The War on Terror Escalates A murder spree in Paris shows the West needs a new antiterror offensive.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-war-on-terror-escalates-1447459989
The international campaign to degrade and defeat the Islamic State (ISIS) in Iraq and Syria is showing its first signs of real life in nearly a year. And not a moment too soon. As we went to press Friday night, a wave of shooting and bombing attacks in the streets of Paris was another grim reminder that what used to be called the war on terror is escalating—and still global.
On Friday the Pentagon reported that it was “reasonably certain” it had killed Mohammed Emwazi, the ISIS executioner better known as Jihadi John, in an airstrike in eastern Syria. Among Emwazi’s many victims were American journalists Steve Sotloff and James Foley, Japanese reporters Haruna Yukawa and Kenji Goto, and British aid workers David Haines and Alan Henning.
If confirmed, Emwazi’s death will deprive ISIS of its most notorious spokesman and puncture jihadi illusions that their Mideast strongholds are immune to U.S. reprisals. It also comes on the heels of ISIS’s loss of the Iraqi city of Sinjar after an assault by Kurdish Peshmerga fighters supported by U.S. air power. The Yazidi city had been mostly empty of inhabitants after ISIS massacred some 2,000 of its people, causing a mass exodus. Retaking the city will help Kurds sever the links between the ISIS strongholds of Raqqa in eastern Syria and Mosul in northern Iraq.
No less important is that the U.S. is finally stepping up its air campaign against ISIS’s strategic assets in Syria after an October lull. We can’t say if President Obama is cribbing foreign-policy ideas from presidential contender Ben Carson, who recommended going after ISIS-controlled oil fields in Iraq and Syria at Tuesday’s GOP debate. But American planes are at last taking aim at the commodity that provides ISIS with an estimated $500 million a year in revenue.
All of this is progress, and will be more so if Iraq’s military succeeds in what appears to be an imminent offensive to retake the city of Ramadi in Iraq’s Anbar province. Mr. Carson was right again Tuesday when he said the key to defeating ISIS is to “make them look like losers”—that is, to inflict strategic blows that also have a psychological effect on would-be converts to ISIS’s cause. That task becomes all the more important as ISIS extends its reach from Afghanistan to Sinai to West Africa.
And, perhaps, to Paris. Though care is always needed in attributing responsibility for terrorist attacks, witnesses quoted on French TV report hearing shouts of Allahu Akbar along with gunfire. At least 39 people are reported dead outside restaurants, hostages were being held in a concert hall, and explosions were heard at the Stade de France soccer stadium, where French President François Hollande was in attendance. Mr. Hollande declared a state of emergency and closed the nation’s borders.
This is the second time this year that Paris has been under siege, following the January attacks on the editorial offices of Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish supermarket. Mr. Hollande has been a vigorous and courageous European leader in battling Islamic terror, sending French troops to the African country of Mali in 2013 to stop an al Qaeda offensive and French jets to hit ISIS targets in the Middle East.
That may be one reason France is now a target, but there can be no backing down from this fight. As January’s attack on Charlie Hebdo showed, what’s ultimately at stake isn’t French policy. It’s France’s freedom—and ours. What the West needs, in Washington and in Europe, is a resurgence of the will to fight an Islamist enemy that knows no restraint. All the more reason to accelerate the destruction of Islamic State’s caliphate before its murderers kill more innocents around the world.
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