Alwaght- Hundreds of people have taken to the streets across France in response to three days of mayhem, as terrorist attacks rocked its capital resulting in the deaths of some 20 people – 17 victims, and three gunmen .
Numerous European leaders have decided to join the rally on Sunday, among them UK Prime Minister David Cameron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, European Commission head Jean-Claude Juncker and European President Donald Tusk, as well as Russian Foreign minister Sergey Lavrov .
While three suspects in the assaults have been eliminated by Special Forces, one of them – involved in the kosher supermarket hostage taking attack – is still at large. Coulibaly's wife, 26-year-old Hayat Boumeddiene, has been asked to contact police. On Friday, a bulletin was issued by the French police stating the pair “may be armed and dangerous .”
The identification of the alleged attackers raises more questions than it answers. Cherif Kouachi, in particular, is well-known to the French and American intelligence and police agencies. In 2005, the New York Times reported that he was arrested in France on charges of intending to travel to Iraq to join the insurgency against America's occupation. In 2008, he was convicted by French courts of terrorism charges and sentenced to three years in prison for allegedly attempting to send French Muslims to Iraq. At the time, he told the Associated Press that he had been driven to act by the images of torture from America prison at Abu Ghraib .
Kouachi served 18 months of his sentence and remained under close surveillance by the French secret services. The French government will have to explain how such an individual—if police claims that he was the gunman are true—was able to obtain a rocket-propelled grenade launcher and automatic weapons and organize a highly professional and deadly attack in the middle of Paris without being prevented or detected .
Moreover, the site of the attack was itself well known to French authorities as a target. The magazine’s headquarters had been placed under police guard when it was fire-bombed in 2011 after publishing caricatures of the Prophet Mohamed. Charb was under police protection, as he was reportedly on a death list drawn up by Al Qaeda. Nonetheless, the gunmen succeeding in gaining access to the building shortly before 11 a.m., by threatening one of its employees at gunpoint .
The Paris atrocity conforms to the pattern of virtually every major case of terrorism internationally, stretching from the September 11, 2001 attacks to the present. They have not been carried out by people off the security services’ radar, but by individuals who were well-known and purportedly under scrutiny. Invariably, the authorities asserted that the atrocities were not prevented due to “intelligence failures.”
Whatever the case, the political intention and effect of the attack is clear: to polarize society along national, ethnic, and religious lines, dividing the working class and strengthening the drive to war, social reaction, and repression .
The main danger arising from this horrible attack is the political purpose to which it will be put. In that sense, the media’s initial comparisons of the Charlie Hebdo shooting with the September 11 attacks are a sharp warning to the working class. That tragedy was exploited to embroil the American people in unpopular wars across the Middle East, above all in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to build up America's intelligence agencies as a massive domestic spying apparatus, combined with paramilitary forces operating an unaccountable global network of torture and drone murder .
