RUTHFULLY YOURS

PARIS—Heavy gunfire rang out in a suburb north of the city through the morning Wednesday as French police laid siege to an apartment with terror suspects inside, potentially including the presumed mastermind of the deadly Paris attacks.

A woman blew herself up at the start of a dawn raid in Saint-Denis, close to the national soccer stadium that was targeted in Friday night’s attacks, and police said another terror suspect was killed.
What We Know About the Paris Attack PerpetratorsFrench authorities have named some of the perpetrators of the Nov. 13 attacks in Paris. Officials believe the assailants carried out the atrocities on behalf of Islamic State. Here’s what we know so far.

The government said at about noon that the siege had ended.

The Paris prosecutor’s office said investigators raided the apartment acting on suspicion that Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a Belgian-born senior Islamic State operative may have been there.
French Police Raid Saint-Denis Suburb in Paris
Gunfire was heard intermittently in the area beginning at about 4:30 a.m. local time.

SAMU members and French police participate in a raid in Saint-Denis. Etienne Laurent/European Pressphoto Agency
Hooded police officers walked on a street in Saint-Denis Wednesday. A woman wearing an explosive suicide vest blew herself up as heavily armed police tried to storm a suburban …
French special police forces secured the area as shots were exchanged in Saint-Denis early Wednesday, during an operation to catch suspects related to Friday night’s deadly attacks in the French capital. Christian Hartmann/Reuters

Leon Aron is the director of Russian studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
As Russia deepens its involvement in Syria, it risks more than a military quagmire. Its intervention exacerbates a growing domestic threat, one that could destabilize the whole country. A new brand of radical Islam is rising in Russia, fueled by Russian fighters eager to perpetrate acts of terror at home.

Even a decade ago, the scope and depth of this emerging terrorist network would have seemed inconceivable. While Russia has suffered its share of domestic terrorism, those crimes were largely perpetrated by Chechen fighters based in the North Caucasus region. When Moscow declared victory in Chechnya in 2009, it suggested that the threat of radical violence had been largely contained.

But militant Islam didn’t disappear. In fact, the fundamentalist teachings have spread from Chechnya throughout central Russia. They’re propagated by Russian imams trained in the Middle East and are finding new audiences among the country’s native Muslims, as well as Central Asian migrants in Moscow. Even some younger and seemingly long-assimilated believers are becoming radicalized. Like their counterparts across Europe, they’re turning to Internet videos and social-media messages aimed at arousing anger at Western “crusaders.”

This is a real danger for Russia. The country has become a new front in the war against militant Islam, a battle that Europe’s largest Muslim country is largely unprepared to fight.

Russia is no stranger to Muslim radicalism. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Chechen independence movement became more militant, propelled by a growing belief in Islamic fundamentalism.

Moscow responded harshly. In 1999, newly appointed Prime Minister Vladi­mir Putin launched a scorched-earth campaign that made the Chechen capital, Grozny, look like the ruins of Stalingrad. Chechen fighters struck back, often with spectacularly gruesome terrorist attacks, such as the 2002 seizure of a Moscow theater and the 2004 attack on an elementary school in North Ossetia. But this didn’t derail Moscow. After a decade of brutal fighting (accompanied, often, by massive human rights violations), the Kremlin ended the antiterrorist operation in 2009.

Islamic fanatics struck another blow for cynicism last Friday night in Paris — wholesale and gratuitous slaughter in the name of their sanguinary Muslim god. History teaches few lessons these days.

We say “Muslim god” because most other religions forsook ritual religious slaughter centuries ago. Indeed, the nearest historical comparison is actually political. Before contemporary jihad, the Nazis were the last imperial movement to use industrial scale pogroms to underwrite an ideological message. Ironically, the EU now opens its borders to religious fascism more virulent than the political strain that led to the Holocaust and associated carnage of WWII. Angela Merkel does the ironic walk of shame here.

Alas, any distinction between politics and religion in a Muslim context is now moot. Politics are mostly religious in the Ummah and dystopic religion seems to be the only relevant politics permissible in much of the Muslim world.

Iranian military commanders, security chiefs and conservative media outlets are coming close to questioning the competence and loyalty of those in the Iranian regime who favor the JCPOA.

The surreal irony, of course, is that President Obama keeps assuring the world — as recently as last week again, when he met with Israel’s PM Benjamin Netanyahu — that he is “preventing” Iran from getting nuclear weapons, while the truth is that his “deal” — if the Iranians ever sign it — not only green-lights Iran’s nuclear program, but in fact finances it.

Iran’s hardliners are pressing their attack on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which has not yet been approved by Iran. Iran’s opponents of the JCPOA have succeeded in halting any steps toward implementation of Tehran’s responsibilities under the July14 settlement reached in Vienna by the five permanent members of the UN Security Council — the US, the UK, France, China and Russia, plus Germany (the so-called P5+1). But who appointed them?

While some reports indicated that Iran was beginning to take off the production line some of the uranium-enrichment centrifuges in the Natanz and Fordow facilities, contradictory reports suggested that any such action was halted due to pressure from Iran’s hardliners, and that dismantling the centrifuges had not been authorized by Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and was therefore premature. Another report suggested that only a small number of outdated centrifuges had been decommissioned.