Lesson: don't fuck with the French

Andrew Higgins and Dan Bilefsky have an article in The New York Times about the appropriate end to their hostage crisis:

The French police killed three terrorists in raids, ending three days of bloodshed that shook a nation struggling with Islamic extremists. At least seventeen French citizens were killed by terrorists in the chaos, first in a massacre at a satirical newspaper that some Muslims believed insulted the Prophet Muhammad, and then, in a roadside shooting on Thursday and two standoffs on Friday that left the gunmen and four of their hostages dead.
The raids, led by heavily armed elite police units, unfolded nearly simultaneously on the eastern edge of Paris and north of the city— at a printing plant where the two brothers of Algerian descent suspected in the newspaper attack held a hostage, and at a kosher supermarket where an armed associate of African origin had lined the place with explosives and threatened to kill the shoppers at his mercy.
In a solemn address to the nation, President François Hollande called this week’s violence, the worst spasm of terrorism in France since the 1954-62 Algerian War, the work of “madmen, fanatics” who had created “a tragedy for the nation that we were obliged to confront.”
During the assault on the Hyper Cacher supermarket, the police units were sprayed with bullets, said Christophe Tirante, a senior police official. The police also said the supermarket had been booby-trapped, making it especially hard to get to the hostage taker.
Rocco Contento, a spokesman for the Unité S.G.P. police union in Paris, said the police had been helped by someone hiding in a cold meat locker in the supermarket who had texted helpful messages. Four of the hostages were killed, but the Paris prosecutor, François Molins, said that all had died when the terrorist stormed the supermarket in the early afternoon, not in the police raid.
Denouncing the attack on the store as a “terrifying act of anti-Semitism,” Hollande saluted the security forces for their “courage, bravura and efficiency,” but warned that France was “not finished with the threats of which it is the target”.
Also far from over are the shock waves created by a drama that sharply escalated longstanding worries about France’s impoverished immigrant suburbs and the radicalization of disenfranchised young people on society’s margins. And many questions remain about the failure of the French security apparatus to disrupt the actions of militants who had links to operatives working with al Qaeda in Yemen. The militants (see a related article here) had been known to the police for years and had been closely monitored by the intelligence services.
al Qaeda in Yemen, also known as al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, did not issue an official statement on the events in France. But a member claiming to speak for the group sent The New York Times a statement saying that the attacks had been orchestrated through its leadership in Yemen. “The target was in France in particular because of its obvious role in the war on Islam and oppressed nations,” the statement said.
Concerns about further attacks were underscored by remarks from Harith al-Nadhari, a militant cleric who speaks for al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The Associated Press reported that he had issued a recording on the group’s Twitter feed that denounced the “filthy” French, called the dead militants heroes, and warned France, “You will not enjoy peace as long as you wage war on God and his prophets and fight Muslims.”
The events are already resonating in French politics and could further strengthen a surging far-right party, the National Front, which has railed against what it says is the failure of immigrants, Muslims in particular, to integrate into French society.
But the raids on Friday— one on the printing plant in Dammartin-en-Goële, a village near Charles de Gaulle Airport, north of Paris, and the other on the kosher store in Porte de Vincennes at the eastern edge of the city— eased a dark and at times panicked mood that had gripped the public and politicians since the massacre of twelve people at the Charlie Hebdo newspaper.
Fear that the crisis was slipping beyond the control of Hollande’s already beleaguered Socialist government had stirred calls from some conservative politicians for a state of emergency. There had also been several retaliatory attacks on mosques and an explosion at a kebab shop in eastern France.
Hollande, denouncing racism and anti-Semitism, said the week’s mayhem had “nothing to do with Islam” and described unity as the nation’s “best weapon”.
Saïd Kouachi, 34, the older of the two brothers suspected of carrying out the attack on Charlie Hebdo, traveled to Yemen in 2011 and received training from al Qaeda’s affiliate there before returning to France, according to American officials.
Shortly before being killed in police shootouts, Chérif Kouachi and a man believed to have killed a police officer spoke on the phone with a French television station. His younger brother, Chérif Kouachi, 32, a sometime pizza delivery man and fishmonger, said he, too, had trained in Yemen. He had been arrested in France in 2005 as he prepared to leave for Syria, the first leg of a trip he had hoped would take him to Iraq; he was convicted three years later.
During the attack on the newspaper, the assailants identified themselves as part of al Qaeda in Yemen and shouted, Allahu akbar, meaning, God is great. Their open embrace of Islam during an act of violence was seized on by those who had been warning about what they called the gulf between Islam and the values of the West.
The hostage taker at the supermarket was identified as Amedy Coulibaly, a 32-year-old Frenchman of African descent who had fatally shot a police officer in the south of Paris on Thursday. He was a friend of the younger Kouachi brother, Chérif.
The police said that both Coulibaly and Kouachi were followers of Djamel Beghal, a French-Algerian champion of jihad who was jailed in 2001 for planning an attack on the American Embassy in Paris.
Alain Grignard, a senior Belgian counterterrorism official who has investigated jihadist groups in France for decades, said in a telephone interview that, while it was uncertain whether the attacks had been coordinated, it was clear that the attackers had known each other and been part of the same network. He said their training and expertise showed that they were “not kids from the poor, working-class suburbs who just decided to do this”.
The attack in Porte de Vincennes appeared to have been calculated to distract attention from the Kouachi brothers as they tried to avoid capture by the police, who had been searching for them since Wednesday, Grignard said.
After a fruitless chase that extended into northern France and back toward Paris, the police tracked the brothers early Friday to Dammartin-en-Goële. The brothers, armed with Kalashnikov rifles and a grenade launcher, seized the printing plant and took a hostage. The police said the brothers had been located by helicopters with heat sensors. Soon afterward, residents of Dammartin-en-Goële, a sleepy rural village of eight thousand saw what looked like commandos drop from helicopters on ropes.
Planes at nearby Charles de Gaulle Airport were advised to avoid certain runways.
Officials ordered residents to stay indoors and close window shutters. Students were locked down in local schools, and police officers sealed off all roads.
While the brothers took control of the printing plant, the crisis took an unnerving turn when their associate, Coulibaly, seized hostages at the kosher supermarket about thirty miles away. Coulibaly, who the authorities said had gunned down a female police officer on Thursday in Montrouge, a suburb south of Paris, threatened to kill his hostages if the police attacked the Kouachi brothers. The authorities said they believed Coulibaly was part of the same jihadist network as the brothers, and issued photographs of him and Ms. Boumeddiene.
In a measure of the jitters pervading Paris during the sieges, the police ordered shopkeepers on Rue des Rosiers, a street with many Jewish-owned businesses, to close as a precaution. The French news media said the Grand Synagogue of Paris had closed for security reasons, not hosting Shabbat services for the first time since World War Two.
In an effort to calm the rising alarm, Hollande sought to assure the public that Paris remained safe. He walked, escorted by bodyguards, from his office at the Élysée Palace in the center of the city to the nearby headquarters of the Interior Ministry. “France is going through a trying time,” he told officials at the ministry, vowing to regain control after attacks he described as “the worst of the past fifty years”.
With helicopters circling Dammartin-en-Goële as a cold drizzle fell, the police established contact with the brothers in the printing plant and began negotiations.

Rico says the French have no sense of humor about some things...