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Devastation in France: What We Know About The Paris Attacks
By EMILY KNAPP
EMILY SHAPIRO
Nov 14, 2015, 5:30 PM ET
Christian Hartmann/Reuters
WATCH At Least 1 American Killed in Paris Terror Attacks
A
wave of devastating attacks on civilians across Paris Friday night has
left at least 129 dead, including an American, and many more injured.
As France initiates a state of emergency and begins several days of mourning, here is a breakdown of what we know so far:
Where
Six separate attacks were carried out across Paris, beginning after 10 p.m. local time Friday night.
One
of the targets was the Stade de France soccer stadium, where Germany
was playing France in a game that French President Francois Hollande was
attending. Hollande was evacuated from the stadium.
Christophe Ena/AP Photo
A
French supporter reacts after invading the pitch of the Stade de France
stadium at the end of a soccer match between France and Germany in
Saint Denis, outside Paris, Nov. 13, 2015.more +At
least 80 were killed inside the Bataclan concert hall, where American
rock band Eagles of Death Metal was playing. A witness in the theater
told ABC News she heard gunmen shout "Syria!"
The four other
attacks were at other locations in the 10th and 11th districts of Paris,
where gunmen targeted bars and restaurants. Police said some attackers
first sprayed cafes outside the venue with machine gunfire before
continuing the assault inside the concert hall.
Thibault Camus/AP Photo
A woman is evacuated from the Bataclan theater after a shooting in Paris, Nov. 13, 2015.
WATCH At Least 1 American Killed in Paris Terror Attacks
A
23-year-old American was killed in Friday night's devastating six-part
attack in Paris, according to California State University, Long Beach.
Nohemi
Gonzalez, a CSU Long Beach student, was in Paris attending Strate
College of Design for a semester abroad program, the school said.
Gonzalez
was one of 17 CSU Long Beach students studying abroad at Strate,
according to a school official. The 16 other students are safe,
according to the school.
Paris massacre: World mourns 120+ killed in series of terrorist attacks Live updates
The
world is mourning with France, the victims of Friday’s terror assaults
in Paris that claimed the lives of at least 129 people. Security has
been tightened up globally as Islamic State, who claimed responsibility
for the massacre, threatened more violence.
14 November 2015
21:46 GMT
A
second person who was reportedly involved in the Paris massacre is
“very likely” to have entered European Union via Greece, sources in the
Greek government told Reuters. Earlier Greece's deputy minister in
charge of police said a Syrian man whose passport was found at one of
the suicide bombing sites made it to the EU through Greece in October.
21:33 GMT
A
spokesman for the Accor hotel chain, which operates the Pullman Hotel,
also confirmed that the earlier incident was a false bomb alert.
21:24 GMT
A
spokesman for the French Interior Ministry has told Reuters that the
incident at the hotel in the center of Paris was a false alarm.
21:22 GMT
Heavily
armed police have been deployed at the Pullman Hotel in Paris' 15th
district, according to witnesses, who said the officers were searching
through rooms. An evacuation has also been reported to have taken place
near the Eiffel Tower.
21:08 GMT
Police in Paris have evacuated an area around the Eiffel tower, Reuters reports, citing witnesses.
Perfect storm: ‘Paris massacre may enflame public opinion on migrant crisis, NATO interventions'
French
President Hollande has declared a state of emergency across the country
as Paris comes to grip with a series of terrorist attacks that led to
the death of 127 people in the capital, which was placed under curfew
for the first time since World War II.
RT
interviewed several analysts for their opinions on what these deadly
coordinated attacks in the French capital mean not only for the freedom
of movement across Europe, but for the ongoing Syrian military
operation, which has brought together various state actors - including
the US and Russia - in an increasingly shrinking and volatile military
theater.
Alain Corvez, Former
Advisor to French Interior Ministry, provided insight into the question
as to how it is possible that Islamic State has such a long reach -
right into the very heart of Europe.
Corvez believes these attacks are “linked to the geopolitical system, and what we are doing in Iraq and in Syria is directly linked to attacks.”
