French President Francois Hollande called on the United States and Russia to join forces to destroy Islamic State in the wake of Friday’s attacks across Paris, and announced a wave of measures to comb
French President Francois Hollande called on the United States and Russia to join forces to destroy Islamic State in the wake of Friday’s attacks across Paris, and announced a wave of measures to combat terror in France.
In a sombre speech to both Houses of French Parliament after the coordinated suicide bombings and shootings that killed 129, Mr Hollande said he would increase funds for national security, strengthen anti-terror laws and boost border controls.
“France is at war. But we’re not engaged in a war of civilisations, because these assassins do not represent any. We are in a war against jihadist terrorism which is threatening the whole world,” he told a packed chamber at the gilded Versailles Palace near Paris on Monday.
Parliamentarians gave Mr Hollande a standing ovation before singing the national anthem in a signal of political unity following the worst atrocity in France since World War Two. Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the attacks, saying they were in retaliation for French airstrikes in Iraq and Syria over the past year. Mr Hollande said French forces would intensify its assaults and said he would meet US President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin in the coming days to urge them to pool their resources. “We must combine our forces to achieve a result that is already too late in coming,” Mr Hollande said.
However, in Turkey, at the end of the G20 meetings, there was little sign on Monday of a dramatic shift in strategy against ISIS in Syria. Concerned about the “acute and growing flow of foreign terrorist fighters,” G20 leaders vowed tighter border controls and aviation security, more intelligence sharing and a crackdown on terrorist financing after the Paris attacks.
US President Barack Obama, speaking at the end of the summit, said the coordinated attacks in the French capital were a setback in the fight against the jihadists, but that putting US troops on the ground in Syria to combat them “would be a mistake.”
A US-led coalition has been bombing Islamic State for more than a year. Russia joined the conflict in September, but US officials say it has mainly hit foreign-backed fighters battling its ally President Bashar al-Assad, not Islamic State.
Speaking in Turkey at the same time as Mr Hollande, Mr Obama called Friday’s attacks a “terrible and sickening setback,” but insisted the US-led coalition was making progress.
“Even as we grieve with our French friends... We can’t lose sight that there has been progress being made,” Mr Obama said at a Group of 20 summit.
Much of France came to a standstill at midday for a minute’s silence to remember the dead. Metro trains stopped, pedestrians paused on pavements and office workers stood at their desks.
“Friday’s act of war was decided upon and planned in Syria, prepared and organised in Belgium and carried out on our territory with the complicity of French citizens,” Mr Hollande said.
On the domestic front, President Hollande called for an extension of the state of emergency by three months and announced 8,500 new police and judicial jobs to help counter terrorism.
France and Belgium staged dozens of raids on suspected extremists as the manhunt continued for an eighth jihadist, including in a known radical hotspot in Brussels where some of the attackers are thought to have lived.
Prosecutors have identified five of the seven dead assailants — four Frenchmen and a foreigner fingerprinted in Greece last month. His role in the carnage has fuelled speculation that Islamic State took advantage of a recent wave of refugees fleeing Syria to slip militants into Europe.
The police believes one attacker is on the run, and suspects at least four people helped organise the mayhem. “We know that more attacks are being prepared, not just against France but also against other European countries,” French Prime Minister Manuel Valls told RTL radio. “We are going to live with this terrorist threat for a long time.”
Islamic State warned in a video on Monday that any country hitting it would suffer the same fate as Paris, promising specifically to target Washington.
French warplanes bombed Islamic State training camps and a suspected arms depot in its Syrian stronghold Raqqa late on Sunday — its biggest such strike since the US-led mission launched in 2014.
French interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve told reporters the police had arrested nearly two dozen people and seized arms, including a rocket launcher and automatic weapons, in 168 raids overnight.
“Let this be clear to everyone, this is just the beginning, these actions are going to continue,” Mr Cazeneuve said. President Hollande said he would create 5,000 jobs in the police and security forces, and boost staff in the prison service by 2,500. He also said there would be no cuts to defence spending. He acknowledged this would break EU budget rules, but said that national security was more important. The police in Brussels detained two suspects and is hunting Salah Abdeslam, a 26-year-old Frenchman based in Belgium. One of his brother’s died in the Paris assault, while a third brother was arrested at the weekend but later released.
Schools, museums and the Eiffel Tower re-opened in Paris on Monday after a 48-hour shutdown, but some popular tourist sites, including Disneyland, remained closed.
The police has named two French attackers — Ismael Omar Mostefai, 29, from Chartres, southwest of Paris, and Samy Amimour, 28, from the Paris suburb of Drancy. A source close to the investigation named two other French assailants as Bilal Hadfi and Ibrahim Abdeslam.
France now believes Mostefai was in Syria from 2013-2014 and his radicalisation underlined the trouble France faces trying to capture an illusive enemy that grew up in its own cities. “He was a normal man,” said Christophe, his neighbour in Chartres. “Nothing made you think he would turn violent.”
The man stopped in Greece in October was carrying a Syrian passport in the name of Ahmad Al Mohammad. The police said it was still checking to see if the document was authentic, but said the dead man’s fingerprints matched those on record in Greece.
Greek officials said the passport holder had crossed from Turkey to the Greek islands last month and then registered for asylum in Serbia before heading north, following a route taken by hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers this year.
Despite warning by world leaders not to conflate refugees with terrorists, six US states — Alabama, Michigan, Texas, Arkansas, Indiana and Louisiana — announced they will no longer accept Syrian refugees, contending it is too dangerous to let in people from that war-torn country following Friday’s deadly Paris attack. The states said they would no longer help support the Obama administration’s goal of accepting 10,000 Syrian refugees in the coming years.
