What We Know – and What We Don’t – About the Paris Attacks

As the world gathers to demonstrate its resilience in the face of last week’s terrorist attacks in Paris and its commitment to the freedom of expression, European and U.S. policymakers are beginning to respond. Foreign leaders from around the world gathered in Paris for a symbolic march, and U.S. policymakers are pressing forward with practical counterterrorism efforts, including a summit next month to address the threat of terrorism and radicalization. Reports are beginning to illuminate who the terrorists were and how the tragedy occurred. These reports suggest that the attacks were acts of domestic terrorism perpetrated by individuals radicalized in France. The terrorists appear to have been affiliated in some way with jihadi groups in the Middle East, particularly al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), but it is still unclear to what extent foreign terrorist organizations were involved or if they had any role in planning or directing the attacks. This limited intelligence, though, has not stopped reactionary critics from making unwarranted assumptions and misconstruing the facts of the case. In doing so, they are politicizing the attacks to push failed interrogation and detention policies and further muddling nuanced national security issues which require clarity for sound decision-making.

The Paris attacks are indicative of the complex state of contemporary jihadi terrorism: So far, reports suggest that the attacks were acts of domestic terrorism affiliated with – but not directly coordinated by – jihadi groups based in the Middle East. Reports have noted that Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, the gunmen who attacked the offices of Charlie Hebdo, had long-standing ties to jihadi groups operating in the Middle East. Saïd Kouachi apparently traveled to Yemen and received training from AQAP, and Chérif Kouachi tried to travel to Iraq in 2005 to fight U.S.  forces stationed there. Amedy Coulibaly, the terrorist who seized the Parisian supermarket on Friday, made a video before his attack declaring his allegiance to the Islamic State. However, it is unclear whether AQAP or the Islamic State coordinated the attacks directly. Rather, the Kouachis seem to have been radicalized in France, and Coulibaly was recruited to the Kouachis’ extremist network while in a French prison.

This has critical implications for how counterterrorism experts understand the attacks and how countries under threat should respond. “Today’s jihadi threat, blended between al Qaeda and ISIS, networked by Facebook, and evolving based on conditions in hundreds of locations, produces attacks on three or more continents every day,” Clint Watts, Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, wrote today for the blog War on the Rocks. “Counterterrorism pundits…try to tease out order from chaos. But today’s counterterrorism landscape does not lend itself to such linearity.” Watts suggests that the best way to understand the attacks is as something between a direct attack coordinated by a jihadi organization (e.g., September 11, 2001) and attacks inspired by jihadi organizations but carried out independently (e.g., the recent attacks in Sydney and Ottawa). “The Kouachis and Coulibaly knew each other prior to the al Qaeda and Islamic State split,” Watts noted. “All were definitely inspired by a combination of both groups, but whether they were fully directed in all of their cumulative actions appears unlikely. A more appropriate way to think about the Hebdo plot and many others to come is ‘networked.’” This, Watts writes, poses dilemmas for both jihadi groups and Western governments: How much will al-Qaeda or the Islamic State take credit for attacks only loosely affiliated with their organizations? How should the United States and others respond to these radicalized individuals?

Reactions to the attacks and criticisms of U.S. counterterrorism policy have made unwarranted assumptions and misconstrue the facts.

There has been no indication that the attacks in Paris were directed by the Islamic State and it’s irresponsible to conflate the threats. Though he acknowledged that “this is an event that continues to unfold from the standpoint of intelligence,” Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) suggested on Sunday that terrorist attacks like those in Paris could occur in Europe on a weekly basis. “I think certainly that’s a tempo we could reach given the number of folks who have gone in and out of Syria,” he told George Stephanopoulos on This Week yesterday. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) also conflated the attacks in Paris with the Islamic State, saying on Sunday that the United States has “no strategy to degrade or defeat” the Islamic State. “ISIS right now is winning,” McCain said. “We need to go after them. We need to have more boots on the ground. We need a no-fly zone. We need to arm the Free Syrian Army. And we need a coherent strategy that can be presented to the Congress.” The return of European foreign fighters to their home countries after fighting in the Syrian civil war is certainly a security concern, but there is no indication that the Paris attacks are at all related to these foreign fighters, nor to the U.S. counterterrorism strategy to combat the Islamic State. Burr and McCain’s comments are misleading and confusing, and nuanced discussions of U.S. security policy demand greater accuracy and clarity.

Conservatives are politicizing the Paris attacks to push failed U.S. interrogation and detention policies. Burr also cited what he saw as weaknesses in U.S. counterterrorism policy, claiming that the United States does not have adequate detention, interrogation, and surveillance policies. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) also made a similar comment last week, when he wrote in a statement on the attacks that “poor policy choices made by the Obama Administration regarding detention and interrogation policies” have weakened “our national security infrastructure designed to prevent these types of attacks,” resulting in “losing the ability to detect, disrupt and prevent future terrorist attacks.” But there is every indication that U.S. counterterrorism policy was adequate in this case: All three of the terrorists had been identified as threats by U.S. intelligence agencies. The problem may have been a lack of intelligence sharing. As Attorney General Eric Holder said on Sunday, “One of the things that we have certainly gleaned from these interactions, is there’s a greater need for us to – to share information, to knock down these information-sharing barriers so that we can always stay on top of these threats…One nation cannot by itself hope to forestall the possibility of terrorism, even within its own borders.” The Paris attacks should not be used to baselessly promote discredited policies of torturing prisoners or maintaining the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, which as NSN has noted previously, has harmed U.S. national security.

Photo Credit: Flickr, Kelly Kline, 1/11/15.