French jets struck the heart of ISIS-controlled territory on Sunday in the first direct retaliation for Friday’s terror attacks that killed at least 129 people in Paris.
Twelve aircraft, including 10 French fighter jets, dropped 20 bombs on a command and control center, a jihadi recruitment center, munitions depot and ISIS training camp in the Syrian city of Raqqa, France’s Defense Ministry said in a statement. Raqqa is the de facto capital of the Islamic State’s “caliphate.”
The “massive” raid was launched from the United Arab Emirates and Jordan and was carried out in coordination with U.S. forces.
A Pentagon source told Fox News, “these were French strikes but they were conducted within the coalition. We helped with [the] target list.”
On the sidelines of the G20 summit in Turkey on Sunday, France’s Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said his country was justified in taking action in Syria.
“It was normal to take the initiative and action and France had the legitimacy to do so. We did it already in the past, we have conducted new airstrikes in Raqqa today, Fabius said. “One cannot be attacked harshly, and you know the drama that is happening in Paris, without being present and active.”
The U.S. has conducted the vast majority of coalition attacks on ISIS territory up to this point, and has been almost solely responsible for all coalition bombings of ISIS inside Syria. However, the nature of Friday’s attacks, which devastated France and shocked the world, changed the calculus.
The airstrikes came as The New York Times reported that investigators believe that at least one of Friday’s eight attackers had visited Syria, while some of the other assailants had been communicating with known ISIS members before the attacks.
Eruopean intelligence officials told the paper that they believed that Ismael Omar Mostefai, a 29-year-old French citizen, traveled to Syria via Turkey in 2012. Mostefai was identified as one of the terrorists who blew himself up at the Bataclan concert hall, but not before helping to murder 89 concert-goers.
French officials also told The Times that U.S. security services had alerted the Paris government in September that French jihadists in Syria were planning some kind of attack. That warning prompted French airstrikes against Raqqa on Oct. 8.
Also Sunday, French officials also played down a claim by Iraqi intelligence officers that they had warned France and other countries of an imminent attack on Thursday, the day before the atrocity.
The Associated Press reported that it had obtained an Iraqi intelligence dispatch that warned that ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had ordered his followers to immediately launch gun and bomb attacks and take hostages inside the countries of the coalition fighting them in Iraq and Syria.
However, the Iraqi dispatch provided no details on when or where the attack would take place, and a senior French security official told the AP that French intelligence gets these kinds of warnings “all the time” and “every day.”
Meanwhile, the Agence France-Presse news agency reported that Turkish authorities had foiled a plot to stage an attack in Instanbul on the same day as the assault on Paris. The official said five people had been detained, including an associate of “Jihadi John”, the notorious ISIS terrorist believed to have been killed by a U.S. airstrike Thursday.
“The initial investigation shows we foiled a major attack,” the official said. The arrest came ahead of the G20 summit at the resort at Antalya, in southern Turkey.(Jennifer Griffin and the Associated Press)
Link : http://www.foxnews.com/world/2015/11/16/french-jets-target-isis-in-raqqa/
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