Tariq Saeedi
Ashgabat, 16 November 2015 (nCa) — The Paris Carnage of 13 November 2015 is a chilling warning for Central Asia.
Let’s look at some of the facts that have been found so far by the investigators:
- One of the attackers in the Paris Carnage has been identified as the French citizen Ismael Omar Mostefai. He was born on 21 November 1985 in Courcouronnes, Essonne and lived in Chartres, which is a Banlieues in southwest of Paris. Banlieues are the low income housing zones with concentration of poor citizens or immigrants, mainly the non-native citizens. Mostefai had a long criminal record though he never served any prison time.
- One of the suspects of Paris Carnage is possibly a Syrian citizen born in 1990. He came through the Greek Island of Leros on 3 October 2015 and was registered under the EU rules. The Greek officials have suggested that two of the suspects may have arrived in the European Union through Greece in the recent months.
- Three persons have been arrested by the Belgian police from Molenbeek, a poor, immigrant area of Brussels, the equivalent of banlieues in France. One of them is a French citizen. There is some evidence that the attacks were planned in Molenbeek. It is noteworthy that a Moroccan-born member of the group behind the 2004 Madrid train bombing that killed 191 was from Molenbeek. The attacker involved in the Paris kosher grocery in January 2015 acquired weapons from Molenbeek. The man who was overpowered in August 2015 on a Thalys high speed train from Brussels to Paris also got weapons from Molenbeek. The alleged plot to attack the Belgian police in January, which was broken up by raids in which two men were killed in the eastern town of Verviers, had connections to Molenbeek. And a Frenchman accused of shooting dead four people last year at the Jewish Museum in Brussels also spent time in Molenbeek.
- Some media reports say that 40 hand grenades, 180 detonators, and plastic explosive was stolen from a French army base in August this year.
- The German police arrested on 5 November 2015 a Montenegrin man who was on Autobahn-8 after crossing from Austria. He was found with two handguns, grenades, eight Kalashnikovs, two hand grenades and 200 grams of TNT. The GPS in his car and the cell phone were programmed for route to Paris. The alarming thing is that he drove 500 miles from the Balkans and another 300 miles within the Schengen zone before being detected.
- It took just eight attackers to cause all of this death and destruction.
- The choice of targets was on the softest side i.e. stadium, theater and restaurants, the kind of places that are either lightly guarded or not guarded at all.
So, these are the basic ingredients that, when combined, shook the whole world: A small group of plotters who could hide in a disenfranchised ghetto, a smaller group that was ready to die for a cause, the arms and ammunitions that were either smuggled or stolen, possibly a mix of both, a network of sympathizers, the ability to spot the loopholes in the system and exploit them, and the negligence of the authorities to connect the developments in a timely manner.
ISIS or no ISIS, this can easily be replicated in Central Asia. Every government in Central Asia must take measures according to its circumstances to prevent this from happening.