Paris Muslims condemn ISIS
Police launch early-morning raids in wake of attacks
PARIS— Mohammed is French, a Parisian and a Muslim from Damascus. And if he’d been on the wrong street corner on Friday, he’s sure he’d be dead.
“I’m not afraid of anyone. Just God. But it doesn’t matter; if I had been there that night at le Carillon, they would have killed me,” said Mohammed. Instead, he was praying late on Monday at the Grande Mosquée de Paris, and wouldn’t give his family name.
Firing blindly into crowded restaurant and bar terraces and a packed concert hall, gunmen killed 129 people and wounded hundreds more, including at least 12 outside Le Carillon in the 10th arrondissement.
“They weren’t picking people out one by one,” Mohammed said. The attackers aimed at no one in particular: just Parisians enjoying a regular Friday evening out.
A day after the Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the attacks, police in France launched about 168 early-morning raids targeting those potentially connected to the attacks or to militant Islamist groups.
Police arrested at least 23 people and recovered weapons, including an assault rifle and a rocket launcher.
The Islamic State’s world is black and white, Mohammed said. You’re the right type of Muslim, following the group’s narrow, brutal brand of faith — or you’re a target.
“The plan is to divide people,” he said: to make people pick sides, and cut out the middle.
An article in the February issue of the Islamic State’s online Englishlanguage magazine, Dabiq, describes exactly that strategy: eliminate what the organization called the “grey zone,” or all of those whose beliefs didn’t align exactly with either Islamic State or Western governments.
“Of course no one supports this. No Muslim supports this,” Mohammed added. “Look in Iraq, look in Syria. It’s Muslims who are dying, who Daesh is killing,” he said, using the Arabic name for Islamic State. In a statement on Saturday, France’s largest Muslim associations described the attacks as acts of “the most abject barbarism.”
Gendarmes with assault rifles stood guard outside the Grande Mosquée on Monday. Memorial services for the people killed in the attacks are scheduled for later this week.
Late on Sunday, Nassim Ouriachi, an Algerian student living in Paris, stood quietly in the crowd gathered outside La Belle Équipe bar, where he had come to visit the spot where19 people were killed.
Behind him in the crowd of people standing around the bar, a small group argued loudly about the cause of the attacks. “It’s Muslims who are paying for this to happen, sending money to terrorism,” one woman said.
Ouriachi was frustrated, but said little. “The first victims of terrorism, always the first, are other Muslims,” he said later.
With police confirming that they believed several of the attackers were French, Ouriachi said he worried that Islamic State was recruiting young people in the country.
“Daesh, they’re recruiting kids born here, kids who don’t know anything, brainwashing them, telling them to kill,” he said.
He pointed to Paris’s suburbs — les banlieues — many of which are home to disaffected youth living with high unemployment in crowded housing projects, the focal point of urban unrest several times in recent years.
“Go out into the banlieues. It’s a different world,” Ouriachi said.
It was 10 years ago in the suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois that the deaths of two teenagers fleeing police sparked weeks of rioting that set the region on fire and spread across the country.
After two weeks, the French government declared a state of emergency, the first time it had done so in metropolitan France.
President François Hollande said on Monday he hoped to extend the current state of emergency.
The city remains tense. Police closed a major boulevard on the Left Bank on Monday afternoon while bomb disposal units examined a suspicious vehicle, and soldiers cleared the Austerlitz railway station and suspended metro service to investigate a bag left in the station. Both incidents were false alarms.
“Of course no one supports this. No Muslim supports this. Look in Iraq, look in Syria. It’s Muslims who are dying, who Daesh is killing.” MOHAMMED PARIS RESIDENT