France and Russia both staged airstrikes on Islamic State (IS) targets in northern Syria yesterday as Paris formally requested EU assistance in its fight against the group behind Friday’s attacks on the French capital.
French warplanes targeted a command post and a recruitment center for militants in the Islamic State stronghold of Raqqa, Syria, in the second consecutive night of strikes ordered by French President Francois Hollande, a military command spokesman said.
A French government source said Russia hit targets in the same area, a day after Hollande appealed to Washington and Moscow to join in a grand coalition to fight the Muslim group that controls swathes of Syria and Iraq.
Photo: AP
In Brussels, French Minister of Defense Jean-Yves Le Drian invoked the EU’s mutual assistance clause for the first time since the 2009 Lisbon Treaty introduced the possibility, saying he expected help with French operations in Syria, Iraq and Africa.
“This is firstly a political act,” Le Drian told a news conference after a meeting of EU defense ministers.
The 28 EU member states accepted the French request, but it was not immediately clear what assistance would be forthcoming.
Photo: Bloomberg
Britain is agonizing over whether to join airstrikes in Syria, while Germany is reticent about joining military action outside Europe.
A manhunt was continuing in France and Belgium yesterday for one of the eight attackers who killed 129 people in shooting and bomb attacks on restaurants, a music hall and a sports stadium in the Paris region on Friday.
French police staged 128 raids overnight in the hunt for accomplices and Muslim militant networks, French Minister of the Interior Bernard Cazeneuve said.
Police found a third Belgian-licensed car believed to have been used by the attackers and sealed off the area around it in Paris’ 18th district.
Cazeneuve told France Info radio police were making rapid progress in their investigation into the attacks.
The French strike on Raqqa involved 10 fighter jets launched from the United Arab Emirates and Jordan.
A French government source said Russia, which until this week has mostly been striking Western-backed groups fighting against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, had also hit IS targets in Raqqa yesterday.
One top suspect, Frenchman Salah Abdeslam, 26, remains at large after escaping back to Belgium early on Saturday and eluding a police dragnet in the Brussels neighborhood of Sint-Jans-Molenbeek, where he lived with his two brothers.
Hollande met visiting US Secretary of State John Kerry yesterday morning to press his call for separate US-led and Russian-led coalitions in Syria to combine forces and give priority to fighting Islamic State. Kerry said afterwards that Islamic State was losing territory in Syria and Iraq, while the Western-backed coalition was gaining ground.
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