I think all of the specialists and experts on terrorism knew that such an attack was possible," he continued. "This
is a world war against terrorists that we have to wage. And for the
first time, President Hollande said we have to fight terrorism on a
larger scale."
‘France has been intervening in the Middle East since 1917’
Washington-based
defense analyst Ivan Eland, asked whether this was the right time for
nations to put aside their differences and join together in the fight
against terrorism, he explained that it is important to consider the
problem long-term it is important to ask “what are the root causes of
this terrorism – we call them “blanket terrorism” – but there’s many
different groups in the world with many different causes and most of
them tend to be local causes, which become international causes when
Western countries, or other countries, intervene where they shouldn’t.”
“France
has been intervening in the Middle East since after World War I, when
Britain and France divided it; it was the colonial master in Syria and
now it’s taking a fairly assertive policy by bombing in Syria.
It’s no secret – this is not random - that France is the target.”
'Terrorists chose Paris as iconic target like twin towers' – ex-CIA officer
The series of apparent Islamic State attacks in Paris can be compared to the 2001 destruction of the WTC towers in the US, says Jack Rice, a former CIA officer. The French capital is an iconic European city, and terrorists target icons.
France has suffered one of the worst tragedies in its modern history with more than 150 people reported killed in seven separate gun and bomb attacks throughout the capital. The terrorist group Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) claimed responsibility for the attacks.
“Part of the strength that a terrorist group has is to take down an icon,” Rice told RT. “If we go back to 9/11 in the United States, they took down the World Trade Center and parts of New York. And we've seen efforts around the world to do similar things.
Traces of airstrikes against household buildings
have been found at the Syria-Jordan border, where Russian warplanes have
performed no missions, deputy chief of the Russian General Staff
Andrey Kartapolov said on Friday.
"We have spotted ruins of
household buildings destroyed by bombing near the settlement of Kherbet
Ghazala at the Syrian-Jordan border," he told a briefing for foreign
military attaches and journalists.
"Russian warplanes have never
performed any missions there and, as far as we know, the Syrian aviation
has not been used there either," he stressed. "This territory has never
been in the hands of the Islamic State. Moreover, this area has been
controlled by the Free Syrian Army since 2013."
He demonstrated
photos of the area featuring bomb-destroyed buildings. "You can see on
these photos that there are no signs of military activity around these
cottages, there are no military hardware, not even signs of military
hardware. These are regular gardens and fields with buildings to keep
farming tools," he said.
"Why destroy these buildings? It looks
like somebody’s pilots were just training their skills or dropped bombs
to report to their command about completed mission," Kartapolov said.
Russia in Syria: Moscow air strikes 'have killed thousands of civilians' already, warns UK Defence Secretary
Michael Fallon says Russia's ongoing operations raise risk of accidental confrontation with Western forces
Mr Fallon says Russia is prolonging the war by targeting all opponents of President Assad EPA
Russian
airstrikes in Syria may have killed “several hundred” civilians already
and raise the risk of accidental confrontation with Western forces, the
Defence Secretary has said.
But Michael Fallon said Russia’s
intervention should not “divert” Britain from combatting Isis and
restated his intention to extend the RAF’s bombing campaign to Syria.
In
a sharp condemnation of Vladimir Putin’s intervention in Syria, Mr
Fallon told the BBC’s Andrew Marr programme that Russia was prolonging
the war by targeting all opponents of President Assad.
“What
[Russia] is doing is propping up the Assad regime, making the
resolution of all this more difficult. They are prolonging the conflict
and civilians are being killed,” he said.
“The RAF strikes are
done to very strict rules of engagement. They’ve been striking in Iraq
for a year where so far there have been no civilian casualties. The
Russians have been at it in Syria for a couple of weeks and independent
reports estimate that they’ve killed several hundred people already.”
Washington (CNN)The initial findings of an investigation into a U.S. airstrike against a hospital
in Kunduz, Afghanistan have concluded that the U.S. government was
aware the site was a hospital, two U.S. officials told CNN Friday. But
that information did not get passed to the correct military personnel,
they said.
