A truck plowed through a crowd gathered in Nice, France for Bastille Day celebrations on Thursday, killing at least 84 people and injuring dozens more.
In a statement in the early hours after the attack, French President François Hollande said that “there’s no denying the terrorist nature of this attack of yet again the most extreme form of violence” and announced a three-month extension of the state of national emergency. The investigation is still unfolding, however, and no claims of responsibility have yet been made.
The Cipher Brief spoke with Colin Clarke, a terrorism expert at the RAND Corporation, on Friday morning to get his initial analysis on the lethal attack in France.
The Cipher Brief: It's still very early in the investigation, but do you have initial, first thoughts on it or things that have struck you as important to point out?
Colin Clarke: The first thing that hit me was that it’s France. We’ve seen France as the country that’s been under siege, not only in the Charlie Hebdo attack, but then in the attack on the Bataclan last November, and there’s been several smaller incidents. I think there’s something on the odds of 1800 French citizens that have left to go fight in Iraq and Syria, and so that gives you a sense of how widespread and entrenched this ideology of Salafi-jihadism actually is in France. You look at major cities like Paris, and not only in the city of Paris, but what they call the banlieues, those areas ringing the city, and places like Marseille, Toulouse, Nice — these are places that are filled with angry, ideologically-driven young men, typically second or third generation from North Africa or the Middle East, who buy in and subscribe to this vision that groups like al Qaeda, al Qaeda’s affiliates in the Arabian Peninsula, and now ISIS have put out there. France is a huge, huge target for these groups and for individuals.
We don’t yet know who is behind this. That’s part of the forensics that people are going to conduct in the days and weeks ahead, whether or not this was a “lone wolf,” or whether this was someone that was directed from ISIS’s command and control structure, or another group. You have to remember that in the Charlie Hebdo attack, the Kouachi brothers were tied to AQAP in Yemen.
TCB: What happened in Nice is being investigated by France as a terrorist attack. What might that entail and how will the investigation proceed, generally? How might authorities try to find out about the perpetrator and how the attack was planned?
CC: They’re going to investigate the forensics of this individual’s background. They’ll probably go to his apartment and turn it upside down and figure out what kind of materials he may have in there. They’re obviously going to look for his laptop or any kind of electronics to see if he might have been in communication with anyone overseas, with any group.
He’s been identified as Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, a 31-year-old delivery truck driver born in Tunisia but moved to France in about 2005. So they’re going to talk to friends and relatives, get hints of whether this is someone who had expressed radical beliefs.
And then you have to remember, at the end of the day, terrorism is political violence. This was clearly the act of someone determined to kill large numbers of people. What was the point of it? Was it to make some kind of political point? And if it was, that certainly falls into the bin of terrorism. Now French authorities have come out already, pretty early, and said that they believe it is terrorism. They may know something that we don’t. This may be somebody that they’ve had on a watch list or had prior information on. From what I’ve read, he had a criminal background, but that’s not uncommon to many attackers. A lot of times these guys get their start in petty crime, and theft, and drug dealing, low levels of criminal activity. I don’t yet know if he spent time in jail, because that’s a place where a lot of people become “radicalized,” particularly in Europe. It’s a bit too early for me to speculate. But listening to the French authorities, it seems like they are pretty convinced this was terrorism.
TCB: About the tactics — is there significance in using a truck? Can you speak at all to how people who work on terrorism, authorities who consider security plans, take into account these kind of tactical changes? This isn’t new in any way, but it’s another thing people have to consider.
CC: This is something that’s been out there for a long time. You’ve had jihadist ideologues saying, ‘If you can’t get your hands on a gun, stab somebody. If you can’t stab somebody, run them over with your car. Really, any way you can inflict damage on the infidel is permissible.’ And so, frankly, I’m surprised that it’s taken this long for something like this to happen. It would seem that it’s pretty easy to do, and it’s nearly impossible to stop. What are you going to do, ban cars and trucks? It’s not like with gun control, where you can take more concerted measures, as many countries in Europe have, and have limited weapons. This is something that is an everyday, common object, if you think about it, that could be used to kill. We just take it for granted that people aren’t going to do that. And when you have these large gatherings, it takes very little planning to pull off and it can yield - the last number I saw was 84 dead - really high levels of lethality.
And then on top of that, part of the purpose of terrorism is to terrorize. When people are thinking, “I could be mowed down by a vehicle at any moment,” that really strikes fear into the heart of ordinary citizens and the general public.
TCB: French President Hollande said he will extend the French state of emergency implemented after the Paris attacks an additional three months. What does that really entail? What’s kind of the effectiveness level of such a state of emergency?
CC: From my understanding, it’s really just dedicating more resources and manpower, and keeping a high level of alert to make people aware. Legally, it offers the French authorities more leverage in what they can do in terms of conducting raids and conducting surveillance. I’ve never quite understood why people make these very public pronouncements — I think it’s political in a certain respect. Especially in a country like France, where there are concerns over civil liberties, privacy, and security. But as I’ve said, this is a country that’s been under siege for the better part of a couple of years now. People are on edge and for good reason. This seems to be the number one target within Europe. We’re talking about all the attacks that happened, but there have been several that have been stopped as well.
As a primary tourist destination for a lot of people around the world — I was in Paris myself in spring of 2015 to give a talk at the OECD on terrorism – France is a great country, and Paris is one of the most beautiful cities in the world. I think people might think twice about going to France when they see incidents like this happening again and again.
Part of me feels for French law enforcement and authorities, because attacks like this are nearly impossible to stop. But clearly there is not enough manpower and resources to surveil, monitor, and track all the individuals that are suspected of having ties to some radical groups or have radical views and might seek to translate those views. The most difficult part is trying to figure out who is going to go from having these views to taking action. It’s only a very small percentage of people that do that. Finding out who those people are and predicting it beforehand is very, very difficult.
TCB: Is there anything else you think is particularly important right now to note?
CC: What I’m following is this kind of Twitterverse of all these ISIS fanboys cheering this attack. But as of this morning [Friday, July 15], there are still no claims by ISIS. This is something I’ve talked to some of my colleagues about. I think it’s really detrimental when in the very early stages of an attack like this, everybody automatically says, ‘Oh, this must be ISIS,’ because it affords the group with this kind of invincible image. I think in many respects, the media is building this group up to be more capable than it is. And when things like that happen, I think we need to just be more patient, a bit more parsimonious in our analysis of these kind of attacks. As hard as it is—because we live in this 24/7 news cycle—we’ve got to wait and be more deliberate in figuring out, ok, what was this attack all about and was it inspired by ISIS, was it even connected to ISIS at all? Because if it wasn’t, just lumping everything under this ISIS banner is really, I think, counterproductive in both the short and the long-term.
Colin Clarke is a terrorism expert and political scientist at the RAND Corporation and a lecturer at Carnegie Mellon University. Clarke focuses his research on insurgency, political violence, transnational terrorism, criminal networks and other international security issues.
