The terrorist attacks in Paris on Friday, along with bombings in Beirut on the day before and the downing of a Russian civil aircraft over the Sinai Peninsula on October 31, show a new phase in the Islamic State’s war against the West, a readiness to strike far beyond areas it controls in Iraq, Syria, and increasingly, Libya, according to the US media.
It mostly concerns the United States and Russia, but it also means persuading more European and Middle Eastern nations to join in the mission.
“France must take measures to protect its citizens, as must the United States, Russia and all the other countries — Western and Middle Eastern — threatened by the Islamic State’s murderous dream of a new caliphate,” says the editorial in The New York Times.
At the same time, it says it is clear that the prevention of further ISIL attacks will require threatened states to find a way to end the Syrian civil war, which has made it possible for this terrorist group to gain wealth, territory and power.
Pouring fuel on the passions swirling around refugees and Muslims in Europe was no doubt a major goal behind the ISIL attack, it adds.
The choice of the neighborhoods where most attacks occurred, an ethnically diverse area in eastern Paris increasingly populated by young professionals, seemed designed to send the message that tolerance would be no protection against what ISIL described in a communiqué as the coming “storm.”
