Who Really Attacked Paris? (Part I)
The nighttime jihadist assault on Paris on November 13, 2015 remains the bloodiest attack on French soil since the Second World War, yet troubling questions linger about what really happened and why
Officially, France’s long nightmare ended last week, after almost seven years, with the handing down of sentences to 20 men who were involved in the country’s unforgettable night of horror. The sole survivor of the combat cell which executed the terrorist attacks late on November 13, 2015, 32-year-old Belgian national Salah Abdeslam, for his murderous role in the atrocity received the unusually harsh sentence in France of life without parole, which has only been handed down by the nation’s courts four times previously. Eighteen other defendants, most of whom were involved in the plot in peripheral ways, were convicted on myriad terrorism-related charges (six of them in absentia), while one was convicted on a lesser fraud charge. Their sentences ranged from life imprisonment to release after time served.
The trial, which commenced in September of last year, was a ten-month trying spectacle for France, with 148 days of hearings including testimony, often gut-wrenching, by 415 victims. In all, the proceedings involved 2,500 plaintiffs, over 300 lawyers, and over a million pages of evidence. The biggest trial in French history reopened wounds for many from that terrible night, while establishing the essential facts of what happened. For some, the trial proved cathartic. As one survivor of the attacks observed, “Being a victim of terrorism is not my profession, so I want to move on to a new phase of my life.”
The 130 innocent people who were murdered that night, of course, cannot move on to any new life phase, while many of the hundred more who were critically wounded (of the 416 wounded in all) are still dealing with crippling injuries that will never fully heal.
The essential outline of the terrible events of November 13, 2015 has been visible for years and the trial didn’t add much detail in the big picture. The well-planned terrorist operation encompassed three three-man jihadist cells, with members carrying AK-style assault rifles and wearing suicide bomb vests, plus a tenth man – that was Salah Abdeslam – driving cars and handling tactical logistics during the attacks.
It all began at 21:16 with a bomb attack on the Stade de France, the national sports stadium, located in the Saint-Denis suburb of Paris. Then-President François Hollande was attending that night’s football match between France and Germany, and he was evacuated when the bombs started going off. Eventually three bombs exploded over a 37-minute period, killing the three bomb vest wearers, yet miraculously only one innocent person. This initial attack was imperfectly executed, and the three terrorists arrived late to the match and did not possess tickets, so they were turned away by security. They failed to penetrate the Stade de Paris at all.
Worse arrived at 21:26 when a second cell initiated its attacks on bars and restaurants in the city’s 10th and 11th arrondissements. Commencing their rampage with the customary chant of “Allahu akbar!” this cell managed to murder 39 innocents at five different locations over a roughly 20-minute period, raking patrons with bursts from AK assault rifles, while one of the terrorists blew himself up with his bomb vest.
The worst came last with the storming of the Bataclan theater in the 11th arrondissement, where the American rock band Eagles of Death Metal was playing to an audience of some 1,500 people. At 21:50 the three-man cell burst into the theater, their guns blazing to chants of “Allahu akbar!” – many fans mistook the explosions for concert pyrotechnics and didn’t take rapid action – and dozens of innocents were felled almost immediately. A three-hour hostage-taking ordeal followed at the Bataclan, where the main floor was covered thickly with pools of blood and dozens of bodies, some piled on top of each other. Elite French police eventually ended the siege but by that point 90 concertgoers were dead, as were the three jihadists.
France was stunned by this atrocity, which impacted the national psyche in a similar fashion to 9/11 in the United States. Just hours after the attacks, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria claimed responsibility, and President Hollande was quick to declare that France was now “at war” with the hated ISIS, which by 2015 had supplanted Al-Qa’ida as the preeminent Sunni jihadist threat to the West. That ISIS was behind the attacks was a logical conclusion. Several of the terrorists had hinted at that during the operation, even blaming Hollande for France’s involvement in the Western military campaign against ISIS in the Middle East.
The immediate problem, however, was that it was obvious that some of the attackers had escaped. Police and intelligence counterterrorist units were hunting nonstop for anyone possibly connected to the attacks and less than five days later they caught up with two of the missing men. In a massive predawn raid on November 18 in the suburb of Saint-Denis, just a mile from where the Stade de Paris bombings occurred, French police with military backup stormed a building where jihadists were hiding, according to late-breaking intelligence. A four-hour siege followed in which the police fired several thousand rounds of ammunition.
By the time it was over, three terrorism suspects were dead while five police officers were wounded, and a police dog was dead. Two of the dead jihadists were linked to the November 13 attacks. The first was Chakib Akrouh, a 25-year-old Belgian national of Moroccan descent, who was identified via DNA several months after his death. The second dead man, who was identified by fingerprints, was Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a 28-year-old Belgian of Moroccan background. He was a rather well-known ISIS fighter possessing multiple noms de guerre plus combat experience in Syria, and French intelligence eventually assessed that he was the ringleader of the November 13 attacks.
