Paris attacks: latest updates

On the first night of the Republican convention, several speakers repeated one criticism of Obama and Hillary Clinton — their reluctance to use the term “radical Islam.”

Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas said that America needs “a commander in chief who calls the enemy by its name.” Rep. Sean Duffy said that while “radical jihadists are killing Americans,” Clinton and Obama “are fretting over whether to call it workplace violence or hate crime.” Karen Vaughn, the mother of a Navy SEAL killed in combat, asked, “How can you defeat an enemy you cannot even name?”

Official ISIS media released a video on Sunday of the final “martyrdom” statements made by nine of the suspected Paris attackers, who killed 130 people in a series of coordinated attacks around Paris on November 13.

The video is significant because it suggests that the central ISIS leadership in Iraq and Syria may have been much more involved with directing and coordinating the attacks than had been thought.

The national panic in the wake of the Paris terrorist attacks shifted into even higher gear early on the morning of Friday, November 20, when Donald Trump told an NBC News reporter that he would “certainly” implement a system to register and track Muslims in the United States.

This idea is pretty clearly unconstitutional, morally repugnant, and not going to be embraced by the bulk of Republican Party politicians. But it comes at a time when Trump continues to ride high in the polls and has repeatedly benefited from past controversies over his own outlandish and often racist statements, and when Republican politicians most certainly are pushing the envelope on anti-Muslim rhetoric and policies in a way that was alien to the George W. Bush–vintage Republican Party’s response to 9/11. Trump’s particular statement is mostly just the political clown show in action, but it’s part of a larger context that is frightening to American Muslims and genuinely threatening to America’s entire geopolitical strategy over the past 15 years.

To understand the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria — why it exists, what it wants, and why it commits terrible violence of which the Paris attacks are only the latest — you need to understand the tangled story of how it came to be.

The group began, in a very different form, in 1999. In the 16 years since, it has been shaped by — and has at moments helped to shape — the conflicts, physical and ideological, of the Middle East.

Only two years ago, hardly anyone outside of a small community of terrorism analysts and Syria watchers had heard of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. Yet now, after the terror attacks in Paris, much of the world is focused on the group. And many are asking: How did this group come so far? How did the world, and to at least some degree the United States, let this happen?

Fred Hof, for six crucial months in 2012, played a lead role in shaping US policy toward the Syrian civil war that helped give rise to ISIS. He was the Obama administration’s special adviser for the transition in Syria from March to September that year, and now is a resident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East. I got in touch with Hof over email to ask him about ISIS and its rise.

John Oliver opened this Sunday’s episode of Last Week Tonight with a short comment on the Paris attacks. He didn’t mince words (if you’re at work, you may want to turn the volume down on this one):

In a media climate full of hyperventilating about jihadism’s unstoppable threat to the West, Oliver’s remarks are a breath of fresh air. Instead of talking about the “civilizational” threat from “radical Islam,” he treated the terrorists as despicable yet weak adherents to an ideology that barely anyone supports. He’s right to.

On Thursday, one day before terrorists who appear to have been linked to ISIS launched a series of devastating attacks across Paris, President Obama went on ABC and made a comment that now looks pretty bad:

In the wake of Paris, it looked to many like Obama had badly overhyped his administration’s efforts against ISIS. At Saturday’s Democratic presidential debate, moderator John Dickerson asked Hillary Clinton if the quote meant that the Obama administration’s legacy will be “that it underestimated the threat from ISIS.”

President Obama is currently at the G20 meeting in Antalya, Turkey, but he took some time from meeting with foreign leaders to answer questions from the press about the Paris attacks and his strategy to fight ISIS. You can watch the full remarks in the above video.

At times, Obama sounded quite combative: “When you actually listen to what [my critics] have to say, what they’re proposing, most of the time, when pressed, they describe things we’re already doing.”

On Friday night, as the Paris terror attacks were still unfolding, French President François Hollande stood before TV cameras to do something that no French leader had done since the early 1960s: He declared a nationwide state of emergency.