The officials declined
to be identified because the investigation remains ongoing, and both
emphasized the initial information could still change as the
investigation proceeds. But Doctors Without Borders (MSF), who ran the
hospital, "did everything right in informing us," one of the officials
said. The location of the hospital "was in the military database" of
restricted sites such as hospitals, mosques and schools that U.S. pilots
are not allowed to strike even if insurgents are present.
Military
investigators are reviewing all available audio tapes and other
technical data that may have passed from a command center to the air
crew, and also to a special operations forces unit on the ground that
was talking to the plane.
Investigators
are also looking at whether the crew may have voiced concern about
engaging any target in that area of Kunduz since it did not appear to
meet the criteria for U.S. airstrikes. Under the "rules of engagement"
strikes are permitted to protect U.S. forces, to hit targets associated
with al Qaeda or to prevent mass casualties among Afghan forces.
The
rubble of a home reportedly hit by a U.S.-led coalition airstrike in
Kafar Daryan in Syria. (Photo: Sami Ali / AFP/Getty Images)
As the United States passes week seven of its expanded war on Iraq,
and week two of air strikes across Syria, a critical question remains
unanswered: Who exactly is dying in the air bombardments?
Many
fear this question will remain unanswered. "I'm concerned that the U.S.
is not held to the same standard as other countries when it comes to
violating international law and killing civilians," Raed Jarrar, Policy
Impact Coordinator for the American Friends Service Committee, told Common Dreams.
The
U.S. military and government have provided virtually no information
about civilian and combatant casualties and have denied on-the-ground
reports that innocent people are being killed and wounded in the
escalating attacks.
But this official version of events is
contradicted by mounting reports from Syria. As recently as Monday, the
Syrian Observatory for Human Rights announced
that overnight U.S. coalition bombings of alleged ISIS positions in
northern and eastern Syria took civilian lives, the exact number
unspecified. Observatory director Rami Abdurrahman told the Associated Press
that a strike on a grain silo in the town of Manbij in Aleppo province
"killed only civilians there, workers at the site. There was no ISIS
inside." He added that the bombings "destroyed the food that was stored
there."
The U.S. military on Monday denied the civilian deaths to Reuters but presented no evidence backing its claims. A U.S. Central Command statement
released Monday offered no further information about civilian or
combatant deaths, stating that air strikes were conducted against a
"ISIL vehicles within a staging area adjacent to an ISIL-held grain
storage facility near Manbij," in addition to other targets.
The Observatory is not the only organization to sound the alarm on civilian deaths. Human Rights Watch released a report
on Sunday that apparent U.S. missile strikes on Idlib in Syria on
September 23 killed at least seven civilians. "Three local residents
told Human Rights Watch that missiles killed at least two men, two
women, and five children," reads the report. Video footage from local
residents and the Shaam News Network, available on the HRW website, appear to verify that civilians were wounded and killed in the strikes. According to some estimates, as many as 24 civilians were killed in coalition air strikes on this day.
Pentagon
Spokesperson Navy Rear Adm. John Kirby denied those civilian deaths as
well, again offering no evidence. "This is a pretty remote area of the
country, mostly just desert. It's not — it's not urban," he told the Associated Press.
"We don't believe that there's much reason to be too concerned about
any collateral damage, you know, to civilian property, that kind of
thing."
But numerous journalists say their contacts corroborate
reports of civilian deaths, including Foreign Policy's Shane Harris, who
tweeted:
The Pentagon has also claimed
that civilians are spared in its ongoing bombings of Iraq, which now
number over 240 strikes since August eighth. But the U.S. has offered no
evidence backing this claim, and the National Iraqi News Agency
has reported that civilians have died in U.S. strikes on the country.
Numerous voices from Iraq and across the world warn that the renewed
U.S. war in the country is bringing further militarization and death to
ordinary Iraqi people, who are squeezed between siege from ISIS and
strikes from above.
