
political divides, armed opposition group leaders and diplomats from the United
Nations and Europe to find a political path for ending the conflict. This effort
has been based on data-driven research about the Syrian catastrophe that the
center has conducted, which reveals the location of different factions and
clearly shows that neither side in Syria can prevail militarily.
The recent decision by Russia to support the Assad regime with airstrikes and
other military forces has intensified the fighting, raised the level of
armaments and may increase the flow of refugees to neighboring countries and
Europe. At the same time, it has helped to clarify the choice between a
political process in which the Assad regime assumes a role and more war in which
the Islamic State becomes an even greater threat to world peace. With these
clear alternatives, the five nations mentioned above could formulate a unanimous
proposal. Unfortunately, differences among them persist.
Iran outlined a general four-point sequence several months ago, consisting of a
cease-fire, formation of a unity government, constitutional reforms and
elections. Working through the United Nations Security Council and utilizing a
five-nation proposal, some mechanism could be found to implement these goals.
The involvement of Russia and Iran is essential. Mr. Assad’s only concession in
four years of war was giving up chemical weapons, and he did so only under
pressure from Russia and Iran. Similarly, he will not end the war by accepting
concessions imposed by the West, but is likely to do so if urged by his allies.
Mr. Assad’s governing authority could then be ended in an orderly process, an
acceptable government established in Syria, and a concerted effort could then be
made to stamp out the threat of the Islamic State.
The needed concessions are not from the combatants in Syria, but from the proud
nations that claim to want peace but refuse to cooperate with one another.
Jimmy Carter, the 39th president, is the founder of the Carter
Center and the recipient of the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize.
“ALLAH has promised us victory and America has promised us
defeat,” Mullah Muhammad Omar, the first head of the Taliban, once said, “so we
shall see which of the two promises will be fulfilled.” When his colleagues
admitted this summer that Mullah Omar had died, Al Qaeda and affiliated groups
around the globe remembered those words — victory is a divine certainty — in
their eulogies. And in Afghanistan today, though the majority of Afghans still
do not identify with the Taliban or Al Qaeda, Mullah Omar’s bold defiance in the
face of a superpower is beginning to look prescient.
Since early September, the Taliban have swept through Afghanistan’s north,
seizing numerous districts and even, briefly, the provincial capital Kunduz. The
United Nations has determined that the Taliban threat to approximately half of
the country’s 398 districts is either “high” or “extreme.” Indeed, by our count,
more than 30 districts are already under Taliban control. And the insurgents are
currently threatening provincial capitals in both northern and southern
Afghanistan.
Confronted with this grim reality, President Obama has decided to keep 9,800
American troops in the country through much of 2016 and 5,500 thereafter. The
president was right to change course, but it is difficult to see how much of a
difference this small force can make. The United States troops currently in
Afghanistan have not been able to thwart the Taliban’s advance. They were able
to help push them out of Kunduz, but only after the Taliban’s two-week reign of
terror. This suggests that additional troops are needed, not fewer.
When justifying his decision last week, the president explained that American
troops would “remain engaged in two narrow but critical missions — training
Afghan forces, and supporting counterterrorism operations against the remnants
of Al Qaeda.” He added, “We’ve always known that we had to maintain a
counterterrorism operation in that region in order to tamp down any re-emergence
of active Al Qaeda networks.”
But the president has not explained the full scope of what is at stake. Al Qaeda
has already re-emerged. Just two days before the president’s statement, the
military announced that it led raids against two Qaeda training camps in the
south, one of which was an astonishing 30 square miles in size. The operation
lasted several days, and involved 63 airstrikes and more than 200 ground troops,
including both Americans and Afghan commandos.
“We struck a major Al Qaeda sanctuary in the center of the Taliban’s historic
heartland,” Brig. Gen. Wilson A. Shoffner, a military spokesman, said. General
Shoffner described it as “one of the largest joint ground-assault operations we
have ever conducted in Afghanistan.” Other significant Qaeda facilities are
already being identified in local press reporting.
Recently, Hossam Abdul Raouf, a chief lieutenant of the Qaeda leader Ayman
al-Zawahri, confirmed in an audio message that Qaeda’s senior leadership has
relocated out of northern Pakistan — no secret to the military and the C.I.A.,
which have been hunting senior Qaeda figures in Afghanistan and elsewhere
throughout the year.
The Taliban are not hiding their continuing alliance with Al Qaeda. In August,
Mr. Zawahri pledged his allegiance to Mullah Omar’s successor, Mullah Akhtar
Mohammad Mansour. Within hours, Mullah Mansour publicly accepted the “esteemed”
Mr. Zawahri’s oath of fealty. And Qaeda members are integrated into the
Taliban’s chain of command. In fact, foreign fighters affiliated with Al Qaeda
played a significant role in the Taliban-led assault on Kunduz.
The United States made many mistakes in the 9/11 wars. After routing the Taliban
and Al Qaeda in late 2001, President George W. Bush did not dedicate the
resources necessary to finish the fight. President Obama was right in December
2009 to announce a surge of forces in Afghanistan, but it was short-lived. Al
Qaeda is not nearly as “decimated” in South Asia as Mr. Obama has claimed.
We don’t think 5,500 troops is enough. No one is calling for a full-scale
occupation of the country. But a force of as many as 20,000 to 25,000 would far
better support our local Afghan allies, helping them defend multiple provincial
capitals at the same time and fight Al Qaeda and the Taliban in their
strongholds.
While many believe that Al Qaeda is solely focused on attacking the West, it has
devoted most of its efforts to waging insurgencies. This is the key to
understanding how it has been able to regenerate repeatedly over the past 14
years. Al Qaeda draws would-be terrorists from the larger pool of paramilitary
forces fighting to restore the Taliban to power in Afghanistan or to build
radical nation-states elsewhere. Therefore, the mission of the United States is
bigger than the one Mr. Obama envisions. Drones and select counterterrorism
raids are not enough to end the threat.
Al Qaeda and like-minded groups were founded on the myth that the Soviet Union
was defeated in Afghanistan because of the mujahedeen’s faith in Allah alone.
This helped spawn a generation of new wars and terrorist attacks, most of which
have targeted Muslims. Should the Afghans suffer additional territorial losses,
Mullah Omar’s words will appear prophetic. And a new myth, one that will feed
the Taliban’s and Al Qaeda’s violence for years to come, will be born.
Thomas Joscelyn and Bill Roggio are senior fellows at the
Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the editors of The Long War Journal.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on October 21, 2015, on page A27 of the
New York edition with the headline: Are We Losing Afghanistan Again?.
JERUSALEM — THE streets of Jewish West Jerusalem are eerie and
still. Silence hangs over the city, punctured occasionally by a siren’s wail.
Buses are half empty, as is the light rail that runs alongside the walls of the
Old City.
Heavily armed security forces, joined by army reinforcements, patrol
checkpoints, bus stops and deserted sidewalks. Young men in plain clothes carry
assault rifles. The evening news broadcasts images of stabbings and shootings.
Among the few shops doing good business are those selling weapons and pepper
spray.
In the city’s occupied East, residents are frightened, too. Massive cement cubes
block exits from their neighborhoods. Lengthy lines at new checkpoints keep many
from their jobs. Men under 40 who were barred from Al Aqsa Mosque on Friday
prayed instead behind police barricades in the surrounding decrepit streets.
Last week, an Israeli minister called for the destruction of all Palestinian
homes built in East Jerusalem without permits, a threat that targets nearly 40
percent of the city’s Palestinians because of restrictive zoning. Jerusalem’s
gun-wielding mayor has called on Israeli civilians to carry arms. Jewish mobs
chanting “Death to Arabs” have paraded through the streets.
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editorial board and contributing writers from around the world.
Palestinian parents keep children indoors, afraid they will be arrested or shot.
Nightly police raids visit their neighborhoods. Returning from work in West
Jerusalem’s kitchens, hotels and construction sites, some Palestinians seek to
protect themselves by wearing yarmulkes. On their cellphones, teenagers watch
videos of stabbing attacks and of Palestinians shot at close range.
Several days ago, an East Jerusalem business owner told me that he and his
employees were frightened to travel to the West. Like many others I’ve spoken
with, he lamented the growing hatred and the killings, but rejected the idea
that they had been without purpose. They had made clear to Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu, he said, that a red line stands before Al Aqsa; no matter
how weak the Palestinian leadership might be, he argued, the people would not
allow Israel to restrict Muslims’ access to the occupied holy site, particularly
while growing numbers of Israeli activists, some calling for the mosque’s
destruction, are permitted to visit under armed protection.
Perhaps most significant, he concluded, the violence signaled that whatever the
intentions of their leadership, Palestinians in Jerusalem and the West Bank will
not indefinitely extend to Israel a period of calm while no corresponding
reduction of the occupation takes place.
The unrest has been sufficiently alarming to induce Secretary of State John
Kerry to announce a visit to the region. But it has not brought Israeli leaders
to rethink their insistence on never relinquishing East Jerusalem, which
includes the Al Aqsa compound, a site also revered by Jews as the Temple Mount.
Yet the Jewish public’s mood is shifting, as it did during the second intifada.
It was during the worst month of those four horrific years, in March 2002, that
pollsters found peak Israeli support for the territorial concessions proposed by
President Bill Clinton in December 2000, including a Palestinian capital in East
Jerusalem with sovereignty over the Al Aqsa compound. Last week, about
two-thirds of Jewish Israelis surveyed in a poll said they wished to separate
from the Palestinian neighborhoods of East Jerusalem, excluding the Old City.
Contrary to claims that Israel’s occupation is growing only further entrenched,
the decades since Israel conquered East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza have
been characterized by a slow process of Israeli separation, often reluctant and
driven by violence. To date, the unrest has not approached the scale that led
successive prime ministers to partial withdrawals: Yitzhak Rabin’s bestowing
limited autonomy on Palestinians in parts of Gaza and the West Bank at the end
of the first intifada; Benjamin Netanyahu’s pulling out of most of Hebron after
the deadly 1996 riots over Israeli excavations beneath the Al Aqsa compound; and
Ariel Sharon’s announcing a withdrawal from Gaza during the second intifada.
