RUTHFULLY YOURS

After announcing that Germany would not place limits on the number of asylum-seekers it accepts, German Chancellor Angela Merkel is now considering a quota system. The turnaround wasn’t her choice.

In early September, German Chancellor Angela Merkel issued an order to bring thousands of refugees who were stranded in Hungary to Germany. Germany’s basic right to asylum has no upper limits, she said.

It was a moment of unaccustomed conviction from a chancellor who had become notorious for her ability to avoid making decisions until the last possible moment. But she went even further. She equated the refugee issue with other significant turning points in the history of her party, the center-right Christian Democrats (CDU). Issues such as West Germany’s integration into Western alliances and Kohl’s commitment to keeping nuclear weapons stationed in West Germany in the 1980s. It was as though she were elevating her refugee policy into the pantheon of Christian Democratic basic principles.

And she didn’t even bother to inform the CDU’s Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), before doing so.

Now, though, Merkel is in the process of preparing a reversal of her refugee policy. At the G-20 summit in Antalya, Turkey at the beginning of the week, she spoke of quotas — fixed numbers of refugees that Europe is willing to accept. On the one hand, of course, introduction the idea of quotas is a concession to reality, because the chancellor knows that the ongoing arrival to Germany of up to 10,000 refugees every day is not sustainable.

Analysts falsely believed Islamic State was too weak to carry out terror attacks abroad. But IS views terror as a means to an end — and will launch attacks as long as they continue to serve its broader strategy.

“It was a terrible night. We heard the roar of the jets, the detonations. Then, the power suddenly went out and everything sunk into darkness,” the young woman on the phone says. She said that she could only see the flashes from the explosions, with one bomb landing right near where she was. “But I don’t want to die after all that we have already gone through here.”

The woman is from Raqqa, where Islamic State has its headquarters in Syria. She lives there together with her parents and brothers. Still. As do so many other civilians. On the phone, she was describing the first wave of attacks in the “war” that French President François Hollande declared against Islamic State following the attacks in Paris. The bombs dropped by French fighter jets hit both used and abandoned IS bases, the former army camp of Bashar Assad’s Division 17, the polyclinic, the horse racetrack and a main power cable. The woman’s brother is a taxi driver, and he witnessed numerous injured fighters being brought to the hospital, which had been closed to civilians.

Still, the raid isn’t likely to have hit any Islamic State leaders. The air strikes over the weekend were apparently an attempt to kill Abdelhamid Abaaoud, who is thought to have been a key figure behind the Paris attacks and who the French initially thought might be in Raqqa. He was ultimately killed in Wednesday morning police raids in the Paris suburb of Saint Denis.

But the upper echelons of IS have been living for months in the city’s densely populated residential areas and are careful to keep their movements inconspicuous. As such, they have likely been able to escape the US-led coalition’s airstrikes, which have been ongoing for 15 months.

After factoring in family reunifications, the actual number of migrants could exceed 10 million, and some believe that Germany’s Muslim population is on track to nearly quadruple to an astonishing 20 million by 2020.

N24 television news reports that up to 50% of the asylum seekers arriving in Germany have gone into hiding and their whereabouts are unknown by German authorities.

“It cannot be that offenders continue to fill the police files, hurt us physically… and there are no consequences. … We are losing control of the streets.” — Tania Kambouri, a German police officer.

“We are not excluding anyone, we are just trying to run a business. If we ignore the complaints of our female guests, we have to expect that many of our regular customers will stay away…. Financially, we do not know how long can we cope with this.” — Thomas Greil, manager of the discotheque “Brucklyn,” Bad Tölz, Bavaria.

“We are reproducing faster and faster. You Germans are not getting any children. In the best case you get two children. We make seven to eight children. Okay mate? And then we take four wives each, then we have 22 children. Maybe you Germans have one child and a dog. Huh? And that’s it.” — Video showing a Muslim threatening a German man openly on the street.

In Berlin, lawmakers are considering emergency legislation that would allow local authorities to seize private residences to accommodate asylum seekers. The proposal was kept secret from the public until November 9, when the leader of the Free Democrats (FDP) in Berlin warned the measure would violate the German Constitution. Berlin Mayor Michael Müller now wants to expand the scope for warrantless inspections to include “preventing homelessness.”

ISTANBUL—The Turkish military shot down what is likely to be a Russian jet fighter along the Syrian border on Tuesday after the plane violated Turkey’s airspace and ignored warnings to return, Turkish officials said.

Turkish authorities didn’t give the nationality of the jet but Russia separately said one of its jets had been downed in the region, it said the jet had flown exclusively in Syrian airspace and that the plane had likely been brought down by shelling from the ground.

The Turkish military said two of its F-16s shot down the jet fighter after it crossed into Turkish airspace and ignored 10 warnings in five minutes to return to Syrian airspace.

Television footage showed a jet catching fire and crashing into the mountains along the Turkey-Syria border.

The plane crashed on a part of the border where Russian and Syrian planes have been targeting Turkmen fighters, a group that has been seeking more support from Ankara in their fight against the Syrian regime.