Many countries have provisions for states of emergency — periods of heightened security and often reduced restrictions of government action — but France’s is particularly severe. It grants the state extraordinary powers to order warrantless searches of homes and businesses, shut down demonstrations, impose curfews, confiscate weapons, and put people under house arrest.

When people talk about ISIS and Islam, as they are today and will surely be for some time in the wake of the Paris terror attacks, they tend to take one of two positions: either that ISIS has nothing to do with “real” Islam, or that ISIS represents the ugly truth of Islam, whether we want to acknowledge it or not.

The debate, on the surface, often turns on theological questions: Is ISIS’s piety sincere or just a cynical tool? Does its horrific ideology have real roots in Islamic text and history, or is it all distortions and lies? Does it violate Islamic law? Just how Islamic is the Islamic State, in its words and deeds?

In a statement Saturday afternoon, the White House did not exactly confirm the now widespread supposition that ISIS was responsible for Friday’s attacks in Paris but did say that the United States “had no information to contradict the initial French assessment of ISIL’s responsibility.”

The National Security Council also concluded that there is “no specific or credible threat to the United States” at this time and that senior US government officials “will remain in close contact with their French counterparts to be ready to provide any necessary assistance to French authorities as part of the investigation.”

If ISIS was telling the truth when it claimed responsibility for Friday’s Paris terror attacks, then this represents a “major shift in ISIS’s global strategy,” according to Will McCants.

McCants is the director of the Brookings Institution’s Project on US Relations With the Islamic World and the author of The ISIS Apocalypse — one of the best books to date on the group. I called him on Saturday to try to understand what lessons about ISIS we should draw from the Paris attacks if indeed the group is responsible as both it and the French government say.

So far, most US presidential candidates have been cautious in their responses to the Paris attacks — except for the arch-conservatives.

Though few details of the Paris attackers are known so far, Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, Mike Huckabee, and Rick Santorum were all quick to cite the attacks in arguing that the US should close its doors to refugees trying to escape war-torn Syria. There is too great a risk that terrorists will arrive with these refugees, these candidates argued. They all also repeated past campaign rhetoric arguing for a stronger military effort to defeat ISIS — though most offered few specifics.

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, which has claimed responsibility for Friday’s terror attacks in Paris, has its origins in Iraq, but the group as we know it today is in many ways a product of Syria’s civil war. That war is much bigger than ISIS, but it is crucial for understanding so much that has happened in the past year, from terror attacks to the refugee crisis. And to understand the war, you need to understand how it began and how it unfolded:

In his statement describing the Paris attacks as an “act of war” against France, President François Hollande said the war “was waged by a terrorist army, a jihadist army, by Daesh, against France.”

Secretary of State John Kerry also referred to Daesh in Vienna at an international conference on Syria. This is not a term most Americans are familiar with, but it’s part of a larger dispute — largely between Western governments and Western media outlets — over how to refer to the group we call ISIS, one that pits the strategic agenda of governments against the goals of clear communication.

The statement, below, is not surprising: ISIS often claims credit for terror attacks, whether or not it was actually responsible. And while there is strong reason to suspect ISIS responsibility for the Paris attacks that killed more than 120, including the fact that French President François Hollande stated as much, the ISIS statement is still a bit odd.

Terror groups, when they claim credit for attacks, will sometimes include details of the planning or execution that establish the group was indeed responsible. There are none here; the statement details nothing that was not publicly available information from news reports. It also includes no biographical information on the attackers, even a name or photo, though terror groups will often lionize its attackers as “martyrs” in such statements.

Friday’s terrorist attacks in Paris left at least 127 dead and about 200 people injured, causing an increased demand for blood to help the wounded. These photos show how the people of Paris are responding: People are lining up around the block to donate blood at hospitals all over the city.

There are blood donation centers operating all over Paris. Some people are waiting hours for their chance to help the wounded.