It was at that time that Mr. Sharon erected the wall and fence separating Israel
from the West Bank. Palestinians, like most of the international community, view
the wall as an illegal seizure of 8.5 percent of the West Bank, but by the same
token, it is now nearly impossible to imagine that any of the 91.5 percent of
territory on the Palestinian side of the barrier would go to Israel in a future
partition.
It is a deeply regrettable fact that, during the past quarter-century, violence
has been the most consistent factor in Israeli territorial withdrawal. That may
partly explain why growing numbers of Palestinians support an uprising and
demand the resignation of President Mahmoud Abbas, who abhors attacks on
Israelis and has presided over nearly a decade of almost total quiet in the West
Bank without any gains to show for it.
Last month, a survey of Palestinians found support for an armed intifada at 57
percent (and at 71 percent among 18- to 22-year-old men). Support was highest in
Hebron and Jerusalem. Two-thirds of those surveyed wanted Mr. Abbas to resign.
Mr. Kerry is scheduled to have meetings with Mr. Abbas and with Mr. Netanyahu in
an effort to achieve their shared goal of restoring calm and returning to the
status quo. Violence is politically threatening to both leaders, especially to
Mr. Abbas, and both will continue to work to suppress any escalation.
Yet if they succeed only in ending the unrest, they will have merely restored
the stasis that gave rise to it. This is what Israelis call “managing the
conflict.” There is certainly no guarantee that if the two leaders fail to stop
the flow of Palestinian and Israeli blood, things will eventually get better.
But what does seem guaranteed is that most Palestinians will continue to believe
that if the occupation is cost-free, there will be little incentive to end it.
Mr. Abbas and Mr. Netanyahu have taught them that.
Nathan Thrall is a senior analyst at the International Crisis
Group.
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for the Opinion Today newsletter.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on October 19, 2015, on page A23 of the
New York edition with the headline: Mismanaging the Conflict.
President Obama was upbeat last Christmas, standing before
American troops in Hawaii as he proclaimed the end of the United States’ combat
mission in Afghanistan.
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“Because of the extraordinary service of the men and women in the armed forces,
Afghanistan has a chance to rebuild its own country,” Mr. Obama said. “We are
safer. It’s not going to be a source of terrorist attacks again.”
The president’s grim tone and body language on Thursday stood in sharp contrast
as he explained why he has given up on leaving Afghanistan, one of the wars he
inherited in 2009.
“The bottom line is, in key areas of the country, the security situation is
still very fragile, and in some places there is risk of deterioration,” Mr.
Obama said in a televised address, standing next to the vice president, the
secretary of defense and the nation’s top military commander.
Mr. Obama’s decision to keep roughly 9,800 troops in Afghanistan next year —
rather than drawing down to 1,000 troops by the end of 2016, as the White House
had once intended — comes amid Taliban advances and other alarming changes in
the region. While Mr. Obama’s shift is disturbing and may not put Afghanistan on
a path toward stability, he has no good options.
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editorial board and contributing writers from around the world.
The administration’s decision is almost certainly driven by the advances of
radical militant Islamist groups in Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Libya, where they
have taken advantage of weak governments to seize ever expanding territory.
American officials say the Islamic State, the largest and most brutal among
them, has a growing presence in Afghanistan, which could allow it to tap into
the country’s profitable opium trade.
Keeping a military contingent in Afghanistan in the short term, the officials
say, may make the country less hospitable to the Islamic State and fighters who
are attracted to its barbaric ideology. It might help the Afghan Army maintain
control of the cities at a time when the Taliban is making alarming inroads
across the country. It could dissuade more Afghans from joining the refugee
exodus.
These are optimistic prospects; the most likely scenario might only be to
maintain the security status quo for another year. It would be foolish to expect
the drawdown delay to turn the war around, nor should this decision become an
open-ended commitment that costs American taxpayers billions of dollars and
takes American lives each year. The Obama administration and the Pentagon have
been disingenuous, and at times downright dishonest, in their public assessment
of the progress American forces and civilians have made in Afghanistan in recent
years.
The key to ending the Afghan war remains a negotiated truce between the
government and the leading factions of the Taliban, which has entered into talks
with the Kabul government in recent years, but has not been persuaded to join
the political process. It would also require that Afghan leaders take far
clearer and bolder steps to root out the country’s entrenched corruption and
turn a hollow, dysfunctional government into a state Afghans start to believe
in.
Whether those goals are attainable will ultimately depend on the competency and
tenacity of Afghanistan’s leaders. President Ashraf Ghani, who has been in
office for a little over a year, has been a marked improvement over his erratic
predecessor, Hamid Karzai.
“In the Afghan government, we have a serious partner who wants our help,” Mr.
Obama said on Thursday.
The administration must redouble efforts during its remaining time in office to
ensure that help is rendered as a part of a coherent, realistic strategy that
ultimately cannot depend on American troops scrambling to hold the country
together.
A version of this editorial appears in print on October 16, 2015,
on page A32 of the New York edition with the headline: A Grim Decision on
Afghanistan.
WASHINGTON — With alarming frequency in recent years, thousands
of American-trained security forces in the Middle East, North Africa and South
Asia have collapsed, stalled or defected, calling into question the
effectiveness of the tens of billions of dollars spent by the United States on
foreign military training programs, as well as a central tenet of the Obama
administration’s approach to combating insurgencies.
The setbacks have been most pronounced in three countries that present the
administration with some of its biggest challenges. The Pentagon-trained army
and police in Iraq’s Anbar Province, the heartland of the Islamic State militant
group, have barely engaged its forces, while several thousand American-backed
government forces and militiamen in Afghanistan’s Kunduz Province were forced to
retreat last week when attacked by several hundred Taliban fighters. And in
Syria, a $500 million Defense Department program to train local rebels to fight
the Islamic State has produced only a handful of soldiers.
American-trained forces face different problems in each place, some of which are
out of the United States’ control. But what many of them have in common,
American military and counterterrorism officials say, is poor leadership, a lack
of will and the need to function in the face of intractable political problems
with little support. Without their American advisers, many local forces have
repeatedly shown an inability to fight.
“Our track record at building security forces over the past 15 years is
miserable,” said Karl W. Eikenberry, a former military commander and United
States ambassador in Afghanistan.
The American military has trained soldiers in scores of countries for decades.
But after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that mission jumped in
ambition and scale, especially in Afghanistan and Iraq, where the ultimate goal
was to replace the large American armies deployed there.
The push to rebuild the Iraqi Army that the United States disbanded after the
2003 invasion had largely succeeded by the time American troops withdrew eight
years later. But that $25 billion effort quickly crumbled after the Americans
left, when the politicization of the army leadership under Prime Minister Nuri
Kamal al-Maliki eroded the military’s effectiveness at all levels, American
officials said.
In Afghanistan, basic training typically included marksmanship, ambush drills
and other counterterrorism skills. Before they could begin that, most new Afghan
recruits also needed time-consuming literacy training so they could read the
serial numbers on their weapons, or lessons on proper hygiene to prevent
illnesses that would reduce their effectiveness in combat. Still, there were
notable successes: Afghan special forces trained and advised by their American
counterparts proved to be especially capable fighters.
Then, in a commencement speech at West Point in May 2014, President Obama put
the training of foreign troops at the center of his strategy for combating
militant groups that threaten American interests. The United States, he said,
will no longer send large armies to fight those wars and, in the case of
Afghanistan, would continue to withdraw the forces that are there. Instead, it
will send small numbers of military trainers and advisers to help local forces,
providing them with logistical, intelligence and other support.
“We have to develop a strategy,” Mr. Obama said, “that expands our reach without
sending forces that stretch our military too thin or stir up local resentments.
We need partners to fight terrorists alongside us.”
Expensive Failures
Mr. Obama’s approach has already endured several setbacks, but with no political
appetite among most Republicans or Democrats to send in large numbers of
American troops, the administration is adjusting its strategy, often turning to
regional allies for help in supporting local forces.
In northwest Africa, the United States has spent more than $600 million to
combat Islamist militancy, with training programs stretching from Morocco to
Chad. American officials once heralded Mali’s military as an exemplary partner.
But in 2012, battle-hardened Islamist fighters returned from combat in Libya to
rout the military, including units trained by United States Special Forces. That
defeat, followed by a coup led by an American-trained officer, Capt. Amadou Haya
Sanogo, astounded and embarrassed American commanders. French, United Nations
and European Union forces now carry out training and security missions in Mali.
In Yemen, American-trained troops and counterterrorism forces largely disbanded
when Houthi rebels overran the capital last year and forced the government into
exile. The United States is now relying largely on a Saudi-led air campaign that
has caused more than 1,000 civilian casualties.
More recently in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, the military campaigns against the
Taliban and the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, have made little
headway. After acknowledging that only four or five American-trained Syrian
rebels were actually in the fight there, Pentagon officials said last week that
they were suspending the movement of new recruits from Syria to Turkey and
Jordan for training. The program suffered from a shortage of recruits willing to
fight the Islamic State instead of the army of President Bashar al-Assad, a
problem Mr. Obama noted at a news conference on Friday.
“I’m the first one to acknowledge it has not worked the way it was supposed to,”
he said. “A part of the reason, frankly, is because when we tried to get them to
just focus on ISIL, the response we get back is, ‘How can we focus on ISIL when,
every single day, we’re having barrel bombs and attacks from the regime?’ ”
In Afghanistan, the United States has spent about $65 billion to build the army
and police forces. Even before last week’s setback in Kunduz, many Afghan forces
were struggling to defeat the Taliban, partly because of what many senior
commanders said had been a precipitous American drawdown before Afghans were
ready to be on their own. But how thousands of Afghan Army, police and militia
defenders could fare so poorly against a Taliban force that most local and
military officials put only in the hundreds baffled and frustrated the Pentagon.
If there is a bright spot in the training landscape, it may be the
American-financed effort by a 22,000-member African Union force — from nations
like Kenya, Uganda and Ethiopia — to oust the Shabab, Al Qaeda’s affiliate in
Somalia, from many areas of the country. The Shabab’s leader, Ahmed Abdi Godane,
was killed last year in an American airstrike, and other agents have been killed
by drone strikes.
The American government has invested nearly $1 billion in the overall strategy
in Somalia. But even with the gains, the Shabab have been able to carry out
bombings in Mogadishu, the capital, and in neighboring countries, including
massacres at a university and a shopping mall in Kenya in the past two years.
