Early Saturday morning, when Dhaka was under a warm blanket in the mild chill of a November night, I was reading a book and on whim, switched the TV on to catch up on some news. I looked for BBC, saw the news highlights on the crawl, but went back to reading my book. All of a sudden, my attention was drawn to the bold letters of the dreadful phrase “breaking news.”
I put down my book and raised the TV volume. It started with the news that gunfires were heard on a Paris street, and then, over the next hours, the gruesome acts of mayhem unfolded.
Armed attacks were perpetrated in restaurants, night clubs, and the Stade de France where a football match was in progress between France and Germany. Attackers armed with AK-47s and explosives were too much for the French security forces to contain. More so, because there were suicide bombers who set off bombs in the vicinity of the stadium. One thing that has been proven over the last two decades is that it is well nigh impossible to stop people who are launching attacks with no intentions of preserving their own lives.
As events were being reported, the death toll which started from a figure in the single digits, started to climb and then we heard the siege of the Bataclan concert hall with hundreds held hostage inside. The overall death toll was reported to be as high as 153 at one point, with another 180 grievously injured. However, this number is likely to go up. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for this attack, but from the very beginning, IS was implicated.
There were three possibilities. Firstly, Al-Qaeda could have done it. Go back to January and the attacks on the offices of Charlie Hebdo. Of the three gunmen, one was affiliated with IS while two others had links with Al-Qaeda in Yemen. Al-Qaeda could have carried out the attacks in Paris if only to regain their formerly held top position in the Jihadi movement scale around the world.
Secondly, it could have been a local group of French jihadis, but given the firearms used and the military style of the attacks, it did not seem likely to be the work of a local splinter group of extremists.
And thirdly, there is the Islamic State.
We know now that the IS started celebrating the Paris attacks online, with hashtags and everything, saying these attacks were done in retaliation to airstrikes made on them, and the French President Hollande, subsequently, promised “merciless” reprisals as he declared a state of emergency throughout France and the closure of her borders. He also implicated that the attacks were planned by IS higher-ups in the Levant and carried out by jihadis with IS affiliations within France.
Thousands have travelled from Europe and the US to join ISIS and hundreds of them have come back with the specific agenda dictated to them by ISIS high command. French President Hollande warned of thousands being radicalised within France and the French intelligence were already on high alert.
How did they get hold of the weapons? It is believed that the Schengen Agreement of a borderless Europe allowed the weapons to be smuggled to the terrorists in Paris. And why Paris? The city of lights, the city of arts and literature, a city loved by Beckett, Hemmingway, Maugham, Scott Fitzgerald, well, it is a city that, an attack on which, would shake the world. And it did. An attack on Paris, New York, London, or Rome impacts geopolitics. A US drone attack on a Baghdad bridal party killing several innocents does not have the same impact. Such is the way of the world we live in.
The attacks were planned very carefully to cause maximum damage and carnage: A Friday night was chosen, when revelers were out and about dining, wining, fraternising, enjoying a concert, sitting at open air cafes and there was a football match in progress with around 80,000 spectators, including the French President. Soft targets were picked and the mayhem was complete.
The question that comes to my mind in the immediate aftermath of Paris is: Where next? One may recall the suicide bombing in Ankara last month killing over a hundred, and before that the attack on the Tunisian resort where scores of British tourists were killed. All of them, the results of the nefarious terrorist attack scheme of the highly radical Sunni group called the Islamic State.
It is a time for grief, a time to stand beside the families of victims, not only in Paris but in Beirut and elsewhere too. The Western world will spew rhetoric about the evil that is Islamic terrorism, more so about the al-Baghdadi-led IS and its drive towards the establishment of a Caliphate. But the West does not have its hands clean.
Even if we overlook the colonial presence in the early to middle part of the 20th century and the drawing of the borders of Iraq, Syria, and the region, and the creation of the state of Israel, we will still have to go back to the Cold War era to seek the root of Islamic terrorism.
But I digress. Our hearts go out to the families of the victims and the hundreds of thousands who had to flee their homeland in the Levant and seek refuge elsewhere. But the new reality of the world is a place where there are no guarantees of safety and security.
The oft-used line “Islam is the religion of peace” will become a hard sell in the West after Paris. Non-Muslims will become wary of the term “moderate Muslim.” Millions of Muslims live and work in the West and lead their lives peacefully abiding all the laws of the country where they have become permanent residents. Their livelihoods may now be at a peril.
If Muslims living in the West face very negative, almost offensive remarks from people, they may call it “Islamophobia” and they will have to suffer and bear suspicious looks or outright curses. Tolerance and acceptance may be in short supply, and life will become difficult for them living in peace and harmony in a culture that is essentially alien.