Victims see satisfaction, no closure in death of ISIS leader

PARIS — For Georges Salines, whose 28-year-old daughter Lola was killed when Islamic extremists went on a bloody rampage in Paris in 2015, the death of the man who inspired the attack brought a welcome “sense of satisfaction.”

But like other survivors and families of victims of the Islamic State group, Salines stressed that the death of its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, does not mean the fight against terrorism is over.

“It would have been even better if al-Baghdadi could have been captured and sent to trial,” Salines told The Associated Press. “That was probably impossible. We knew that for a long time.”

Al-Baghdadi was responsible for directing and inspiring attacks by his followers around the world. In Iraq and Syria, he steered his organization into committing acts of brutality on a mass scale: massacres of his opponents; beheadings and stonings that were broadcast to a shocked audience on the internet; and the kidnapping and enslavement of women.

His death was announced Sunday by President Donald Trump, who said al-Baghdadi detonated an explosive vest while being pursued by U.S. forces in Syria, killing himself and three of his children. It was another major blow to the Islamic State group, which in March was forced by U.S. and Kurdish forces out of the last part of its self-declared “caliphate” that once spanned a swath of Iraq and Syria at its height.

The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the Nov. 13, 2015, attacks on Paris cafes, the national stadium and the Bataclan concert hall that left 130 people dead, including Lola Salines and Thomas Duperron, 30. Duperron’s father, Philippe, who is president of French victims’ association 13onze15, which takes its name from the date of the attacks, said al-Baghdadi’s death was “not bad news.”

“One major player of the Islamic state group’s actions has disappeared,” he told AP, although he said that his group would not express joy at any death. A trial of suspects in the Paris attacks is expected to begin in 2021. French prosecutors said this month that the judicial investigation of the attacks has ended and that 1,740 plaintiffs have joined the proceedings. Fourteen people have been charged in the case, including Salah Abdeslam, the only surviving suspect of the group of assailants.

French magistrates had recently issued an international arrest warrant for al-Baghdadi in a counterterrorism investigation for “heading or organizing a criminal terrorist conspiracy.”

Arthur Denouveaux, a Bataclan survivor and president of the Life for Paris victims’ group, told the French newspaper Le Parisien “us, the victims, are not seeking revenge … but a desire for justice.” Al-Baghdadi’s death is “symbolically a major blow to the operational capacities” of the ISIS group, he said. The ISIS group claimed responsibility for three suicide bombings in Brussels on March 22, 2016, that killed 32 people at its airport and in a metro station. Philippe Vansteenkiste, who lost his sister in the airport bombing and went on to become director of V-Europe, an association of victims of those attacks, said he knows the fight is not over. “This is a new step in the fight against Daesh, but I’m not naive,” Vansteenkiste said, using an Arabic acronym for the militant group.