Paris attacks: terrorism in for long campaign of urban warfare

French President Francois Hollande (Rear C), protected by armed bodyguards, stands near the Bataclan concert hall in central Paris, early on November 14, 2015. At least 120 people were killed in a series of terror attacks in Paris on November 13 according to a provisional total, a source close to the investigation said. AFP PHOTO / MIGUEL MEDINA

It’s a week since the atrocity in Paris, and details are still emerging of the terrorists, their tactics and intent. Commentators have dubbed this “France’s 9/11”. There’s some truth to that — much as 9/11 prompted George W. Bush to declare a “global war on terror”, this attack led French President Francois Hollande to announce a “pitiless war against the Islamic State”.

France launched airstrikes into Syria this week and deployed its aircraft carrier, Charles de Gaulle, to the eastern Mediterranean for further strikes. Hollande became the first European leader to invoke the collective defence clause of the EU treaty, and asked Russia and the US to join a global coalition against Islamic State. French and Russian planners meet next week — with added urgency now investigators have concluded that an Islamic State bomb caused the Russian airline crash in Sinai on October 31. But Hollande’s ­chances of uniting Washington and Moscow in a Grand Alliance are slim, given disagreements over the future of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

And the Paris attack is, in some ways, more concerning than 9/11, though casualties were much lower, because rather than a one-off attack formulated from outside the country, it signals the existence of a jihadist underground in cities across France, Belgium, Germany, Denmark and The Netherlands. It’s too soon to be certain, but early indications suggest we may be seeing the start of a sustained urban guerilla campaign — and perhaps not just in Europe.

Raid in Saint-Denis

Let’s start with the attackers. The eight-person assault team — seven of whom died in the attack, while one remains on the run — was organised into two groups of three and one of two.

These operated independently but synchronised efforts by text message, helping them launch eight attacks across the city in just 33 minutes (from 9.20pm, the moment of the first bombing at Stade de France, to 9.53pm when the last bomb exploded, by which time the Bataclan theatre siege was well under way).

This was what the military calls a “complex attack”, and its main targets were the soccer stadium and the Bataclan, with shootings and bombings at street cafes and restaurants acting to divert first responders and create confusion. Thanks to a sharp-eyed security officer, the first bomber was turned away from the soccer stadium — had he made it inside, the toll could have been far higher.

The attackers moved calmly, showed good weapons skills and tactical sense, and displayed a high degree of what soldiers call “battle discipline”: covering each other, maintaining all-round security while moving and halted, and seeking alternative targets when their first efforts were blocked. They were well-equipped, with standardised gear: Kalashnikov assault rifles, hand grenades and at least seven suicide vests — the first time these have been used in France, and all built to a common design. One question investigators are examining is where the vests were made: were they smuggled into Europe or built near the target? Each possibility raises different concerns: the first suggests border security failures (at least one attacker entered through Greece and Macedonia as an asylum-seeker) while the second implies that an underground cell manufactured devices close to Paris, under the noses of police.

According to officials, the second explanation is considered likelier — a disturbing admission given that (as I wrote earlier this week) French security services have been on high alert since the Charlie Hebdo attack and ahead of climate talks starting in two weeks.

The tactics used in Paris were reminiscent of Pakistani group Lashkar-e-Toiba’s attack on Mumbai in November 2008 and represent a dramatic escalation beyond the drive-by shootings and lone-wolf attacks previously seen from Islamic State supporters in Europe. Police now face an enhanced threat including urban siege techniques, “mobile active shooter” scenarios (where an attacker goes mobile, in this case using stolen or rented cars, to commit a rapid string of shootings in multiple loca­tions) and military-grade weapons.

Beyond their professionalism, the attackers clearly had access to safe houses, stolen vehicles, weapons caches and false documents, suggesting a wider underground support network.

Police estimate at least 20 people played supporting roles in the attack. This network wasn’t limited to France — the attack planner, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, was a Belgian of Moroccan descent, who founded an Islamic State cell in the Brussels suburb of Molenbeek last year.

This cell, raided by police after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, also sponsored other attacks including the attempted shooting on a French train in September.

The weapons used in Paris were probably also acquired in Belgium, where there’s a thriving black market for military-grade arms. Police suspect weapons seized in Germany were linked to the attacks, and German, Danish, Dutch and Belgian security forces have all mounted counter-terror sweeps or closed high-profile events and locations as precautionary measures.

All this — plus the existence of paramilitary underground groups such as the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont network, linked to the Charlie Hebdo attack — suggests the latest Paris attack is perhaps best thought of not as a single terrorist incident but as one operation in a sustained campaign of urban guerilla warfare.

That campaign — including attacks in Lebanon, Turkey, Tunisia, France, Belgium, Kuwait and Denmark in the past few months — has killed 1000 civilians this year alone, contributing to a spike in global terrorism (including mass-casualty attacks).

There’s no evidence Islamic State leaders selected targets for Paris, directed the attack or put the team together. But (as I noted after Charlie Hebdo) that’s not how Islamic State operates — methods such as leaderless resistance, guer­illa terrorism and remote radicalisation mean the organisation’s central leaders don’t have to actively direct every attack. They also make detecting attacks ahead of time vastly more difficult — akin to preventing school shootings rather than classic counter-terrorism.

If Paris is part of a broader campaign (and again, it’s too early to be sure) we can expect more attacks in coming weeks.

