January 7, 2015 | Quoted by Armin Rosen - Business Insider
Some Possibilities For Who Might Be Responsible For The Paris Attack
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“A few data points suggest Al Qaeda. A few data points suggest ISIS. And we just don't have enough information to really know right now,” Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told Business Insider.
Gartenstein-Ross added that the competition between Al Qaeda and ISIS, which represent differing strains of jihadist practice and thought and are competing for recruits, affiliates, and support around the world, all but ensures that one of the organizations will claim responsibility, assuming one of them is in fact responsible.
But there's no clear time-frame for a claim of responsiblity. It took Al Qaeda about a year to declare itself responsible for the July 7th, 2005 attacks in London, although Gartenstein-Ross believes that competition between ISIS and Al Qaeda will make the groups more eager to connect themselves to the Paris attack.
At this point, one of the likelier possibilities — relatively speaking — is the attackers probably aren't finished.
“I think there's a strong possibility they intend to carry out a secondary attack,” Gartenstein-Ross says. In that case, the Paris attack could be reminiscent of the 2008 Mumbai attacks, another “urban warfare”-style gun attack in which terrorists from the Pakistani jihadist group Lashkar-e-Taiba moved between multiple targets. But Gartenstein-Ross notes that in Paris, the attackers “launched the attack and then made a getaway,” which wasn't the case in Mumbai, where the attackers they “stood and fought every step of the way.”
A possible precedent here could be Mohammed Merah, a jihadist who killed 7 people over a 8-day period in the French city of Tolouse in March of 2012. His rampage that culminated in an attack on a Jewish school in which 4 people were killed. The Toulouse killer carried out his attacks over a span of a week, and it's possible that a secondary attack in Paris could be days rather than hours away.
But like Watts, Gartenstein-Ross cautions that any analysis at this point has a degree of speculation behind it: “The fact is we have very little information right now.”