A group gathered in Yonge-Dundas Square Sunday evening to light candles “in the name of humanity and peace” during a unity rally for the victims of the Paris bombings and terrorist attacks. The event, “to counter the darkness” of recent terror attacks in Lebanon and Baghdad as well, was organized by students from Ryerson University and the University of Toronto. Organizer Fatima Sayed, a second-year journalism student at U of T, says people were asked to come out “whatever their race, and religion may be to bring kind thoughts and prayers so that we may share in silence as friends, family [and] equals in humanity.”
On Sunday, French warplanes bombarded Raqqa, an ISIS stronghold in response to coordinated attacks by ISIS that killed 129 people and injured another 300 people in Paris Friday, many of them critically. French President Francois Hollande is scheduled to address a special session of the French parliament in Versailles today where he’s expected to up the ante against ISIS. But are more airstrikes really the answer against a terrorist group created out of the fallout from the failed U.S. war in Iraq against Saddam Hussein?
It appears that some of the eight men involved in the attacks are French of Algerian descent, which raises once again the spectre that followed the attacks on the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo in January about the role life in Paris’s poor suburbs, known as the banlieues, may be playing in the radicalization of young people of Arab and African descent in the country.
Meanwhile, Canada’s Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, is sticking to his election promise to pull CF-18 fighters out of the bombing campaign against ISIS as the pressure mounts on the new government to remain in the fight. How Canada’s continuing role, or any country’s for that matter, in a campaign that has claimed untold number of civilian lives will keep us any safer from another Paris-like attack is a question that must be given serious consideration.
Here’s what the world’s editorialists are saying about what comes after Paris:
The prevention of further ISIS attacks will require an end to the Syrian civil war
The terrorist attacks in Paris on Friday, along with twin bombings in Beirut the day before and the downing of a Russian jetliner over the Sinai Peninsula on October 31, show a new phase in the Islamic State’s war against the West, a readiness to strike far beyond areas it controls in Iraq, Syria, and increasingly, Libya. The Islamic State must be crushed, but that requires patience, determination and the coordination of strategies and goals that has been sorely lacking among countries involved in the war on ISIS, especially the United States and Russia. France already has some of Europe’s most intensive antiterrorist policing adopting draconian measures of the sort demanded by far-right nationalists like Marine Le Pen of the National Front can only further alienate France’s Muslim population of five million, without offering any assurance against more attacks. It’s clear that the prevention of further ISIS attacks will require threatened states to find a way to end the Syrian civil war, which has made it possible for this terrorist group to gain wealth, territory and power.
There is no appetite for another major military incursion into the Middle East
In July 2005, the G8 summit was under way in Gleneagles when news came of the bomb attacks on the London transport network. Yesterday, the leaders of the G20 gathered in Turkey for talks that have inevitably been dominated by the massacre in Paris.
In 2005, as now, the rest of the world united behind the country targeted by the bombers. Tony Blair said they “will not prevail”, just as French president François Hollande now promises a merciless campaign against the Islamist group that has claimed responsibility for the attack and increases his airstrikes against them.
But the biggest shock in 2005 was to discover that the bombers in London were actually British citizens and had not been flown in from overseas to kill and maim, even if they had been trained abroad by al-Qaeda.
There is no appetite, even after Paris, for another major military incursion into the Middle East by countries seared by the experience in Iraq. Yet only by being confronted on the ground can Isil be beaten,
To declare war against ISIS is to flatter it
Amid all the noise that follows an act of horrific violence, amid the din of debate and argument, it can be easy to stop hearing the pain of the event itself. The French president responded to the Paris killings by branding them a declaration of war. That sounds compelling. To speak of Friday night’s shootings and bombings only as crimes, as if they were equivalent to a string of murders by an urban gang, misses something important. They were co-ordinated, meticulously planned and, according to eye-witnesses, staged with a cold, military precision. Not for nothing did Francois Hollande speak of confrontation with the ISIS “army.”
And yet even if ISIS did mean this night of slaughter to be a declaration of war, that does not mean France – or the rest of the world – needs to return the compliment. And a compliment it would be. To declare war against ISIS is to flatter it, to grant it the dignity it craves. It accords it the status of a state, which ISIS claims for itself but does not deserve. It confronts that murderous organisation on terms of its choosing rather than ours. What’s more, rhetoric of that hue has a recent and unhappy history. But if we feel European values are in danger, then the last way to defend those values is by dismantling them.
The solution to ISIS: get rid of Assad
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attempts to portray the Syrian president as the sole alternative to Islamic terrorism is misguided. A closer look at the facts suggests that the Assad regime’s continued existence has not diminished terrorism, it has been one of the root causes of it.
The rise of the Islamic State and other terrorist players –– and their growing support in places like Sinai –– would not have been possible to the extent that we have witnessed it, if not for the existence of a much despised foe in Assad.
Assad’s battlefield alliance with Shiite groups, most notably Iranian special forces and Hezbollah, has given Sunni extremists — such as the Islamic State that have been recruiting followers from all over the world — an additional tool to get their message across. The results of this global recruitment campaign are horrifying.
Several months ago, Reuters reported that a UN assessment concluded that the number of foreign fighters in Syria and Iraq combined –– the vast majority being in Syria –– has climbed to 22,000 recruits from about 100 countries. Recent developments have been particularly troublesome. Between mid-2014 and March 2015 the recruitment rate was estimated to have grown by 71 percent. In other words, the trend is going from bad to worse. The key to a solution to both –– the quagmire that has unfolded in Syria and the threat posed by Islamic terrorism –– is to deprive the terrorist groups of their main propaganda tools and to form a new Syrian government that excludes Assad (and his foreign Shiite allies).
Sven-Eric Fikenscher of Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs writing in the Moscow Times.
Revenge will only aid terrorist organizations
Every country and every culture — Western, Arab, Christian, Jewish and Muslim — is in the crosshairs of those who have decided to teach a lesson to people who do not accept their criminal ideology. Emotional reactions that called for immediate revenge created the war in Afghanistan in 2001 and the second Gulf war of in 2003. In hindsight, the harm they caused outweighed the benefits. Physical and cultural withdrawal, the persecution of Muslims solely because they are Muslim and draconic legislation in the name of fighting terror will only aid terror organizations toward their goal of creating persecuted communities in the West.
Ha’aretz, Israel
It’s important that Muslim nations take a lead in the fight against ISIS
It is grossly unacceptable that men who lead Daesh (the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) can sit in Syria and Iraq and govern a territory the size of France and eight million unfortunate inhabitants. They have to be removed from power and tried for their crimes against humanity.
The international community needs to combine with the regional powers to eliminate this excrescence from the face of the earth. It is encouraging that the US and Russian foreign ministers, and all others attending the Vienna conference on Syria, agreed on the urgency of standing up for the rule of law and defeating Daesh. It will be important that Muslim nations take a lead in this action to emphasise to the world at large that no one can be complacent or accepting of this horror that seeks to make its home in the Arab world.
Gulf News, United Arab Emirates
enzom@nowtoronto.com | @enzodimatteo
