ISIS in the West: the new faces of extremism
On Friday, November 13, 2015, France had its 9/11. At least 129 people were killed at multiple locations in and around Paris, including a concert hall, a soccer stadium, and a popular restaurant, the kinds of venues that ordinary Parisians flock to on a Friday night. At, or near, these venues the attackers deployed a mix of terrorist tactics, including multiple suicide attackers, an assault using more than one gunman willing to fight to the death, hostage-taking, and bombings. In the years after 9/11, we have seen various forms of this terrible news story play out before: the multiple bombs on trains in Madrid that killed 191 in 2004; a year later, the four suicide bombings in London that killed 52 commuters; the attacks in Mumbai by 10 gunmen willing to fight to the death in 2008, who killed 166; and the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris in January 2015 that killed 12 people. The attackers in Paris seemed to have learned lessons from all these attacks.