Shiites Step Back
Much more complicated is the situation in Iraq. A United States training program
to strengthen the embattled security forces there has run aground, in part
because the Iraqi government has provided far fewer recruits than anticipated,
while many Shiite militiamen and soldiers who were fighting the Islamic State
have left the battlefield and joined the exodus of migrants seeking new lives in
Europe.
The reality is that Iraq’s Shiite majority seems to be settling in to a divided
Iraq and increasingly questioning whether it is worth shedding Shiite blood in
areas like Anbar Province or Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, which the
Islamic State captured in June 2014. The battle against the Islamic State is no
longer the national priority it was a year ago, when the militants threatened
Baghdad and the Shiite-majority south.
With those areas now largely secure, mostly because of the efforts of Iranian
military advisers and their proxy militias, the Iraqi government is focused on
other priorities — mostly the migrant crisis and street protests, which led to a
series of proposals by Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi.
For the White House, which hoped to rely on a rehabilitated Iraqi Army and
Shiite militias to fight the Islamic State, this raises troubling questions and
highlights the diverging interests of the United States and its partner.
Vali Nasr, dean of the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins
University and a former senior adviser at the State Department, said there was a
deepening sense in Iraq that “ISIS is a Sunni problem, not a Shia problem.” He
said the prevailing belief now among Shiites was that saving Anbar was not worth
“the blood of our children.”
Maps have even circulated that show the territory the Shiite militias and their
sponsors in Iran care about. A line stretches from the Iranian border in the
east to just south of Kirkuk; around Samarra and to the edge of Baghdad; and
then across Anbar, south of Falluja, toward the Jordanian border.
Sajad Jiyad, an Iraqi analyst based in London and Baghdad who has advised the
Iraqi Defense Ministry, saw one of the maps and described it as “the lines they
are not willing to concede.”
This is a significant shift. Last summer, during the Islamic State’s onslaught
into Iraq, tens of thousands of Shiite men took up arms after Grand Ayatollah
Ali al-Sistani, the spiritual leader for Iraqi Shiites, issued a fatwa. As
recently as four months ago, after Ramadi, the capital of Anbar, fell to the
Islamic State, militiamen streamed into the province, promising to quickly drive
the militants away.
American officials had long worried that the militias, the most powerful of
which are supported by Iran, would be counterproductive if they fought in Sunni
areas, because they could exacerbate sectarian tensions.
But in Anbar, the situation was so dire that local Sunni officials invited the
militias in, and the Americans largely acquiesced as long as the groups
coordinated with the Iraqi government so that American warplanes would not
mistakenly bomb them. Now, more than four months after the fall of Ramadi,
despite American and Iraqi officials’ promises of a robust counteroffensive, the
fight has come to a stalemate.
And many of the Sunnis who sought help from the militias now regret it. Several
officials said that instead of helping liberate Anbar from the Islamic State,
the Shiite militias had settled into relatively safe areas of the province,
raising fears that their goal — and that of their sponsor, Iran — is to set up a
permanent presence there as part of a plan to protect Baghdad and the south.
Sheikh Rafi al-Fahdawi, a Sunni tribal leader in Anbar, said the militia
fighters had “isolated themselves in certain areas and don’t want to participate
in the important battles.”
The United States and 16 allied countries have so far trained six Iraqi Army
brigades and 10 Kurdish pesh merga battalions, or about 12,000 troops, according
to the Defense Department. About half of the army troops are now in the fight,
with the others training on their equipment and soon to follow, American
military officials said.
One option now for the United States is to emphasize training and equipping
Sunni tribal fighters, something the Obama administration has long sought to do.
But while there are about 5,600 Sunni fighters in Anbar as part of the Popular
Mobilization Forces, the umbrella group for the largely Shiite paramilitary
forces, they have yet to prove themselves in combat.
An Iraqi official briefed on the military situation in Anbar, who spoke on the
condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the news media,
said, “I don’t think there is a sense of urgency anymore.”
“Clearly, there is no progress,” the official said. “Why there is no progress is
what everyone is talking about. I don’t think there is any will among the Iraqi
security forces and militias to fight. They are just not fighting.”
Soldiers and militiamen, many of whom said they had not been paid in months, are
dropping their weapons and heading for Europe.
One militia fighter from Diyala Province, who refused to give his name because
he had abandoned his unit, spoke recently from Germany. “I almost got killed
more than five times because we went into highly dangerous areas,” he said. “I
considered moving to Europe as the last option for me to live in a country away
from the hissing of bullets and death.”
John E. McLaughlin, a former deputy director of the C.I.A. who is
now at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, said American
efforts to train the Iraqi military would probably be futile without a political
bargain to unite the country’s Shiite and Sunni Arabs.
“Training is a necessary but not sufficient way to get you to the point of
creating a robust fighting force, because ultimately, militaries fight over
political issues,” he said.
Eric Schmitt reported from Washington, and Tim Arango from
Baghdad. Omar al-Jawoshy contributed reporting from Baghdad, and an employee of
The New York Times from Diyala Province, Iraq. Kitty Bennett contributed
research.
A version of this article appears in print on October 4, 2015, on page A1 of the
New York edition with the headline: U.S. Financing Fails to Sustain Foreign
Forces.
KABUL, Afghanistan — A crowded hospital in the embattled city of
Kunduz that treats war wounded came under attack on Saturday and the American
military acknowledged that it may have killed 19 patients, staff members and
others at the facility while firing on insurgents nearby.
The attack, which the military said in a statement might have been “collateral
damage” that occurred while engaging militants, drew a fierce international
outcry. The head of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, condemned it and called for
a “thorough and impartial investigation.” It also renewed scrutiny of the United
States military’s record of causing civilian casualties, which has alienated the
Afghan public and often undermined relations with the government here.
At least 12 staff members and seven patients — including three children — were
killed when the hospital, run by Doctors Without Borders, was badly damaged in
the airstrike early Saturday in Kunduz. At least 37 were wounded, and some were
flown to Kabul for treatment.
The United States military, in a statement, confirmed an airstrike at 2:15 a.m.,
saying that it had been targeting individuals “who were threatening the force”
and that “there may have been collateral damage to a nearby medical facility.”
One American official, who requested anonymity to discuss early reports of an
event now under official investigation, said the attack may have been carried
out by an American AC-130 gunship that was supporting Special Operations forces
on the ground in Kunduz. The top United States commander in Afghanistan, Gen.
John F. Campbell, said that American troops had come under fire in the vicinity
of the hospital and that an investigation into the airstrike had begun.
President Obama issued a statement offering condolences to the victims in what
he called “the tragic incident” in Kunduz. However, noting the Defense
Department investigation, he said “we will await the results of that inquiry
before making a definitive judgment as to the circumstances of this tragedy.”
The attack will bring renewed criticism of the United States for failing to
minimize civilian casualties. The military has been playing an increasingly
active role in Afghanistan amid a Taliban resurgence, particularly in the
northern province of Kunduz.
The airstrike on Saturday set off fires that were still burning hours later, and
a nurse who managed to climb out of the debris described seeing colleagues so
badly burned that they had died.
Another nurse, Lajos Zoltan Jecs, described looking into the intensive care unit
and seeing the bodies of six patients burning in their beds. “There are no words
for how terrible it was,” he said in a statement issued by the aid organization.
The group, which is also known by its French initials, MSF, said the bombing
continued for 30 minutes after the United States and Afghan militaries were
informed by telephone that the hospital was being bombed.
“All parties to the conflict including in Kabul and Washington were clearly
informed of the precise location [GPS Coordinates] of the MSF facilities —
hospital, guesthouse, office,” the group said in a statement.
“MSF urgently seeks clarity on exactly what took place and how this terrible
event could have happened,” it said. Doctors Without Borders is highly respected
for its work in conflict zones and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999.
President Ashraf Ghani’s office released a statement on Saturday evening saying
that General Campbell had apologized for the strike. However, General Campbell
said in a statement that he was “aware of an incident that occurred at a Doctors
Without Borders hospital in Kunduz” but suggested that it was justified, saying
that the airstrike “was conducted against insurgents who were directly firing
upon U.S. service members advising and assisting Afghan Security Forces.”
However, General Campbell said the military opened a formal inquiry into the
attack known as a 15-6 investigation. The results will be sent up the chain of
command and can lead to administrative or nonjudicial punishments, or to
court-martial.
Airstrikes resulting in civilian casualties have caused tensions verging on
hostility between the Afghan government and the United States for years. The
former president, Hamid Karzai, was often in the uncomfortable position of
explaining to his countrymen why Afghanistan’s biggest ally was killing innocent
Afghans.
Mr. Ghani has been largely spared such confrontations since taking power last
year. Although the United States military has kept up a steady stream of
airstrikes, it has mostly targeted small groups. And with greatly reduced troop
levels there have been far fewer mistakes.
The United Nations high commissioner for human rights, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein,
called the airstrike “utterly tragic, inexcusable, and possibly even criminal.”
Mr. al-Hussein also said, “International and Afghan military planners have an
obligation to respect and protect civilians at all times, and medical facilities
and personnel are the object of a special protection. These obligations apply no
matter whose air force is involved, and irrespective of the location."
The strike came as the United States, for the first time since it began
withdrawing most of its soldiers from Afghanistan, has begun to play an
increasingly active role in the fight there. It is trying to support Afghan
troops overwhelmed by the Taliban in Kunduz Province.
The Taliban took control of Kunduz City on Monday and despite sporadic but often
intense fighting over the last three days, their white flag is still flying over
the main square.
Accounts differed as to whether there had been fighting around the hospital that
might have precipitated the strike. Three hospital employees, an aide who was
wounded in the bombing and two nurses who emerged unscathed, said that there had
been no fighting in the hospital’s immediate vicinity and no Taliban fighters in
the hospital.
But a Kunduz police spokesman, Sayed Sarwar Hussaini, said Taliban fighters had
entered the hospital and were using it as a firing position. The hospital
treated the wounded from all sides of the conflict, a policy that has long irked
Afghan security forces. In a Twitter post, Arjan Hehenkamp, director of Doctors
Without Borders in the Netherlands, denied that Taliban fighters had been in the
hospital, saying that only staff, patients and caretakers had been inside.