It took several months to bring the tenth man to justice. Salah Abdeslam had been on the run since the Paris attacks and counterterrorism police caught up with him mid-March 2016 in a raid on an apartment in the Molenbeek neighborhood of Brussels, a heavily Muslim district which constitutes the epicenter of Belgium’s jihadist problem. His 31-year-old brother Brahim was one of the seven jihadists killed during the November 13 attacks and Salah was taken into custody wounded.
Since then, he has told conflicting accounts of his role in that night’s events, including during the recent trial. Exactly why Salah Abdeslam, alone among the terrorists, lived has never been clear. His claim that he had a change of heart, abandoning his bomb vest and fleeing Paris, has been broadly questioned, while Abdeslam’s self-pitying testimony during the trial did not endear him to many survivors. His biography is a jihadist cliché: a son of Muslim immigrants who developed a violent love-hate relationship with his European home. Abdeslam got involved in petty crime, including drugs (plus rumors of gay prostitution), and scammed off welfare, while embracing radical Islam as a salve for his personal problems. It’s widely believed that ringleader Abaaoud enticed Abdeslam into ISIS ranks, but the latter has publicly downplayed his relationship with Abaaoud.
Mysteries abound in this case and with the trial’s end few expect significant insights to emerge. Abaaoud, the presumed terror mastermind, remains a bona fide international man of mystery in death. The son of a Moroccan immigrant father (little is known about his mother), his Belgian upbringing was hardly oppressive. The family wasn’t poor and the young Abaaoud was admitted to an elite Catholic school, a rarity among Muslim immigrant kids. He entered the too-common pattern of alienation from Europe followed by a life of petty crime, leading to redemption via radical Islam.
Abaaoud found his violent niche in Syria, where he traveled in 2013 to fight the Bashar al-Assad “apostate” regime. He soon became a celebrity in jihadist circles, denouncing “infidels” and hailing the spilling of their blood, an ISIS media darling. Abaaoud is believed to be linked to several terrorist operations in France and Belgium circa 2014-15 but hard facts are difficult to establish. Several months before the November 13 attacks, Abaaoud was convicted by a Belgian court in absentia on terrorism charges, receiving a 20-year prison sentence, but he evaded detection and moved easily about Western Europe in the run-up to the Bataclan slaughter.
More mysterious still is who some of the November 13 terrorists really were. Of the 10 men known to have been directly involved in the attacks, including Abaaoud and the Abdeslam brothers, eight had similar backgrounds: French or Belgian nationals of Muslim heritage (usually Maghrebi) who were known to the authorities before the attacks, in some cases having open warrants for terrorism. But two others remain substantially identified. ISIS has boasted of them in their propaganda yet who they really were – many suspect they were Middle Eastern terrorists who came to Europe during the 2015 migration wave, carrying fake passports – is elusive. This mystery seems unlikely to be resolved.
The biggest mystery of all is how exactly ISIS planned and executed the November 13 operation. The broad outline is understood: in the months preceding the attacks, a jihadist cell operating out of Molenbeek meticulously planned the Paris operation, presumably with help from ISIS in Syria. However, details remain opaque. In the nine months before the attacks, logistician Salah Abdeslam traveled to six different countries preparing for the operation. Who arranged and paid for it all? Abdeslam has shed insufficient light on any of this since his arrest and he has no incentive to do so now, facing life without parole.
Hints have bubbled to the surface over the years. In late August 2016, ISIS announced the death of Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, one of its top leaders and official spokesman, as well as the group’s reputed external operations chief. This was confirmed two weeks later when the Pentagon admitted it had killed Adnani in an airstrike in northern Syria. Conspicuously, the DGSI, France’s domestic security agency, issued a statement that Adnani’s death marked the end of the terrorist who supervised the November 13 attacks (among several).
That said, there’s long been a strong whiff in Western intelligence circles that the Paris attacks somehow just aren’t quite right. Lingering questions about significant aspects of any terrorist “big wedding” leave a bad taste in the mouths of seasoned spooks. Nobody denies that an ISIS-linked cell based in Brussels executed the November 13 atrocity; that is indisputable. Who might have stood behind that shadowy cell, however, is a question that gnaws on veteran spies who know the Middle East and how its unpleasant authoritarian regimes actually function.
The ugly reality of Syria’s civil war, which has raged for over a decade now and claimed a half-million lives, is a good deal murkier than Western media accounts portray. The coffeehouse view that the Assad regime and ISIS are implacable foes, indeed mortal enemies, is too simplistic by half, as even some American experts are willing to state in some detail, as here:
It may seem contrary to conventional wisdom, but the regime of Bashar al-Assad has consistently supported the Islamic State terrorist group (ISIS) even as the regime struggles to retake control of Syrian territory from the various rebel groups engaged in the Syria civil war, including ISIS. ISIS has been fighting in Syria since its precursor organization sent operatives into the country from Iraq in 2011. But the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad took the strategic decision to enable and facilitate the continued survival of the Islamic State in Syria in an effort to paint all of the Syrian opposition as “terrorists.” The Syrian government’s support included both passive support, such as deciding not to target ISIS positions, and active support, such as releasing terrorists from Syrian prisons and helping to bankroll ISIS by purchasing oil from ISIS and wheat from ISIS-controlled areas that ISIS was able to tax. In fact, Syrian government support for the terrorist network that morphed into ISIS goes back many years … making it the group’s earliest and most significant state sponsor.
