Posted on 01/09/2015 3:28:13 PM PST by SeekAndFind
According to CNNs reporting, the series of bloody attacks on journalists in police in Paris over the course of this week has electrified the global jihadist movement. The suspicion that the two brothers who were responsible for the assault on the offices of Charlie Hebdo also had links to al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is likely to boost recruiting and fundraising efforts for that terrorist group.
A resurgent al-Qaeda is already reportedly planning to follow up on the success of the Parisian attacks in the coming days. According to a warning from Britains MI5 intelligence service that was made public on Thursday, al-Qaeda militants are planning a renewed campaign of spectacular attacks in the West. Those are expected to be directed against transportation systems and iconic targets.
Speaking after gunmen killed 12 people in an assault on a French satirical newspaper, MI5 boss Andrew Parker warned a strike on the United Kingdom was highly likely.
“A group of core al Qaeda terrorists in Syria is planning mass casualty attacks against the West,” Director General Parker said in a rare public speech at MI5 headquarters in London. His last public speech was in October 2013.
In the speech, planned before the killings in Paris, Parker said seasoned al Qaeda militants in Syria aimed to “cause large-scale loss of life, often by attacking transport systems or iconic targets” in the West.
This revelation that al-Qaeda is planning to return to a strategy that targets infrastructure and landmarks would seem to mark a departure from reliance on low-tech lone wolf terrorists. That paradigm may be misleading, however, as the Paris attack indicates that only loosely affiliated terrorist actors with access to sophisticated armaments and training can execute spectacular attacks all on their own.
According to the deceased French attackers, their actions were part of an al-Qaeda operation (though it is unclear if it was ordered and directed by operatives in the Middle East):
#BREAKING Charlie Hebdo gunman told French TV he was sent and financed by Al Qaeda
— Agence France-Presse (@AFP) January 9, 2015
#BREAKING Supermarket gunman told French TV he "coordinated" with Charlie Hebdo killers
— Agence France-Presse (@AFP) January 9, 2015
American intelligence sources, who spoke with The Daily Beast, are now indicating that this operation was no lone wolf attack.
The cumulative intelligence to date strongly points toward al Qaeda as, at the least, inspiring the Kouachi brothers to take up their killing spree. U.S. and French intelligence and law-enforcement officials have been poring over records in an attempt to learn more about the two suspected gunmen. A U.S. intelligence official told The Daily Beast that the men have been on the governments no-fly list, which would ban them from traveling on a U.S. airliner, for years, declining to specify how long. The FBI has also been searching its records for any information that could assist the French investigation, a spokesperson added.
The brothers themselves claimed during the attack to be a part of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, the groups Yemeni branch. And an al Qaeda magazine geared toward jihadis living in the West called for the assassination of the the editor of the satirical Charlie Hebdo magazine, the first victim of the Paris attack.
Also under review, intelligence sources told The Daily Beast, is any connection the brothers may have to a Frenchman named David Drugeon, who became the chief bombmaker for a unit of al Qaeda called the Khorasan Group, which operates in Syria, the report read.
Right now, the links between AQAP, Syrian al-Qaeda, and the French attackers are tenuous, but they are not nonexistent either. The War on Terror is not over, and al-Qaeda is not on the run.
There is no AQ. Was told that in the news by the dems. So this must be a made up story as they were destroyed. Sarc/.
Guess that genius in the white house was wrong, but more likely telling a muslim lie.
AQ has a fondness for striking on Christian holy days on the Julian calendar.
9-11 was Coptic New Year.
Tuesday was Julian Calendar Christmas.
The next Crusade is going to be a Dooozy!
I stood in my living room on September 11, 2001 and watched the trade towers fall. I thought, “We are so lucky that at this point they don’t have weapons that will cause hundreds of thousands of casualties. They’ve alerted everybody to what they are and now the West will fight back and win.” What the heck happened to the West? We tried to fight states when the problem is a whole culture, not a state. There are good Muslims and radical Muslims? No, there are just Muslims. I’ve known many who are citizens and have spent most of their lives here. They’re proud not to have acculturated. They will look you in the eye and tell you that so-and-so must die for having defamed Islam. My mother said, “you must always believe people when they say they will do bad things. They will. If you don’t believe them and take appropriate action, they will do them to you.”
The Crusaders had the will. We have the means.
Well, he wasn't exactly wrong,
Bad time to have the enemy within the WH.
I can believe this.
If this starts happening world wide I think Israel might have a little more support if they nuked the muslims.
I told my wife the war on terror would never be won because we won’t do what has to be done. I told her that when W first started the attacks on Afghanistan.
At least we can take some comfort in the fact that the Islamic religion is not involved in any of this. It is something else altogether.
What it is we don't know - but we'll think hard about it and come up with the answer after it happens. It probably has something to do with George Bush, legitimate grievances, Western oppression, or the Crusades but we'll find out for sure after.
Don't worry. The answer will be all over the mainstream news media. They won't let us down and make us scratch our heads for the answer.
“I told my wife the war on terror would never be won because we wont do what has to be done.”
I read somewhere recently that we won WW2 because FDR didn’t insist on tracking down the individual pilots who attacked Pearl Harbor and prosecute them as criminals. When individual non-state actors have anti-ship missiles and shoulder fired weapons that will take down 747’s you have to go after the culture that is producing them, not individuals pulling the trigger.
Right on! I remember Ross Perot said we can’t win the war on drugs because the American people can’t stomach what it would take to win it. That’s when he said “Some of these drug dealers couldn’t work the third shift at a Dairy Queen.” And he was right.
I mentioned on other threads that the French general who almost won in Algiers did so because he decided to be meaner than the muslims. But he was stopped because the world couldn’t stomach what he was doing back then.
There is one way to win. We announce that every weapon we use will be soaked in pork fat. I guarantee if we did that they’d stop. But we can’t even stomach that. Most of the idiots think we won’t do it because it will give the muslims high cholesterol. Stupidity is another problem we have.
Without the will, the means are useless.
I’m sure some people think that it’s over. It isn’t.
It's a one-hundred-year war. Well under way. The Muslims know this, but the West just doesn't realize it yet. The "mass casualty attacks" will actually be pin-pricks here and there, of a few deaths. Then they will ratchet it up to hundreds of such pin-prick attacks. Ten or fifteen years down the road will be the huge attacks. This thing will go on for several generations. It's too late to prevent it; we need to stop being willing victims and start bloodying their noses.
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