Video of the hospital grounds posted Saturday showed fires still burning,
blackened walls and, in one building, a collapsed ceiling. One side of one
building appeared to be pockmarked by bullets or possibly shrapnel, suggesting
that there could have been fighting there. But it was impossible to tell whether
the marks were new.
The organization described the facility as “very badly damaged.”
The United States Embassy in Kabul said it “mourns for the individuals and
families affected by the tragic incident at the Doctors Without Borders
hospital, and for all those suffering from the violence in Kunduz.” A hospital
nurse, who asked not to be identified because he had instructions not to speak
to reporters, said that two nurses had been killed, as well as at least three
doctors, a pharmacist and two guards. “Most of my colleagues died in the fire
after the bombing,” he said.
“When the bombing occurred we were treating patients, then we lost our way.
Everyone stumbled and fumbled to escape,” the nurse said. “I don’t even remember
how I got out.”
Another nurse described treating himself because there was no one to help him.
Doctors Without Borders said 105 patients and caretakers had been at the
hospital, along with 80 staff members. The hospital was “partially destroyed” in
the bombing, the group said, adding that it had been “hit several times.”
When the military describes a single airstrike, it can mean that more than one
bomb was dropped on a single target. Similarly, if an attack is carried out by
helicopters or drones, there may be more than one missile or rocket fired, but
if there is a single target, it is often described as just one airstrike,
according to the military.
The Afghan Army has also been using helicopters to attack targets in Kunduz, and
a spokesman for the brigade in Kunduz, Ghulam Hazrat, said that Afghan
helicopters were “maneuvering and targeting enemies.” It was not yet clear
whether Afghan aircraft had been involved in the attack.
The International Committee of the Red Cross condemned the bombing.
“This is an appalling tragedy,” said Jean-Nicolas Marti, the head of the
organization’s delegation in Afghanistan. “Such attacks against health workers
and facilities undermine the capacity of humanitarian organizations to assist
the Afghan people at a time when they most urgently need it.”
Kunduz has been the scene of heavy fighting since Thursday, when Afghan
government security forces began a counterattack against the Taliban.
Although the hospital was overwhelmed in recent days by civilians wounded in the
fighting and was running short of supplies, staff members continued to work.
Early on, the Taliban had respected the hospital’s request not to bring weapons
inside, according to staff members, and the hospital had been a refuge in the
shattered city.
The United States began dropping bombs on the Kunduz area on Tuesday in an
effort to aid Afghan forces.
The civilian deaths in the Saturday airstrike, and the discrepancies in the
accounts of what led to the bombing, were painful reminders of scores of earlier
mistakes by American forces as they hit civilians. Among them: women, children
and the elderly at weddings, travelers on roads, villagers and Afghans gathering
firewood.
Although such mistakes have accounted for an ever smaller fraction of civilian
deaths in the war, each one has taken on magnified significance in the eyes of
many Afghans because it is the fault of a foreign power. That has done much to
alienate the Afghan population, which in turn has hurt the United States-led
forces and their Afghan government allies.
The most recent report from the United Nations found that the United States is
now responsible for just 1 percent of civilian casualties.
Civilian casualties from coalition airstrikes have also engendered support for
the insurgency. Whatever the Taliban’s atrocities, and there have been many, the
insurgents do not have aircraft and the devastating capability to kill from
above. Nonetheless, in the first half of 2015, the Taliban and other
antigovernment forces were responsible for 70 percent of civilian casualties.
In 2012, the United States military reached an agreement with then-President
Hamid Karzai to sharply limit the circumstances in which air support was used,
and to avoid population centers and Afghan homes almost entirely.
At the time, exceptions were allowed for extraordinary circumstances: for
instance, when Afghan government forces requested help. It was unclear whether
those rules remained in place.
The United Nations says that 19,368 civilians have been killed in fighting in
Afghanistan since 2009, when the world body began to keep detailed statistics.
Nearly 33,300 have been wounded.
Reporting was contributed by Jawad Sukhanyar and Ahmad Shakib
from Kabul; an employee of The New York Times from Baghlan Province,
Afghanistan; and Eric Schmitt from Washington.
A version of this article appears in print on October 4, 2015, on page A1 of the
New York edition with the headline: U.S. Is Blamed After Bombs Hit Afghan
Hospital.
THE evidence from Europe in recent weeks is that many citizens
are ahead of their governments when it comes to responding to the tide of human
misery coming from the Middle East. Soccer clubs in Germany are setting up
training academies. Austrians have turned out at railway stations. In Iceland,
more than 15,000 people joined the “Syria is calling” Facebook page, many of
whom apparently offered to house a refugee.
In the United States, the Obama administration’s response has been cautious.
While Turkey is hosting approximately 1.9 million refugees from Syria, Jordan
has received more than 600,000, and Lebanon over one million, America has taken
only just over 1,500 people during four years of the Syrian civil war.
The president first promised this month to increase the number who will be
resettled to 10,000 in the fiscal year beginning in October. This was paltry.
Secretary of State John Kerry has said that the total number of refugees allowed
into the country in 2017 would be increased by 30,000, to 100,000, but he didn’t
specify how many of those would be Syrian. The city of Munich welcomed 25,000
refugees over one weekend.
The mismatch between need and response is all the more striking since the United
States has given a home to some three million refugees since 1975. In 2013, they
came from 64 different countries.
The experience of the United States Refugee Admissions Program, which is a
consortium of federal agencies and nonprofit organizations, offers a number of
valuable lessons. The first is that successful resettlement needs more than
big-hearted citizens. It needs an effective combination of resources provided by
both the public and the private spheres.
Government needs to set the legislative framework, oversee security checks and
provide funding for initial housing, case management and language training. Once
these needs are met, resettlement agencies in the United States work within
their communities to develop volunteer programs and raise funds to augment the
public provision. The success of the refugee admissions program lies in this
partnership between the public and the private sectors.
Second, refugees need to be seen for their potential contribution to society.
The language of “burden” is mistaken. Rather, economic self-sufficiency is the
central pillar in successful refugee resettlement.
Resettlement agencies work to help refugees gain employment as soon as possible
after their arrival. According to the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement’s
annual report to Congress for 2013 (the most recent year for which figures are
available), the rate of refugees’ self-sufficiency at 180 days was 69 percent. A
recent survey by the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute found that
refugees were, in fact, more likely to be employed than the American-born
population.
Third, education for the children of refugees is crucial for effective
integration. Many refugee children arrive with little formal education and
limited to no English skills. Yet resettlement experience in the United States
shows that, with proper support, refugee children are able to thrive at school
in a short time.
Data from the International Rescue Committee indicates that 95 percent of
refugee students graduating out of the I.R.C.’s New York City Education and
Learning program earned a diploma. This is far above the city’s baseline average
of about 62 percent for English-proficient students.
For many refugees, the chance for their children to get a good education means
more to the parents than their own immediate prospects. It is the young who can
go on to reap the full benefits of resettlement.
The final lesson is that refugees prosper most when they become citizens.
Refugees need support to achieve it as soon as they become eligible. Studies
show that naturalization as a United States citizen correlates with higher
levels of employment and earnings.
The United Nations has called for the resettlement of 400,000 Syrian refugees
over the next several years — which amounts to about 10 percent of those who
have been displaced to neighboring countries like Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan.
Historically, the United States has taken 50 percent of the world’s refugees who
are eligible for resettlement; that is why the I.R.C. is appealing to America to
take 100,000 Syrians next year.
That will require political will and the funding to back it up — both of which
most of Europe has conspicuously lacked. European Union leaders meeting this
week must put that right.
With more people fleeing conflict and disaster than at any time since World War
II, renewed leadership is required. No country is better placed than the United
States to offer it.
No one pretends that an enlarged program of resettling refugees will end the
humanitarian crisis created by the civil war in Syria. That will require a new
wave of political and diplomatic engagement at the source of the conflict.
International aid organizations like the I.R.C. see every day the need to
provide more help to the neighboring states of Syria that are under huge strain,
but refugee resettlement is also a practical way of making a difference for the
most vulnerable.
There are very many generous, civic-minded Americans who stand ready to welcome
thousands more Syrian refugees to this country. So, too, should the United
States government. That effort will not only save precious lives, but will also
confirm the nation’s commitment to its moral and international responsibilities.
David Miliband, a former British foreign secretary, is the president and chief
executive of the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian aid
organization.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on September 22, 2015, on page A27 of
the New York edition with the headline: How the U.S. Can Welcome Refugees.
PARIS — It was 5:45 p.m., a normal Friday afternoon on the sleek
high-speed train that takes high-level European diplomats, businesspeople,
tourists and ordinary citizens between Amsterdam, Brussels and Paris.
Less than an hour away from Paris, a French passenger got up from his seat to
use the toilets at the back of the carriage. Suddenly, in front of him rose a
slightly built man. Across the man’s chest, in a sling, was an automatic rifle
of the kind favored by jihadists the world over: an AK-47.
The passenger threw himself on the man. The gun went off, once, twice, several
times. Glass shattered. A bullet hit a passenger.
The man with the gun kept going down the carriage, holding his AK-47 and a Luger
pistol. In a pocket was a sharp blade capable of inflicting grievous harm. He
had at least nine cartridges of ammunition, enough for serious carnage.
Alek Skarlatos, a specialist in the National Guard from Oregon vacationing in
Europe with a friend in the Air Force, Airman First Class Spencer Stone and
another American, Anthony Sadler, looked up and saw the gunman. Mr. Skarlatos,
who was returning from a deployment in Afghanistan, looked over at the
powerfully built Mr. Stone, a martial arts enthusiast. “Let’s go, go!” he
shouted.
Mr. Stone went after the heavily armed gunman and, with his friends, pounded him
to the floor of the train carriage. “I mean, adrenaline mostly just takes over,”
Mr. Skarlatos said in a Skype interview on Saturday, barely 12 hours after it
was over. “I didn’t realize, or fully comprehend, what was going on.”
Their actions saved many lives on the train, which was packed with over 500
passengers, according to French officials. The attack took place in Oignies,
near the historic town of Arras.
“I heard a gunshot,” Chris Norman, a British consultant who helps African
entrepreneurs find financing in Europe, said at a news conference Saturday
afternoon. “I heard a window shatter. I saw an employee run down the train. I
saw a man holding an AK-47.”
Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve of France identified the suspect Saturday as
a 26-year-old Moroccan man known to the Spanish authorities as a member of “the
radical Islamist movement.” Mr. Cazeneuve, however, cautioned that the French
police had not fully confirmed his identity. French officials had identified the
man as a security risk, but he was not under surveillance and had apparently
spent little time in France.
By Saturday evening, having left the hospital in Lille where he was operated on
after being severely cut by the suspect, Mr. Stone and his friends were being
hailed as heroes by French officials and citizens. Some were proposing them for
the Legion of Honor. President François Hollande of France had already invited
them to Élysée Palace for a congratulatory meeting. The French passenger who
initially encountered the attacker was also lauded by French officials for his
bravery, but was not named.
President Obama called the three Americans “to commend and congratulate them for
their courage and quick action,” a spokesman, Eric Schultz, said. And Mr.
Hollande spoke with Mr. Obama by phone, “thanking him warmly” for the “exemplary
conduct of the American citizens” who had prevented “an extremely serious act,”
the Élysée said in a statement.
There was no thought of heroism as the men sprang into action, however. “What
happened and what we did, it just feels unreal,” Mr. Skarlatos said in the Skype
interview. “It felt like a dream, or a movie.”
In the train carriage, Mr. Stone was the first to act, jumping up at the command
of Mr. Skarlatos. He sprinted through the carriage toward the gunman, running “a
good 10 meters to get to the guy,” Mr. Skarlatos said. Mr. Stone was unarmed;
his target was visibly bristling with weapons.
With Mr. Skarlatos close behind, Mr. Stone grabbed the gunman’s neck, stunning
him. But the gunman fought back furiously, slashing with his blade, slicing Mr.
Stone in the neck and hand and nearly severing his thumb. Mr. Stone did not let
go.
The gunman “pulled out a cutter, started cutting Spencer,” Mr. Norman, the
British consultant, told television interviewers. “He cut Spencer behind the
neck. He nearly cut his thumb off.”
Mr. Skarlatos grabbed the gunman’s Luger pistol and threw it to the side.
Incongruously, the gunman yelled at the men to return it, even as Mr. Stone was
choking him. A train conductor rushed up and grabbed the gunman’s left arm, Mr.
Norman recalled.
The AK-47 had fallen to the gunman’s feet. Mr. Skarlatos picked it up and
“started muzzle-thumping him in the head with it,” he said.
By then, an alarm had sounded on the train. Jean-Hugues Anglade, a well-known
French actor, had broken the glass to set it off, cutting himself in the
process. The train began to slow down. Julia Grunberg, a Brazilian student
living in the Netherlands, looked up from her book. “It was all very normal,”
she said. “Then, suddenly, the alarm started ringing. We were very fast; then we
were very slow.”
Mr. Anglade accused the train personnel on Saturday of having fled the scene of
the struggle, abandoning the passengers and cowering in the engine car. He told
the French news media that the behavior of the staff had been “terrible” and
“inhuman.”
Mr. Norman and Mr. Sadler had joined in the efforts to subdue the gunman, who
“put up quite a bit of a fight,” Mr. Norman recalled at the news conference in
Arras on Saturday. “My thought was, ‘I’m probably going to die anyway, so let’s
go.’ Once you start moving, you’re not afraid anymore.”
Mr. Stone, wounded and bleeding, kept the suspect in a chokehold. “Spencer Stone
is a very strong guy,” Mr. Norman said. The suspect passed out. Mr. Norman
busied himself binding him up with a tie.
Mr. Skarlatos, the AK-47 in hand, began to patrol the carriages, looking for
other gunmen. He made a series of startling discoveries: The suspect’s guns had
malfunctioned, and he had not had the competence to fix them.
“He had pulled the trigger on the AK. The primer was just faulty, so the gun
didn’t go off, luckily,” Mr. Skarlatos said. “And he didn’t know how to fix it,
which is also very lucky.” In addition, the gunman had not been able to load his
own handgun: “There was no magazine in it, so he either dropped it accidentally
or didn’t load it properly, so he was only able to get what appeared to be one
shot off,” Mr. Skarlatos said.
Bleeding heavily, Mr. Stone went to the aid of a gunshot victim, Mr. Sadler
said. “Even though he was injured, he went to help the other man who was
injured,” he said. “Without his help, he would have died.”
Slowly, the train pulled into the Arras station. “Somebody came in,” Ms.
Grunberg recalled, and told passengers, “You have to get off the train.”
“While I was leaving the train,” she said, “I saw someone in a wheelchair,
police dogs. It was all very confusing.”
All those who took part realized it could have turned out far worse. “I mean, if
that guy’s weapon had been functioning properly,” Mr. Skarlatos said, “I don’t
even want to think about how it would have went.”
Reporting was contributed by Aurelien Breeden, Lilia Blaise and Elian Peltier
from Paris; Raphael Minder from Madrid; and Helene Cooper and Michael D. Shear
from Washington.
A version of this article appears in print on August 23, 2015, on page A1 of the
New York edition with the headline: An AK-47, Bullets Fly, Then Americans
Pounce.
President Obama on Wednesday made a powerful case for the strong
and effective nuclear agreement with Iran. In a speech at American University,
he directly rebutted critics like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel
and rightly warned of the damage to global security if the Republican-led
Congress rejects the agreement.
“If Congress kills this deal, we will lose more than just constraints on Iran’s
nuclear deal or the sanctions we have painstakingly built,” he said. “We will
have lost something more precious — America’s credibility as a leader of
diplomacy. America’s credibility is the anchor of the international system.”
He debunked the notion that there was a better deal to be had if American
negotiators and the allies — France, Britain, Germany, Russia and China — had
demanded that Iran capitulate and completely dismantle all of its nuclear
facilities. That was not going to happen. The truth is, if Congress rejects the
deal when it votes in September, the robust web of multinational sanctions the
administration persuaded other countries to impose on Iran will crumble and the
only way to keep Iran from gaining a nuclear weapon will be war, he said.
Mr. Obama’s defense of the deal, which is designed to prevent Iran from
obtaining a nuclear weapon in exchange for relief from sanctions, was blunt and
forceful. He likened Republicans to Iranian hard-liners, saying both are more
comfortable with the status quo.
Congressional Republicans, Mr. Netanyahu and other opponents have mounted a
multimillion-dollar lobbying campaign, including ads and a webcast on Tuesday by
Mr. Netanyahu to American Jewish leaders in which he denounced the agreement as
having “fatal flaws.”
Mr. Obama said he understood Israel’s security concerns and didn’t doubt the
sincerity of Mr. Netanyahu’s objections, but he believes the deal is in the
interests of both America and Israel. Mr. Obama also promised to redouble
American support for Israel’s security.
The speech was so trenchant because Mr. Obama ably connected the opposition to
the Iran agreement to recent history. “If the rhetoric in these ads and the
accompanying commentary sounds familiar, it should, for many of the same people
who argued for the war in Iraq are now making the case against the Iran nuclear
deal,” he said.
As a presidential candidate, Mr. Obama opposed the Iraq war. Invading Iraq was a
catastrophic mistake that destabilized the country and, more than anything, has
enabled Iran to expand its influence in Iraq and in the region. Mr. Netanyahu,
of course, was a strong supporter of the Iraq war and in September 2002 made
that case in congressional testimony as a private citizen.
After 14 years of war, thousands of American and Iraqi lives lost and many
thousands more people wounded, it is appalling that so many opponents of the
Iran deal either would cavalierly support military action against Iran or are
willing to risk it by rejecting the deal. This is an irrational posture, since,
as Mr. Obama pointed out, he and future American presidents would be able to use
force if Iran tried to build a bomb in coming years.
In putting the current situation into its proper context, Mr. Obama drew one
crucial lesson from Iraq — the need to get beyond “a mind-set characterized by a
preference for military action over diplomacy, a mind-set that put a premium on
unilateral U.S. action over the painstaking work of building international
consensus, a mind-set that exaggerated threats beyond what the intelligence
supported.” Some members of Congress may not have learned that lesson after so
many years of war, but surely the American public has.
After the speech, in a meeting with a small group of journalists, Mr. Obama said
the possibility of war if the deal fails was a matter of logic. Though Iran may
not attack the United States directly, it could threaten American troops in Iraq
with Shiite militias there, threaten Israel with rocket attacks by Hezbollah or
send a suicide bomber in a small craft against American naval ships in the
Strait of Hormuz, he said.
Despite fierce opposition, Mr. Obama expressed confidence the deal would get
through Congress, even if by the slimmest of margins. After nearly seven years
in office and lots of tough decisions, he said, “I’ve never been more certain
that this is sound policy.”
A version of this editorial appears in print on August 6, 2015, on page A26 of
the New York edition with the headline: A Compelling Defense of the Iran Deal.
President Obama’s Clean Power Plan has rightly been hailed as the
most important action any president has taken to address the climate crisis.
The new rule requires the nation’s power plants to cut their carbon dioxide
emissions to 32 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.
Power plants are the largest source of such pollution in the United States,
responsible for more than a third of the country’s carbon dioxide emissions.
This greenhouse gas is the main driver of climate change, yet, until today, most
plants could emit the pollutant in unlimited quantities.
The president’s plan is important not only because of the reductions it will
achieve in domestic emissions. It also signals to the international community
that America is serious about reining in its contribution to the global problem
of greenhouse gas pollution. This message is particularly salient as the world’s
nations prepare to gather in Paris in December to negotiate a new climate
agreement.
Of course, not everyone is happy with the new rule. Some, like the Senate
majority leader, Mitch McConnell, a Republican from coal-producing Kentucky,
have denounced it as the latest — and most damaging — attack in President
Obama’s “war on coal.”
There’s no getting around the fact that a large number of coal-fired power
plants are likely to close their doors in the near future. The Clean Power Plan
will be at least partially responsible for many of these closings. A recent
study by the United States Energy Information Administration estimated that
almost 90 gigawatts of coal-fired electric generating capacity (close to 10
percent of the nation’s total) will be retired by 2020, and that just over half
of that loss will be caused by the new regulation.
