With 12 dead and three gunmen still on the loose in Paris, many questions remain about the brutal armed assault on the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo. Above all: who did it?
Based on video footage and eye witness accounts, security experts are already drawing conclusions. Several note that Wednesday’s attack in Paris’s 11th arrondissement appears qualitatively different from any terror attack on western soil of this decade.
The gunmen were not only dressed and equipped professionally, but moved and behaved professionally, too. They appeared calm and disciplined. Their handling of weapons was restrained and they were precise in their use of ammunition. And they operated as a team, covering each other’s positions.
The implication, then, is that the attack was plotted with the assistance of a foreign terrorist organisation rather than the exploit of a so-called “wolf pack” – a group of radicalised individuals inspired to commit an act of violence, but not necessarily trained or directed to do so by a broader terrorist group.
Given French involvement in the international coalition against Islamic State, the Iraq and Syria-based group would be an obvious culprit.
But so far IS – whose primary focus is local, rather than global – has mainly attempted to inspire lone wolf attacks in reprisal for western intervention against it, rather than go to the greater effort of more directly exporting its terror abroad. There has been little evidence of IS actively training its members to be sent back to the West.
The most likely scenario may be that the attackers are affiliated to al-Qaeda, or one of al-Qaeda's virulent branches such as al-Qaeda in the Arabian peninsula from Yemen, or Jabhat al-Nusra, from Syria.
Al-Qaeda is desperate to reassert itself after IS gained the upper hand among jihadi groups. Two eyewitnesses to the attacks in Paris have now said the fighters claimed an al-Qaeda affiliation.
One – a Parisian who claims to have been stopped by the fighters as they fled – said they told him they were from Yemen. That would point to AQAP – the arm of al-Qaeda charged by the group’s leadership with exporting terror to the West.
While these statements are as yet unverified, they appear to chime with other circumstantial evidence.
“My initial thought was that it’s al-Qaeda going for relevance through a spectacular attack,” says Patrick Skinner, a former CIA official and counter terrorism expert now working at the Soufan Group who has studied al-Qaeda for years. In comparison, he says, “Isis or Isis sympathiser attacks are more in line with the group’s [own] mindset and ethos: chaotic violence aimed to shock. [AQ and IS] have different psychologies which reveal themselves in their attack planning.”
Western spy chiefs too have long been fearing an AQAP-linked terror plot, even amid the international focus on Isis.
According to one UK security official, the group has been especially active in recent months. In particular, it has been at work to strengthen ties with al-Qaeda’s official affiliate in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra, they said. The advantage of doing so is clear: AQAP has the professionalism and the expertise to carry out an attack, while Jabhat al-Nusra has the European citizens in its ranks who with training and time – could execute it in their home countries.
As yet, of course, it is still far too early to tell who is responsible, or indeed why.
But should the Paris shootings indeed be attributed to AQAP, it would be a gruesome reminder that not only is the world’s most historically successful Islamist terror organisation still around, but functional and experienced in projecting its violence far away from its heartlands – in a way that Islamic State is still years away from achieving.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2015