Known as the City of Lights, Paris loves its nights. On Friday, tens of thousands of Parisians were out to enjoy the night – watching a friendly soccer game between Germany and France at the Stade de France, listening to an American band at the Bataclan concert hall, drinking their favorite cocktail at the La Belle Equipe Bar and Le Carillon Bar, having dinner at the LA Casa Nostra restaurant and Petit Cambodge, or simply strolling along Rue Albert.
But it was Friday the 13th and something tragic was bound to happen.
The bloodbath began soon after 11 p.m. A gunman opened fire on Le Carillon bar in the Rue Albert, near the Place de la République, before heading across the road to Le Petit Cambodge (Little Cambodia) restaurant, killing a total of 15 people.
At the La Belle Équipe, at least 19 died in gun attacks. At the La Casa Nostra Restaurant, at least five were shot dead.
At the 1,500-seat Bataclan concert hall, hundreds of people were waiting for the American rock band eagles of Death Metal to perform when attackers, wearing vests strapped with explosives shouted “ Allahu Akbar!” (God is great) and then opened fire, killing at least 80 and seriously wounding many more in a matter of seconds. They later took 20 hostages and executed seven of them before detonating their explosives as policemen started their assault.
The security forces that stormed the concert hall found four attackers dead. Three had blown themselves up and a fourth was shot dead by police.
To the north, two suicide bombers blasted themselves near the entrance of Stade de France national stadium where some 80,000 gathered to watch a soccer game, including French President Francois Hollande who was quickly evacuated.
Surprisingly, only the three suicide bombers were killed.
On that tragic night, at least 129 people were dead and more than 350 wounded, some of them in critical condition. It was a dark night in the City of Lights.
The Islamic State released a statement on Saturday, saying that eight brothers using explosive belts and varying assault rifles had carried out attacks on “carefully chosen” targets in response to France’s involvement in the air strikes on IS militants in Syria and Iraq.
The world grieved as it had on the morning of September 11, 2001, when three planes hijacked by terrorists slammed into the two towers of the World Trade Center in New York and at the Pentagon in Virginia, killing close to 3,000 people.
Europe was again gripped in fear as it had been when jihadists attacked the offices of Charlie Hebdo newspaper and killed 17 and wounded 11 in January, and when errorists bombed a train in Madrid in 2004, killing 191 people.
Hollande imposed a state of emergency after the worst peacetime attack in France since WWII and the deadliest in Europe since the 2004 Madrid bombings.
The attacks came ahead of three major international events where some of the world’s leaders were expected to attend – the G-20 summit in Turkey, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Manila, and the 2015 Climate Change Conference in Paris.
The attacks should give the world’s leaders the motivation to finally work together to address the problem of global terrorism and put an end to, if not minimize, the barbaric acts of extremists around the globe, particularly in the Middle East and in Africa.
Intelligence officials are known to be tracking down several jihadist cells operating in Europe, particularly in Belgium, France and Turkey. Europeans are now worried that the ISIS had embedded some of its jihadists with the refugees who had fled Syria to find peace and better life in Europe.
While Al Qaeda, which was responsible for the 9-11 attacks, has been weakened by the death of its leader Osama bin Laden, but the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which has carved a territory in strife-torn Iraq and Syria, has emerged as the world’s newest and biggest threat. In Africa, the Nigeria-based Boko Haram has killed more than 17,000 people since 2009, including 10,000 in 2014. It has also carried out mass abductions, including the kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls in April 2014.
In April this year, another Islamic extremist group, the Somalia-based Al Shabaab militant group killed 147 people and wounded scores of others at a Kenyan university, the highest death toll on Kenyan soil since the US Embassy in Nairobi was bombed in 1998, resulting in the death of more than 200 people.
There are more Islamic extremist groups that are sowing terror all over the world. These include the Haqqani Network and the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Kataib Hezzbolah in Iraq, the Jemaah Islamiyah which has cells in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines, and the Abu Sayyaf in Mindanao.
The world’s leaders have three opportunities this month to pool their resources and come together with a coordinated action against the ISIS and other terror groups in their bases of operation, particularly in Syria and Iraq, and against terror cells operating throughout the world, particularly in the United States and in Europe.
These barbaric extremists that President Obama called “the face of evil” have declared war against humanity and civilization. They don’t care about human lives and celebrate death and terror. The world has to fight back and remove this scourge from the face of the earth.
(valabelgas@aol.com)