But the truth is that most of the coal plants at risk should have been shuttered
years ago. Traditionally, the economically useful life of a coal-fired plant was
thought to be about 30 years. As of 2014, coal-fired plants in the United States
had been operating for an average of 42 years, and many plants had been in
service far longer. Some date all the way back to the 1950s, meaning they have
already been running for twice their expected life span.
Unsurprisingly, these clunkers tend to pollute at a far higher rate than more
modern plants. Since 1990, a vast majority of the new electric generation
capacity in the United States has been built to burn natural gas. Gas plants
emit, on average, half the carbon dioxide, a third of the nitrogen oxides and a
hundredth of the sulfur oxides per megawatt hour that coal plants do. The second
largest source of new capacity has been wind power, which creates no air
pollution at all.
Given the ready availability of newer, cleaner technology, why are we still
getting our electricity from plants built in the Eisenhower era? The blame,
ironically enough, rests with our nation’s most important environmental law.
Nearly 45 years ago, an almost unanimous Congress passed the Clean Air Act,
which had the remarkably ambitious goal of eliminating essentially all air
pollution that posed a threat to the public.
But however lofty its goals, the law contained a terrible flaw: Existing
industrial facilities — most notably, electric power plants — were largely
exempt from direct federal regulation. For some of the most ubiquitous
pollutants, like those that form soot and smog, only newly constructed
facilities would face limits on their emissions.
This “grandfathering” of old power plants didn’t seem terribly consequential at
the time. Soon enough, it was thought, those plants would run out their useful
lives and close down, making way for new facilities that would be subject to
federal standards.
But that expectation turned out to be wrong. By instituting different regulatory
regimes for new and existing plants, Congress had significantly altered the math
behind decisions to retire plants. A system that subjected new plants to strict
emissions controls but allowed old plants to pollute with impunity gave those
old plants an enormous comparative economic advantage and an incentive for their
owners to keep operating them much longer than they would have otherwise.
By the late 1980s, it was clear that the central goals of the Clean Air Act
would never be achieved if these grandfathered coal plants were not regulated
more stringently. Every president since then, whether a Democrat or Republican,
has taken meaningful steps to slash pollution from existing plants, in most
cases relying not on new legislation but on previously neglected provisions of
the Clean Air Act itself. The statute has, in this sense, held the keys to its
own salvation.
The Clean Power Plan follows in this bipartisan tradition. No new legislation is
necessary. If the plan appears likely to spur a larger number of plant
retirements than its predecessors, that is mainly because it is taking effect
during a period when natural gas is affordable and abundant as never before. In
the current market, shuttering old coal plants and ramping up the use of gas
plants is simply many utilities’ most cost-effective option for cutting their
carbon emissions.
Those who promote the “war on coal” narrative would have us believe that the
president’s plan represents some sort of personal vendetta, an attempt, as
Senator McConnell put it, to “crush forms of energy” the president and his
allies don’t like. In reality, the rule is the latest chapter in a decades-long
effort to clean up our oldest, dirtiest power plants and at last fulfill the
pledge that Congress made to the American people back in 1970: that the air we
all breathe will be safe.
It’s a promise worth keeping.
Richard L. Revesz is a professor and dean emeritus at the New York University
School of Law, where Jack Lienke is an attorney at the Institute for Policy
Integrity. They are co-authors of the forthcoming book “Struggling for Air:
Power Plants and the ‘War on Coal.’”
NAIROBI, Kenya — At one point during his weekend in Kenya,
President Obama acknowledged the delicate nature of deciding which of his vast
array of half cousins and stepaunts should be invited to dinner.
“The people of Kenya,” he said wryly, “will be familiar with the need to manage
family politics sometimes.”
Over the course of two days here, Mr. Obama tried to manage the broader family
politics of his father’s land, a country that considers him one of its own, even
as it has played a singular role in his own life and career. Bathed in
adulation, he nonetheless delivered a tough-love message before leaving on
Sunday, challenging Kenya to tackle corruption, sexism and division.
For the first African-American president returning to his ancestral home, a
moment unlike any before in the history of either country, the visit was
powerful and yet, at times, strangely impersonal. At some moments, Mr. Obama
seemed genuinely moved by the experience, and he reflected on the country’s
impact on him. At other times, he talked dispassionately about policy issues,
sounding much like he does in plenty of other countries.
He made it clear that he resented the security bubble that prevented him from
visiting his father’s village or even just strolling down the streets of the
capital, Nairobi, as he did as a young man. Kenyans clearly craved his
attention, desperate in many cases to see him, talk with him or touch him, but
they were largely kept at a distance. In the end, he has experienced more
frenzied receptions in other countries, such as Ghana, his first stop in Africa
as president in 2009, when his motorcade was swarmed by thousands of people.
Mr. Obama, who arrived Friday evening, saw the first large-scale crowds of this
trip on Sunday morning when his helicopter touched down at Kenyatta University.
Thousands of students and others lined the streets, waving, cheering, taking
photographs and in some cases wearing T-shirts with messages welcoming him.
When his motorcade left the campus to head down a highway past ramshackle
communities far from the polished buildings of downtown, he passed thousands
more waiting along the road, in their case mostly silent, as if holding vigil.
At Safaricom Indoor Arena, where he delivered a speech to 4,500 people, the
crowd chanted, “Obama! Obama! Obama!” and the public address system played a
song with the refrain, “I’m coming home.”
When he went to shake hands after the speech, the only time he did that with
everyday Kenyans, the crowd surged forward, pushing barriers several feet closer
to him.
“Don’t push, don’t push,” Mr. Obama implored, before making a quick exit after
just a few minutes on the rope line.
He had more of a sustained conversation later in the day with a group of 75
selected representatives of nongovernmental organizations. But it was a heavily
scripted event, in which predetermined Kenyans were given the floor and each
delivered a speech on his or her area of interest. Mr. Obama’s responses were
sober and typically professorial.
“Part of the challenge that I’ve had during the course of my presidency is that
given the demands of the job and the bubble, I can’t come here and just go
upcountry and visit for a week and meet everybody,” he lamented earlier in the
trip. “I’m more restricted, ironically, as president of the United States than I
will be as a private citizen.”
In a country fighting the Shabab, a Qaeda affiliate that has carried out
repeated deadly attacks on Kenyan soil, security was a serious concern, enough
so that Joseph P. Clancy, the director of the Secret Service, personally
accompanied Mr. Obama and Kenyan authorities shut down vital roads. Seemingly
much of Nairobi stayed away for the first day.
Mr. Obama hoped to connect with Kenyans at the arena, where he was introduced by
his half sister, Auma Obama, who runs a foundation here and hosted him for his
first visit to the country nearly three decades ago. Noting a common Kenyan
saying — “don’t get lost” — she said that he is not lost now, “nor was he lost
when he first came to Kenya. I’ll tell you that because he was with me. He fit
right in.”
“He’s not just our familia,” she added. “He gets us. He gets us.”
Mr. Obama tried to show that with a few words of Swahili.
“Habari Zenu!” he called out to the crowd, meaning, “How are you?”
He recalled that first trip as a young man and how he arrived at the airport,
where an airline official helping him fill out a form recognized his last name
and asked if he was related to his father.
“That was the first time that my name meant something,” he said.
Recounting stories he also told in his memoir, Mr. Obama noted that during that
visit, Auma’s car broke down repeatedly.
“We’d be on the highway, we’d have to call the juakali — he’d bring us tools,”
he said, referring to a serviceman. “We’d be sitting there, waiting. And I slept
on a cot in her apartment. Instead of eating at fancy banquets with the
president, we were drinking tea and eating ugali and sukumawiki,” or maize flour
and greens.
In making his personal connection, Mr. Obama then used it to gently push for
progress. He noted that his grandfather had served as a cook for the British
Army when Kenya was a colony, and that his father had gone to America to seek an
education.
“In many ways, their lives offered snapshots of Kenya’s history, but they also
told us something about future,” he said. “They show the enormous barriers to
progress that so many Kenyans faced just one or two generations ago.”
To continue that progress, he said, Kenya needs to confront “the dark corners”
of its past and wage a sustained campaign against corruption, expand its
democracy, overcome ethnic division, protect human rights and work to end
discrimination against women and girls.
“Kenya is at a crossroads,” he said, “a moment filled with peril but also
enormous promise.”
Even as he held forth, he delicately navigated the sensitivities of his Kenyan
hosts. He made the point that for democracy to thrive, “there also has to be
space for citizens to exercise their rights,” without suggesting that Kenya had
been closing that space or naming the human rights groups that have been
targeted. He did not note that the arena where he spoke is part of a sports
complex used just last year to round up Somalis for summary arrest and
deportation.
Instead, he acknowledged the United States’ own struggles, citing the recent
shootings of nine black churchgoers in Charleston, S.C., and the dispute over
flying the Confederate battle flag.
“What makes America exceptional is not the fact that we’re perfect,” he said.
“It’s the fact that we struggle to improve. We’re self-critical.”
Mr. Obama said Kenya’s future lay with itself. Repeating a message he espoused
during his first presidential trip to Africa in 2009, he emphasized that “the
future of Africa is up to Africans,” and that they should not look “to the
outside for salvation.” But he vowed that the United States would help.
“I’m here as a friend who wants Kenya to succeed,” he said.
By Sunday afternoon, as Mr. Obama arrived at the airport to head to his next
stop in Ethiopia, hundreds of people gathered to see him off, including several
groups of dancers in colorful outfits, ululating and banging drums. As he headed
from his helicopter to Air Force One, Mr. Obama paused as if tempted to go over
and greet them, as he does with crowds at almost any airport in the United
States and many overseas.
But evidently he thought better of it. He waved and smiled at them instead and
headed up the stairs of his plane to depart for the last time as president.
A version of this article appears in print on July 27, 2015, on page A4 of the
New York edition with the headline: Obama Delivers Tough-Love Message to End
Kenya Trip.
NAIROBI, Kenya — Shaking off the morning chill, they walked down
dirt pathways and past burning piles of trash. It would cost 10 shillings —
about a dime — to see the speech, but they wanted to see the man.
Inside a shack made of pressed tin sheets, the roof held up by tree trunks, they
gathered early Sunday morning to hear President Barack Hussein Obama on
television.
During Mr. Obama’s whirlwind visit to his father’s homeland, people around Kenya
often referred to him as “our son.” But what they heard Sunday was more like a
lecture from a stern but loving father.
