RUTHFULLY YOURS

By David Gauthier-Villars and Stacy Meichtry in Paris and Matt Bradley in Beirut

PARIS—In targeting Abdelhamid Abaaoud in a raid, French authorities aimed to remove from Islamic State’s ranks a prominent figure who they said blended his battlefield experience in Syria with a network of associates in Europe to mastermind one of the bloodiest terror attacks in French history.

In Syria, the Belgian was a military commander, or “emir of war,” in eastern Deir Ezzour province, according to local activists and news reports, an unusually high rank for a fighter who hailed from Europe. Friends from his early life in Brussels, in the predominantly Muslim district of Molenbeek, recall a “nice guy” who played soccer.

In Paris, officials say the 28-year-old militant assembled a potent arsenal that he planned to deploy against multiple additional targets—including Paris’ La Defense business district—following the attacks that investigators say he coordinated against a stadium, concert hall and other locales, killing 129 people.
A look at the 27-year-old Belgian citizen suspected by French authorities of having a role in the Paris terror attacks, and who they also believe masterminded failed attacks on a high-speed train and a church. Mark Kelly reports.

Its strength was on full display Wednesday in an hourslong resistance to a raid in search of him in the northern Paris suburb of Saint-Denis. French police late Wednesday were working to establish if Mr. Abaaoud was among those killed in the action.

If Kurds left their homes, they would be shot. If they stayed in their homes, they would be bombed.

In 1990s, the Turkish military used to burn down Kurdish villages; today they burn down Kurdish towns.

This month, three neighborhoods in the Kurdish city of Silvan in Diyarbakir Province — Tekel, Konak and Mescit — were put under military curfew and then attacked from November 3 to November 14. Telephone lines, water, and electricity were cut.

The neighborhoods, besieged by armored police vehicles, were then bombarded by tanks and artillery shooting from the hills. Many houses were hit by bullets and bombs; some houses were burned. [1]

Representatives of the governor’s office in Diyarbakir claimed that the military operations aimed to “remove the ditches and barricades” set up by some Kurdish youths, but reports coming from the town showed that the operation actually seemed to aim at ethnically cleansing the town from its indigenous population for more than two thousand years, the Kurds. [2]

“We cannot get information from those neighborhoods in any way.” Firat Anli, the co-mayor of Diyarbakir, told Firat News Agency (ANF). “We cannot send in any food or humanitarian aid. Dialysis patients, children, the elderly… We have no information about their situation. They have been disconnected from the rest of the world.”

Edip Erk, a former deputy of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party, HDP, told the Bianet News agency:

“Three HDP deputies have been in those neighborhoods. They say there are many wounded. Even martial law permits the wounded to be taken to hospitals but in Silvan they [Turkish officials] are not allowing that.

“The public institutions in those neighborhoods, such as the health care center, are closed. There is a huge food shortage. We have informed the authorities that we would like to send in a truck with but we have not yet received their response. So the truck is still waiting.

“The chief of police of the city told us he is not administering the operation. The Ministry is. It is a military operation. Here, it used to be like an open prison; now it is an open torture center.”[3]

The EU alleges that the “Interpretive Notice” has nothing to do with a boycott of Israel, and the U.S. has officially concurred in that assessment. The EU says the Interpretive Notice merely responds to “a demand for clarity from consumers, economic operators and national authorities.” But this is disingenuous.

There is a long list of separatist movements in the EU, some demanding independence, others demanding greater autonomy. It is easy to imagine that some Jews in Israel have corresponding sympathies with such movements and “demands for clarity” about the products of the respective European states. Surely some Israeli Jews would like to buy Scotch Whisky only from the few firms that are still in Scottish hands. How can Israelis’ right to know fairly be denied? Israel is entitled to request that Europeans label their products accordingly.

What has happened is another manifestation of the infuriating zeal of the European Commission to issue endless directives to all member states in order to impose uniformity in cases where most Europeans never imagined that uniformity was necessary,

On November 11, 2015, the Commission of the European Union (EU) issued the “final” version of its “Interpretative Notice on indication of origin of goods from the territories occupied by Israel since June 1967” (which can be read here and here). It recommends the labeling of all such goods as originating in an “Israeli settlement.” The decision aroused dismay and anger not just in the parties constituting the current Israeli government but also in most of the parliamentary opposition in the Knesset.

If Mikhail Bulgakov had come back to life and written a Levantine sequel to The Master and Margarita, he could not have devised a scenario more lurid than what we now observe in Syria. Russian President Vladimir Putin is now the leader of the Free World against Islamist terrorism, directing the efforts of France and Germany and setting terms for American involvement. Reeling from last week’s massacre in Paris, France lacks both the backbone and the brute force to avenge itself against ISIS, but in alliance with Russia it will make a more than symbolic contribution.

In 2008 I endorsed Putin for the American presidency, in jest, of course. Now he is leading America’s president by the nose and directing the anti-terror efforts of France and Germany. No-one could have anticipated Putin’s sudden ascent to global leadership during the past several weeks. Russia is in the position of a a vulture fund, buying the distressed assets of the Western alliance for pennies on the dollar. Faced with an American president who will not fight, and his European allies whose military capacity has shrunk to near insignificance, the Russian Federation seized the helm with the deployment of a mere three dozen war planes and an expeditionary force of 5,000 men. One searches in vain through diplomatic history to find another case where so much was done with so little. As an American, I feel a deep humiliation at this turn of events, assuaged only slightly by Schadenfreude at the even deeper humiliation of America’s foreign policy establishment.

