“Like the Taliban which banned sports events, music, and celebrations, the ISIS nihilists offer a vision of the world so foreign to any of us as to be incomprehensible. And this nihilist vision now presents the French government with a genuine “how to res

devil in this house”), then surely the Quai d’Orsay now has to hold its nose and switch its focus from removing Assad to wiping out ISIS?

With that in mind, and in the context of the broader Middle Eastern civil war, this weekend’s tragedy is good news for Russia and Iran, and bad news for the Gulf states as attention will increasingly shift to neutralising the source of the fundamentalist ideology. One immediate result of the Paris attacks was to win support for accelerated US-Russian backed talks between all the main regional powers that aim for a resolution to the Syrian civil war.

Last weekend’s military-style terrorist act in Paris will hopefully turn out to be ISIS’s “Operation Barabarossa”, an action marking the apex of its powers, but one which sparks a coordinated response leading to its eventual liquidation.