If anybody has officially claimed responsibility for tonight’s terror attacks in Paris, that hasn’t been widely disseminated yet. ISIS-related social media accounts are reportedly celebrating the attacks, but that’s not the same as claiming responsibility. When Wilayat Sinai (allegedly) brought down that Russian airliner a couple of weeks ago, they claimed responsibility for it pretty quickly. Now, ISIS doesn’t always claim responsibility for attacks that it’s probably carried out — the Suruç and Ankara bombings in Turkey haven’t been claimed even though it’s likely that ISIS was behind both — but that’s because it’s actually in ISIS’s interest to leave responsibility for those bombings ambiguous, to allow for the possibility that, say, the PKK was behind those attacks, because ISIS wins when Turkish society falls apart along ethnic lines. Terrorist groups often don’t claim responsibility for their acts, especially when there’s something to be gained from ambiguity. This, however, seems more like the kind of attack that they’d want to claim; it’s high-profile, impressively orchestrated, a serious strike on a major Western city. But they haven’t claimed it — not yet, at least.
One ominous possible reason why they haven’t claimed credit is because the attack isn’t over yet. The Mumbai attack in 2008 took place over four days. French police are saying that all the attackers are dead, either killed by police or by their own suicide bombs, but it seems incredibly early to say that with any degree of certainty. Some attackers could have slipped away in the chaos. There could be more attackers, who weren’t involved tonight, lined up to launch more attacks after these. Hopefully this isn’t true, but it’s something that French authorities are undoubtedly keeping in mind.
I feel like I might have been too heavy-handed in discounting the possibility that ISIS was behind these attacks in my last post. They, either directly or via some very sophisticated group of fans (which seems much less likely), could well have perpetrated this operation, but it would represent a significant leap in their tactics, so in my opinion it makes sense to consider some other possibilities. Obviously such a leap isn’t out of the question; I doubt anybody thought that Lashkar-e-Taiba could pull off something like Mumbai, until they did, and it’s the same thing with ISIS or any other terror group. Nobody thought al-Qaeda could pull of anything like the 9/11 attacks, until they did. Certainly ISIS has been able to orchestrate attacks like this on the battlefield in Syria and Iraq, so the question is whether they have figured out how to export that kind of attack to a European country.
There are reports that witnesses said one of the gunmen in the Bataclan Theater attack shouted “This is for Syria!” as he was shooting. If those reports are accurate, that suggests…well, that it could be anybody who’s fighting in Syria, which includes ISIS, al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, etc. The choice of Bataclan, where an American band was playing tonight and you could reasonably have expected to find some Americans in the audience, might be an interesting detail, but then again it might be a total coincidence; it’s just too early to say.
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