The jihad is raging in Paris. President Hollande repeatedly declares that France is at war, and press reporting has highlighted the French military’s combat operations against ISIS in Syria. But what the French are most worried about — and what the Obama-friendly media are happy to gloss over while the president is pushing to import thousands of Middle Eastern Muslims into our country — is fifth-column activity, meaning French Islamists supportive of violent jihadists.

Early Wednesday morning, French police conducted a raid in Saint-Denis, on the northern edge of Paris, where operatives of the jihadist enemy were holed up in an apartment. In the ensuing shootout involving several jihadists, Kalashnikovs were fired at police who stormed the hideaway. A woman detonated an explosive suicide vest. Several police were wounded; the woman and a male terrorist were killed.

Turkish supporters attending an international football friendly against Greece on Nov. 17 refused to participate in a minute of silence following the recent jihadist attacks on France, choosing instead to boo the commemoration.

A section of the crowd at Fatih Terim Stadium in Istanbul’s Başakşehir district had first whistled during the playing of the Greek national anthem, prompting Turkish star Arda Turan to remonstrate with the crowd. Arda’s intervention, however, failed to stop the booing.

During the subsequent moment of silence, supporters also whistled their disapproval while a section of the crowed also reportedly shouted “Allah-u Akbar” and “Martyrs don’t die, the homeland will not be divided” – a common nationalist slogan.

French President Francois Hollande today promised that “France will remain a country of freedom,” defending his decision to honor a commitment to accept migrants and refugees despite Friday’s deadly terrorist attacks in Paris.

“Life should resume fully,” Hollande told a gathering of the country’s mayors, who gave him a standing ovation. “What would France be without its museums, without its terraces, its concerts, its sports competitions?

“France should remain as it is. Our duty is to carry on our lives.”

In the same spirit, he added, “30,000 refugees will be welcomed over the next two years. Our country has the duty to respect this commitment,” explaining that they will undergo vigorous security checks.

Hollande noted that “some people say the tragic events of the last few days have sown doubts in their minds,” but called it a “humanitarian duty” to help those people … but one that will go hand in hand with “our duty to protect our people.”

“We have to reinforce our borders while remaining true to our values,” he said.

It is like the death of a loved one. The death of our city that we love despite its failings, misdeeds, and particular misbehavior that I have been chronicling over the past fifteen years. A city is more than its current events. And today the heart of our city is broken. We do not have the fibre of Israelis who live with miraculous vitality in a permanent state of war & peace, but Parisians are not entirely devoid of courage and sharp instincts in the face of utmost danger. Anecdotes and eyewitness testimony are slowly emerging. The hard facts are at a minimum.

A soft spoken young man in an elegant overcoat describes the scene at the café on Rue de Charonne. He was present, he saw people picked off like sitting ducks. “They didn’t have a chance.” And yet he himself cannot believe what he saw. The Public Prosecutor delivers official information in an appropriately neutral tone. A hundred shell casings are left at each of the cafés attacked. No one was spared. Those who are not dead are in desperate condition.

Al Gore was a few hours into his 24-hour global warming telethon in Paris, designed to fire up the faithful for the coming climate change conference in Paris in December, when ISIS mass murderers chose that evening to massacre as many innocents as they could find in the city. Gore’s global warming faithful are a large club at this point, attracting all who think the planet faces one primary threat — an apocalyptic overheated future in the next few decades if too much carbon is burned. After all, if one looks at the doctored temperature records, one might think the world has warmed by 0.8 degrees centigrade since the Industrial Revolution began 165 years ago. The “climate change is very scary” club includes Democratic presidential candidates among its ranks, as well as U.S. President Barack Obama. Gore, a former presidential candidate himself, is, of course, the author of “An Inconvenient Truth,” in which he laid out the climate problem as he understood it. The timing of the attacks in Paris was inconvenient for Gore’s broadcast, but also for the climate change army headed to Paris in two weeks, who wanted no distraction from their single minded focus on their issue. International media outlets expected to make Paris and climate change the association that stuck with their audiences, but now it will be Paris and Islamic terror.

Environmentalists have warned of future climate refugees, forced to leave their coastal homes soon to be overrun by rising seas and travel to new lands to find new homes. However, to add one more inconvenient truth, refugees are already on their way, in the millions, and not due to climate change, but rather due to wars in the Islamic world which have driven them out, and the compassionate instincts of many Europeans, who encourage them to migrate in, signaling they will be welcomed and supported by their new societies.

Five days before ISIS terrorists struck in Paris, I warned that ISIS operatives and war criminals were entering Europe disguised as asylum seekers. I quoted Salem Kurdi, who said in an interview with the Dutch TV news program EenVandaag that there are “war criminals and members of militias, Assad warriors as well as ISIS jihadists who apply for asylum in Europe.”

There are now very strong indications that one of the Paris attackers entered Europe as an asylum seeker. Suicide bomber Ahmed Almohammad, who blew himself up near the football stadium “Stade de France,” entered the small Greek island of Leros on October 3, 2015 – on a raft together with 198 refugees. He was accompanied by Mohammed Almuhmed, another man suspected of terrorist links, the Paris newspaper Le Figaro and Forocoches, a Spanish source, reported. Ahmed’s (forged?) Syrian passport was found near the place where he blew himself up on November 13.

The distance from Leros to Turkey is only seven miles. It was on October 7, that Ahmed Almohammad arrived in Serbia, one day later he was in Croatia, and from Croatia he traveled to Hungary and Austria and finally arrived in France where he joined the other ISIS terrorists who struck in Paris on November 13, on a Friday evening, that is. Le Figaro quotes Bavaria’s Finance Minister Markus Söder from the Christian Social Union (CSU) who said: “Not all refugees are terrorists from ISIS. But it is naive to believe that there is not one fighter among the refugees.”