And they could not have been happier. Even if they were at times skeptical on a
point in Mr. Obama’s speech, they said his message would be absorbed and, they
hoped, bring change.
“He is saying what we need to hear,” Simon Oudo said as he watched.
When Mr. Obama criticized the “cancer of corruption” that infects every corner
of life, Mr. Oudo, 25, nodded knowingly.
“I have no job,” he said. He scrapes by on the 50 shillings he earns for each
car he washes. In a good week, he can take home 1,000 shillings, or $10.
“There are many jobs,” Mr. Oudo said. “But many people buy those jobs. It is
corruption. It is killing us.”
Mr. Obama’s speech was directed to Kenyans, but it was likely to resonate in any
city or village on the continent, many facing the same struggles and challenges.
In Kibera, a rough and worn slum in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, it was the sense
of personal connection with Mr. Obama that made this moment different.
When the president spoke of his grandfather’s struggles working as a cook in the
British military, there was a hushed silence in the shack. Most of the men there
wore battered shoes, and their hands were worn from labor. They knew about
struggle.
“He was referred to as a boy even though he was a grown man,” Mr. Obama said of
his grandfather, adding, “A young, ambitious Kenyan today should not have to do
what my grandfather did, and serve a foreign master.”
They cheered.
“You don’t need to do what my father did, and leave your home in order to get a
good education and access to opportunity,” Mr. Obama said. “Because of Kenya’s
progress, because of your potential, you can build your future right here, right
now.”
They burst out in enthusiastic shouting.
Kibera is only a short walk from new office buildings and fancy restaurants, a
testament to Kenya’s growing prosperity.
When Mr. Obama came to Kenya in 2006 as a senator, he visited this area.
Mohamed Abdul Rahim Suleiman met him that day, and on Sunday, he wore two Obama
buttons on his chest as proof.
The words on one button — “Change. Courage. Hope.” — were also the words echoed
in the shack, grandly known as San Siro Stadium. It is usually filled with
people watching soccer. A chicken scurried across the floor as the headline on
the TV declared, “Obama’s Grand Return.”
To a person, the people watching the speech said they believed Mr. Obama’s
return would help their country.
“We all trust Obama,” said Solomon Mujivane, 49. “We are very proud of him. We
know he does not see tribe. When he speaks about corruption, our leaders will
listen.”
But even among this adoring crowd, there was some cynicism. At one point, a
group of men burst into laughter, shouting in Swahili, as Mr. Obama talked about
corruption.
“Corruption is everywhere,” Rashid Seif, 32, explained, pointing at another
young man. “Just ask that man.”
Apparently, he was taking a bit off the top of the entry fee for watching the
speech.
Mr. Obama’s call for better treatment of women — unlike descriptions of his
personal history and calls to end corruption — was met mostly with silence. He
got a laugh when he compared a society that limits its women to a team that does
not use half its players.
“That’s stupid,” Mr. Obama said.
But there was only one woman in the room.
Elizabeth Nakhungo, 36, sat quietly with a broad smile. When asked what she
thought about the president’s speech, her husband answered for her.
“She loved it,” he said.
The crowd was largely quiet as it listened to what at times felt like a sermon.
One young man leaned over to a friend as Mr. Obama discussed his own journey and
whispered, “Obama is really telling the whole story of all Kenyans.”
Mr. Oudo, the car washer, does not know what tomorrow will bring. He expects,
though, that it will be a struggle to pay for food. Life will be hard.
“But today, it is a beautiful day,” he said. “We thank this great man for coming
to Kenya.”
A version of this article appears in print on July 27, 2015, on
page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: Kenyans Nod Knowingly at a
President’s Critique.
NAIROBI, Kenya — The return of the long-lost son, as President
Obama is widely seen by Kenyans, had all the elements of a family reunion. They
hugged, they caught up, they talked about shared interests, they agreed they
should get together more often, and they had their sibling spats.
In his first visit as president to his father’s home country, Mr. Obama struck a
relentlessly upbeat tone, declaring, “Africa is on the move”; praising progress
toward democracy and economic growth; and marveling over the changes he saw on
the streets of this locked-down capital.
But he found himself at odds with his hosts on human rights and same-sex
marriage and gingerly tried to nudge them to change their ways. At a news
conference, he said the fight against terrorism in Kenya should not be used to
justify a crackdown on dissent and argued that no nation should discriminate
against gays and lesbians, comparing it to the era of segregation of
African-Americans.
“If somebody is a law-abiding citizen who is going about their business and
working in a job and obeying the traffic signs and doing all the other things
good citizens are supposed to do and not harming anybody, the idea that they are
going to be treated differently or abused because of who they love is wrong,”
Mr. Obama said. “Full stop.”
Standing to his left on the lush lawn of the colonial-era State House, President
Uhuru Kenyatta accepted the advice on human rights without argument, saying
Kenya was trying to improve its handling of security and liberty. “This issue of
terrorism is new to us,” he said, “and as it is new, we learn with each and
every step.”
But in a country where homosexuality is widely condemned, he flatly rejected Mr.
Obama’s views on gay rights. “There are some things we must admit we don’t
share; our culture, our society don’t accept,” he said. “It is very difficult
for us to be able to impose on people that which they themselves do not accept.”
The disagreement was quickly papered over, though, as both Mr. Obama and Kenyans
focused on the historic nature of his visit. While Mr. Obama came here three
times before taking office, many Kenyans had bristled that he waited until the
seventh year of his presidency to return.
He joked in public events that he had not wanted to make the rest of Africa
jealous by coming too soon, but expressed a strong connection to Kenya. “I’m
proud to be the first U.S. president to visit Kenya, and obviously, this is
personal for me,” he said at a business forum. “There’s a reason why my name is
Barack Hussein Obama. My father came from these parts and I have family and
relatives here. And in my visits over the years, walking the streets of Nairobi,
I’ve come to know the warmth and the spirit of the Kenyan people.”
He held out Kenya as a model in a fast-growing region. “Kenya is leading the
way,” Mr. Obama said. “When I was here in Nairobi 10 years ago, it looked very
different than it does today.”
He added, however, that the greatest threat to continued growth in Kenya is the
scourge of corruption, found here from the local police officer to the highest
politicians. Mr. Obama and Mr. Kenyatta released a 29-point plan for fighting
corruption in Kenya. They also signed an “action plan” to bolster Kenya’s
security in its fight against the Shabab, the Qaeda affiliate based in Somalia.
Mr. Obama could not get out of his armored car to wander the streets as in the
past. Instead, his most intimate encounter with Kenya beyond its official
leadership came during a dinner Friday at his hotel with three dozen members of
his extended family.
Over a buffet of Kenyan food, including chicken, fish and beef, the president
heard his relatives talk about life in Kenya, and he told them a little about
life in the White House. Some of them told Mr. Obama they wished he could spend
more time in Kenya, and with them. He later said he spent part of the meal
“begging for forgiveness” that his schedule did not allow it. “Once I’m a
private citizen, I will have more freedom to reconnect,” he said.
Said Obama, his uncle, said his relatives understood. “He explained to the
family members the nature of his work,” Said Obama said in an interview. “But he
said his mind is always with them, his heart is always here.”
The president generally has only remote connections to most relatives living
here. He is closest to his half sister, Auma Obama, who hosted him for his first
visit as a young man. Also present on Friday night was his step-grandmother,
known as Mama Sarah but whom he calls Granny.
His Kenyan relatives have not been regular visitors to the White House. The only
Obamas who show up in publicly released White House visitor logs are Said Obama
and Sarah Obama, an aunt, who have visited just once in more than six years, and
the president’s half brother Abongo, also known as Roy, who has visited three
times.
Indeed, the president acknowledged that some at dinner here on Friday were
strangers. “In these extended families, there are cousins and uncles and aunties
that show up that you didn’t know existed but you’re always happy to meet,” the
president said with a laugh. “And there were lengthy explanations in some cases
of the connections. But it was a wonderful time.”
Mr. Obama had a long day of activities. He addressed the sixth annual Global
Entrepreneurship Summit meeting, laid a wreath at a memorial to the victims of
the 1998 bombing of the United States Embassy here and attended a state dinner
in the evening, where he was serenaded in English and Swahili by a group that
sang a song called “Coming Home.” In his toast, Mr. Obama joked that critics
back home no doubt believed he had come “to look for my birth certificate,”
adding, “That is not the case.”
He made no mention of Mr. Kenyatta’s indictment for crimes against humanity. Mr.
Kenyatta and his deputy, William Ruto, were charged in the International
Criminal Court with instigating violence after disputed 2007 elections that
killed more than 1,000. The case against Mr. Kenyatta was dropped in December,
but the charges stand against Mr. Ruto, who met with Mr. Obama.
Mr. Obama referred obliquely to that violence but praised a revised constitution
adopted afterward, and said the subsequent election in 2013 that elevated Mr.
Kenyatta and Mr. Ruto “showed growth in the election process.”
He defended his Power Africa initiative, a multibillion-dollar effort announced
two years ago that has produced little electricity for a power-starved
continent. “I would just point out that if you wanted to start a power plant in
the United States, it doesn’t take a year to get that done,” he said.
Rejecting comparisons to President George W. Bush, whose efforts to curb AIDS
and malaria in Africa are warmly remembered, he said, “This isn’t a beauty
contest between presidents.”
The excitement at his visit was palpable from the gated homes with manicured
lawns in grand old wealthy neighborhoods like Muthaiga and Karen to the slums of
Kibera, where sewage runs in the street and families live in mud and tin shacks.
“Obama is a source of inspiration to many,” said Babu Owino, president of the
Kenya University Students Organization. “The students here love him so much.
They are die-hard fans. When they look at his background, he’s someone they are
able to identify with.”
So much so that before the visit, Mr. Owino wrote to the American ambassador
here claiming at least 17 students had threatened to commit suicide if Mr. Obama
did not visit the University of Nairobi. (The president did not, but no suicides
were reported.)
Mr. Obama transcended the tribal differences that have divided society. Mr.
Obama’s family is Luo while Mr. Kenyatta and his ruling elite are Kikuyu. But
Solomon Wekesa, 31, a security guard who himself is Luya, said it did not matter
to most Kenyans.