This statement sounds shocking to novice Western ears but is uncontroversial in old-hand intelligence circles. The idea that everything you know might be wrong isn’t new if you’re acquainted with how Kremlin intelligence has operated for a century, including sharing the dark art of provocation with its friends and clients … for instance, Assad’s Syria. Western journalists have shied away from the notion that the Assad regime and ISIS are in some sense partners, indeed Syrian intelligence in no small part created ISIS, with the admirable exception of Roy Gutman, whose three-part series in The Daily Beast in 2017 blew the lid on this sordid counterintelligence story.
That series, which drew heavily on accounts by Syrian regime oppositionists (including intelligence defectors), made a convincing case that Syrian intelligence, the feared mukhabarat, played a major role in boosting the jihadist cadres which coalesced into ISIS, while ensuring that its ranks included significant numbers of mukhabarat agents – to the point that Syrian intelligence at times influenced major ISIS operations.
This alone raises questions about who really attacked Paris in late 2015. Moreover, Gutman explained, U.S. intelligence has displayed scant interest in exploring clandestine connections between the Assad regime and ISIS. He stated:
Remarkably, several high-level former Syrian security officials who spoke on the record with this reporter said that U.S. intelligence agencies never debriefed them. The ex-officials viewed this as a major lapse, not only because they were privy to, and complicit in, the inner workings of Assad’s role in organizing a terrorist insurgency against U.S. forces in Iraq, but also because they were well-placed to advise on the establishment of a new state security apparatus should Assad’s police state collapse or be overthrown.
The Obama administration apparently wasn’t interested. A former top U.S. diplomat said the CIA had little interest in Syrian defectors and debriefed them only if the diplomat insisted.
The CIA declined to comment but did not dispute the validity of the question. “I looked into this, and there is nothing we can add,” a spokeswoman said.
Gutman’s three-part series was broadly ignored by the American media and the Washington foreign policy establishment, since its recondite message raised uncomfortable questions about what ISIS really is and what U.S. policy in Syria is accomplishing. Gutman is an esteemed foreign correspondent with many awards (including a Pulitzer) to his credit, so it was easier to ignore than attempt to deal with his reporting here.
Others were thinking in a similar vein, including the French journalist Marc Weitzmann, whose 2016 article in Tablet boldly asked if Syrian intelligence might constitute a hidden hand behind ISIS attacks in Europe, including the then-recent Paris atrocity. He explained what was nagging at him about the November 13 operation (let me share that some in Western intelligence think along similar lines):
First, the sudden growth of sophistication in operative tradecraft and technical means on the part of the ISIS team. Second, French Minister of Foreign Affairs Laurent Fabius, who had held the firmest position against the nuclear deal with Iran among Western leaders, was said to be dead-set against any negotiation with Bashar, making France a logical target for a regime bent on breaking Western resistance to its continued rule. It is also worth noting that the main result of the Paris attack was to practically silence the French delegation at the U.N.-brokered Syrian peace negotiations the next day in Vienna. Openly relaxed, Bashar al-Assad himself suggested a link that same day in a statement that was notably devoid of even a single word of support for the victims of the attack. “Erroneous policies from Western countries in the region, especially from France, contributed to the expansion of terrorism,” Assad remarked. “Three years ago, we warned of what would happen in Europe, we said, ‘do not take lightly what is going on in Syria.’ Unfortunately, European leaders did not listen.”
Weitzmann asked all this to someone possessing an informed opinion, Abdul Halim Khaddam, a consummate Assad regime insider, who served as Syria’s foreign minister for 14 years then as vice president for another 11 years. Khaddam (who died in 2020) was the Damascus insider par excellence, right up until his defection in late 2005, disenchanted with the troubling trajectory of the regime. Ever the diplomat, Khaddam explained that he possessed “no specific information” about Syrian intelligence links to ISIS, but he conceded that the jihadists and Assad are partners of a sort: “It is a fact that [ISIS] does not fight the government in Damascus any more than the government in Damascus bombs [ISIS].” He went further:
You have to understand that, at some point, practically half the Syrian population worked for Secret Police one way or another. Remember that we were formed by the Soviets. That’s why they were so powerful. The intelligence services soon became the main factor in maintaining the regime. The model was the KGB … They were everywhere. Thousands of Syrians went in Russia to train and study, learned Russian, and married Russians. Every student we sent abroad in the West brought back information. And this was left unchanged after the end of the Cold War. Did they have a part in the 13 November attacks? Again, I have no information on this. But that these networks are still in motion is beyond any doubt.
That’s not evidence of anything, of course, but it ought to establish that the notion that a repressive Middle Eastern dictatorship engaged in a brutal civil war cum fight for its life might exploit jihadists, including arranging terrorist attacks to get Paris off its back, isn’t far-fetched, indeed it’s alarmingly plausible if you understand such regimes and how the KGB bequeathed them their provokatsiya mind-virus.
Most incredible of all, this didn’t first happen in Paris in 2015, rather two decades before, in a shockingly similar manner.
To be continued…