According to Jarrar, the failure of the U.S. to account for the Iraqis killed in the 2003 war
raises serious concerns about U.S. accountability and honesty over who
it kills. "There is strong evidence that the U.S.-led attacks have
killed dozens of civilians in Syria in the last few weeks and killed
tens and thousands of civilians in Iraq over the last decade, and we
haven't seen any investigations into these crimes," said Jarrar. "There
is no reason to believe the U.S. will investigate itself."
Robert Naiman, policy director for Just Foreign Policy, told Common Dreams,
"There is a big danger here that U.S. air strikes in Syria are going to
resemble the drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen in the sense that
there is no accountability for who is killed. We have reports of
civilian casualties from people in the area and the U.S. government
says, 'No, they are bad guys.' There has to be some public
accountability for what happens when there are allegations of civilian
casualties."
According to Jarrar, the U.S. hand in civilian deaths
extends beyond direct bombings. "The indirect U.S. intervention is left
unchecked as well: U.S. training and funding and equipping proxy groups
in Iraq and Syria. There is very strong evidence that many of the U.S.
allies that have been receiving us military assistance and training and
equipments have been committing gross human rights violations and the
U.S. has not been held accountable."
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License
The
Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has documented death of
250124 persons since 18/03/2011, which witnessed the fall of the first
martyr in Daraa, until 10/15/2015.The casualties are as
follows:Civilians: 115627 including: 12517 children and 8062 female
over the age of 18 YPG, the rebel and Islamist fighters: 41201 Defected
soldiers and officers: 2551 Arab fighters from Gulf countries, Yemen,
Iraq, Egypt, North Africa, Palestine, Jordan, Sudan ... Read more
Published on Thursday, December 26, 2013 by Common Dreams
UN Officials: We Demand Answers for US Wedding Massacres in Yemen
Special Rapporteur Juan Méndez: 'A deadly attack on illegitimate targets amounts to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment'
- Sarah Lazare, staff writer
Children
gather near car destroyed in 2012 by a U.S. drone air strike in Azan,
in the southeastern Yemeni province of Shabwa. (Photo: Reuters / Khaled
Abdullah / Files)A suspected U.S. drone strike that killed
16 civilians attending a wedding in Yemen violates humanitarian law and
must be accounted for, declared UN experts on Thursday.
“A
deadly attack on illegitimate targets amounts to cruel, inhuman or
degrading treatment if, as in this case, it results in serious physical
or mental pain and suffering for the innocent victims,” said Special
Rapporteur on Torture Juan Méndez, according to a UN statement.
“If armed drones are to be used, States must adhere to international
humanitarian law, and should disclose the legal basis for their
operational responsibility and criteria for targeting,” said Christof
Heyns, UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary
executions. “Yemen cannot consent to violations of the right to life of
people in its territory."
Local security officials report that 16 civilians were killed and over 10 injured when drone missiles struck two wedding processions on December 12.
Despite this mass civilian death, confirmed in numerous media
reports, the U.S. government has so far refused to disclose information
on the legality, targets, and victims of these strikes.
The Obama administration has been famously secretive about the covert
drone wars of the United States while claiming that their civilian
death count is low, despite reports from Bureau of Investigative Journalism researchers who have documented high numbers of civilian deaths in Pakistan and Yemen.
As Tom Engelhardt recently pointed out, while
much media reported that the wedding was an "unlikely target" that was
struck mistakenly, there is in fact nothing unlikely or unique about
this wedding tragedy. According to "the count of
TomDispatch, this is at least the eighth wedding party reported wiped
out, totally or in part, since the Afghan War began and it extends the
extermination of wedding celebrants from the air to a third country — six destroyed in Afghanistan, one in Iraq, and now the first in Yemen," writes Engelhardt.
"And in all those years, reporters covering these “incidents” never
seem to notice that similar events had occurred previously."
He adds, "The only thing that made the Yemeni incident unique was the
drone. The previous strikes were reportedly by piloted aircraft."
_____________________
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Mr Fallon says Russia is prolonging the war by targeting all opponents of President Assad 