“In Obama, they see a man who does not see tribe, a man who is an open man,” he
said. “He sees Kenya as one nation.”
Others hoped the visit would bring change. “I want Obama to push for reforms in
Kenya’s fight against corruption to enable the poor access to a better
livelihood,” said Nancy Ayako, 21, who lives in the Kibera slum settlement.
“There are so many young people who have been marginalized, like slum dwellers.”
But expectations may have surpassed reality. For Rogers Mogaka, a community
organizer, Mr. Obama’s visit came too late. “Why now?” he asked. “Look, he is
not coming here to meet with the common man on the street.”
He added, “There are a number of issues that we think need to be addressed that
affect the common man in Kenya.”
Reuben Kyama contributed reporting.
A version of this article appears in print on July 26, 2015, on page A13 of the
New York edition with the headline: An Upbeat Tone Mixes With Notes of Discord
as Obama Visits Kenya.
The final deal with Iran announced by the United States and other
major world powers does what no amount of political posturing and vague threats
of military action had managed to do before. It puts strong, verifiable limits
on Iran’s ability to develop a nuclear weapon for at least the next 10 to 15
years and is potentially one of the most consequential accords in recent
diplomatic history, with the ability not just to keep Iran from obtaining a
nuclear weapon but also to reshape Middle East politics.
The deal, the product of 20 arduous months of negotiations, would obviously have
provided more cause for celebration if Iran had agreed to completely dismantle
all of its nuclear facilities. But the chances of that happening were
effectively zero, and even if all of Iran’s nuclear-related buildings and
installations were destroyed, no one can erase the knowledge Iranian scientists
have acquired after working on nuclear projects for decades.
As described by Mr. Obama and other officials, the deal seems sound and clearly
in the interest of the United States, the other nations that drafted it and the
state of Israel. In return for a phased lifting of international economic
sanctions, Iran will reduce by 98 percent its stockpile of low-enriched uranium,
which can be processed further into bomb-grade fuel, and reduce the number of
operating centrifuges used to enrich that fuel by two-thirds, to 5,060. These
limits mean that if Iran ever decides to violate the agreement and make a dash
for a nuclear bomb, it will take a year to produce the weapons-grade fuel needed
for a single bomb, compared with a couple of months now.
Many of the various restrictions in the agreement will be in force for 10 to 25
years. Some, notably Iran’s agreement to constant and technologically advanced
monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency, will last indefinitely, as
will its commitment under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to never produce a
nuclear weapon. Inspectors will have access to suspicious sites “where
necessary, when necessary,” President Obama said, and if Iran cheats, that will
be detected early enough to respond, including by quickly reimposing sanctions
or taking military action.
The deal nearly faltered on a demand by Iran and Russia that United Nations bans
on the purchase and sale of conventional weapons and ballistic missiles be
lifted immediately. But in the end, the accord requires that the conventional
weapons ban remain in place for five years and the missile ban for eight years —
assuming Iran abides by its commitments.
It is deeply unsettling that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel
derisively dismissed the deal immediately as a “historic mistake.” He,
Republicans in Congress and most candidates for the Republican presidential
nomination have opposed negotiations with Iran from the outset yet offered no
credible alternative to a negotiated settlement. The Republican presidential
hopefuls repeated that formula today — condemnation of the deal with no credible
alternative to offer.
That said, no one should have any illusions about Iran, which considers Israel a
sworn enemy; often condemns the United States; supports Hezbollah and other
terrorist organizations; and aspires to greater influence in the region. Once
sanctions are lifted, it stands to gain access to billions of dollars from
accounts in international banks that have been frozen and from new oil exports
and other business deals.
American officials say that Iran will get that money over time, and that its
immediate priority will be to deal with pressing domestic needs. More important,
many American sanctions will remain in place even after the deal is implemented,
including those relating to Iran’s support for terrorism and its human rights
violations. The United States has to be extremely vigilant in monitoring how
Iran uses those new funds and in enforcing those sanctions.
Agreeing on the nuclear deal is just the first step. Congress gets to review and
vote on it. Powerful forces, like Mr. Netanyahu, have vowed to defeat it, and
Mr. Obama may have to make good on his vow to veto any resolution of
disapproval. It would be irresponsible to squander this chance to rein in Iran’s
nuclear program.
A version of this editorial appears in print on July 15, 2015, on page A26 of
the New York edition with the headline: The Best Chance to Rein In Iran.
BEIRUT, Lebanon — Prince Saud al-Faisal, the urbane diplomat who
used quiet diplomacy to maintain Saudi Arabia’s regional influence and alliance
with the United States during his four decades as foreign minister, died on
Thursday, according to Saudi officials and state news media. He was 75.
Before his retirement in April, Prince Saud was the world’s longest-serving
foreign minister and helped shape the kingdom’s responses to monumental changes
in the Middle East.
During his tenure, he dealt with a civil war in Lebanon, whose end he helped
mediate; the Palestinian uprisings against Israel in 1987 and 2000; the Sept.
11, 2001, attacks on New York and the Pentagon; the American invasion of Iraq in
2003; and the Arab uprisings of 2011.
He used a combination of oil wealth, religious influence and close relationships
with world leaders as leverage for diplomacy that was most often done far from
the public eye.
Continue reading the main story
Related Coverage
From left, the new Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Nayef, with Prince Muqrin
bin Abdulaziz and King Salman in January.
A Saudi Royal Shake-Up With a Goal of StabilityAPRIL 29, 2015
“It was traditional, state diplomacy that was conservative, quiet and logical,”
said Abdullah al-Shammari, a Saudi political analyst in Riyadh, the capital, and
a former diplomat. “He did not take hasty or emotional positions.”
The length of Prince Saud’s tenure and his role inside the royal family made him
an essential player in the reigns of four Saudi kings and an interlocutor for
seven American presidents.
As fluent in English as he was in Arabic and as comfortable in a suit and tie as
in a traditional Saudi robe, he was for much of his career a familiar face in
Washington and other capitals.
Ford M. Fraker, the United States ambassador to Saudi Arabia from 2007 to 2009,
said he often told his bosses in Washington that Prince Saud was among three
Saudi officials who could quickly get things done. The others were King Abdullah
and Adel al-Jubeir, the Saudi ambassador to Washington, who succeeded Prince
Saud as foreign minister.
“Saud was in the middle of it all,” Mr. Fraker said. “There was not a single
foreign policy decision that he was not involved in.”
While many Saudis praised Prince Saud as an international representative of the
kingdom and its policies, he often called his failure to help the Palestinians
achieve an independent state his greatest regret.
“We have not yet seen moments of joy in all that time,” he said, looking back on
his career in an interview with The New York Times in 2009. “We have seen only
moments of crisis; we have seen only moments of conflict, and how can you have
any pleasure in anything that happens when you have people like the Palestinians
living as they are?”
Prince Saud al-Faisal bin Abdulaziz Al Saud was born in the Saudi city of Taef
in 1940, the third son of the Saudi foreign minister, Prince Faisal, who became
king in 1964, while continuing to serve was foreign minister.
He was educated at the Hun School of Princeton and then at Princeton University,
where Mr. Fraker recalled seeing him on the soccer field. Years later, the
prince would recall struggling with his studies and wanting to drop out, Mr.
Fraker said.
But his rise was swift. He returned to Saudi Arabia after graduating with a
degree in economics and worked in the Saudi Oil Ministry before replacing his
father as foreign minister after his father’s assassination in 1975.
That year, a civil war that would shake Lebanon for 15 years began, and Prince
Saud became one of the mediators who helped bring about an accord that ended
hostilities in 1990.
While he maintained close ties with Washington, the kingdom’s relationship with
the United States was not always smooth. Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 lead
to the deployment of American troops on Saudi soil, a move that caused
consternation among the Saudi public and in much of the Arab world.
American support for Israel raised tensions, especially during the two
Palestinian uprisings against Israel in 1987 and 2000.
The 9/11 attacks also strained ties with the United States, especially after it
was determined that 15 of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia.
Those attacks prompted new scrutiny of Saudi Arabia’s ultraconservative
religious doctrines and of the monarchy’s support for the military campaign
against the Soviets in Afghanistan during the 1980s. Many Saudi citizens
traveled to Afghanistan at that time to wage “jihad,” often with the support of
the Saudi government. Some of those fighters later joined Osama bin Laden, also
a Saudi, to form Al Qaeda.
Robert W. Jordan, the United States ambassador to Riyadh from 2002 to 2003,
credited Prince Saud with realizing the danger that Al Qaeda posed and working
to sustain American-Saudi ties.
“He helped maintain the relationship with the U.S. after 9/11 when it could have
gone completely south,” Mr. Jordan said. “He had the patience and the
perseverance to make sure that both sides understood that this relationship had
existed for many decades and had many common interests.”
But a new strain developed with the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, leaving
Saudi Arabia to face the fall of a Sunni Arab leader there and a greater role
for Iran, the kingdom’s Shiite rival, in Baghdad.
Prince Saud became a fixture of international and regional diplomacy, whether at
Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, the Arab League or the Gulf Cooperation
Council. Those who worked with him recall his sharp intellect and his propensity
for charming guests and journalists with jokes.
Foreign diplomats and analysts have contended that Prince Saud’s domination of
the Saudi Foreign Ministry hampered its professionalization and prevented the
development of other capable diplomats.
His health had begun to fail in recent years, and he spent long periods of time
in the United States for medical treatment.
During that time, the regional order that he had long been a part of started to
crumble. Saudi Arabia scrambled to deal with the Arab Spring uprisings, toppling
some of its longtime allies. And wars now rage in Syria, Iraq, Libya and Yemen,
while the jihadists of the Islamic State have founded a self-declared caliphate
and carried out suicide attacks abroad, including inside Saudi Arabia.
Many Saudis described Prince Saud’s passing as the end of an era, and some have
expressed concern about the kingdom’s new, more assertive posture, typified by
the bombing campaign it is leading against the Houthi rebels in Yemen.
Prince Saud is survived by three sons and three daughters, all from the same
wife, said Joseph Kechichian, a senior fellow at the King Faisal Center for
Research and Islamic Studies in Riyadh.
A version of this article appears in print on July 10, 2015, on page A14 of the
New York edition with the headline: Saud al-Faisal, 75, Quiet Force in Middle
East, Dies.