On Wednesday French police foiled a follow-on attack against the Paris business district, fighting a seven-hour battle in the suburb of Saint-Denis against a cell (police aptly called it a commando) that included Abaaoud and a female suicide bomber thought to be his cousin.

In Marseilles, Islamic State supporters stabbed a Jewish teacher, threats were made against public venues in Denmark, Germany and France, and a jihadist in Sarajevo killed two Bosnian soldiers. A security crackdown is under way across Europe and is unlikely to let up anytime soon.

Strategically, Islamic State’s external campaign (in Europe, North America and Australia, and against Russian targets) seems intended partly as retaliation for attacks on its territory, partly to deter further attacks and partly to force adversaries to focus on defending their own populations and critical infrastructure, thereby reducing pressure on the “caliphate” in Iraq and Syria.

It’s unclear, as yet, whether the Paris attack also was designed to provoke a backlash against refugees and asylum-seekers — 800,000 of whom have flooded into the EU since the beginning of this year — but given Islamic State’s proven talent for provoking sectarian bloodshed, it’s reasonable to assume that may be part of the intent.

In Iraq and Syria, Islamic State (and its predecessor, al-Qa’ida in Iraq) directed attacks against critical infrastructure, forcing security forces to focus defensively, then exploited the resulting urban “no-go” areas to carry out sectarian atrocities. The goal was to push Sunnis into a corner, where they would be forced to support the group — which posed as their defender against Shia and others.

In the case of Europe, the refugee influx (along with the alienation of Muslim immigrant communities as in Molenbeek or the Paris banlieues) has generated significant anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant tension from right-wing political parties. Attacks such as those in Paris have only increased this tension, spreading concerns about terrorist infiltration of the refugee flow into the political mainstream.

Perhaps aware of this danger, Islamic organisations in France quickly condemned the Paris attack — but public calls for solidarity with Muslims have been very muted by comparison to those after Charlie Hebdo in January, and a mainstream public backlash against separationist Muslim communities, and against such a large influx of asylum-seekers, many of whom are Syrian and Iraqi military-age males, is gathering steam.

If Islamic State were indeed planning a sustained urban guerilla campaign in Europe, the group would be perfectly positioned to exploit that backlash.

Looking at this from Australia or the US, it’s tempting to feel a certain complacency: Australia’s offshore refugee processing system, thorough vetting of asylum-seekers and tight border controls, for all the controversy they’ve generated, vastly reduce the risk of terrorist infiltration into Australia via refugee flows.

Likewise, neither North America nor Australia shares borders with Syria, unlike Europe (which does, indirectly, through Turkey) — and distance may seem to mitigate the threat. In Australia’s case, strict gun laws also limit the risk of a Paris-style urban guerilla underground acquiring military-grade weapons.

But these laws haven’t protected Australian cities from attackers such as 15-year-old Farhad Jabar, who used a handgun to kill NSW police employee Curtis Cheng in Parramatta last month, or Man Haron Monis, who used a shotgun in the Lindt cafe siege in Sydney’s Martin Place. And gun laws allow country dwellers to maintain weapons for use on their own properties, prompting outlaw motorcycle gangs (several with connections to Middle Eastern organised crime and some with links to religious extremists) to mount “gun runs” in rural areas, breaking and entering to steal weapons that can be sold or re-used in the cities.

Likewise, Americans and Australians may look at the notoriously marginalised Muslims of Europe and congratulate themselves on their record of inclusiveness, but that would be unwise. Young alienated men and women in our communities have travelled to the Middle East to fight for Islamic State, and many more remain radicalised at home. What has happened in Europe may not occur on the same scale in Australia but may very well happen in some form in the near future.

It’s not all bad news: the solidarity of the French and German soccer teams last week — the Germans had to sleep on mattresses in Stade de France because it was considered unsafe to return to their hotel, so the French insisted on staying with them — is a case in point.

The courage of Europeans at all levels, from German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who refused to be evacuated from the stadium, to Parisians who used the hashtag #portesouvertes (“open doors”) to offer shelter to people stranded by the attacks, offers hope that communities can remain resilient in the face of this threat.

But at some level there’s a need for an honest conversation about the risks of large-scale immigration (especially illegal immigration) from war zones, and the dangers posed by marginalised, non-integrated communities within Western democracies.

The fear, described by some commentators as irrational, that terrorists will infiltrate communities along with the flow of refugees is actually far from irrational, as last week’s incident shows. But it may be overblown, especially for countries such as the US and Australia that already have robust border protection and immigration vetting processes. In some ways, it’s the EU’s open borders that are most at risk here.

Likewise, this attack reopens the thorny question (put into sharp relief by US National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations on electronic surveillance) of how to balance civil liberties and personal privacy against mass surveillance and intrusive security. I still tend to think it’s better to err on the side of liberty — but it’s not up to me. This is a discussion that needs to involve all our citizens.

President Barack Obama, preserving his near-perfect record of ill-timed comments on Islamic State, described the group as “contained” in a CNN interview last week, mere hours before the attack. Clearly Islamic State is far from contained. And given the atomised, highly connected nature of the threat — and the possible emergence of low-grade urban guerilla warfare in Europe — it may be worth asking whether containment already may be overtaken by events. Urban guerilla warfare, indeed, could be coming soon to a city near you.