France liftoffs air strikes in Syria
French warplanes pounded Daesh or Islamic State positions in Syria on Sunday as police widened their investigations into coordinated attacks that killed more than 130 people.
Daesh has claimed responsibility for Friday’s suicide bombings and shootings, which have re-ignited a row over the refugee crisis in Europe and brought calls to block a huge inflow of Muslim asylum seekers.
French police have started a global search to get a Belgian-born man they consider helped organise the assaults with two of his brothers. While the second one is under arrest in Belgium among the brothers died in the strikes, a judicial source said.
An additional two French suicide attackers have been identified, authorities said, while four other assailants’ identity, who all died in the violence, was still under review.
France is bombing Islamic State positions in Iraq and Syria for months within a U.S.-led operation. Following Friday’s mayhem, Paris vowed to destroy the group. Underlining its resoluteness, French jets on Sunday launched their largest raids reaching its stronghold in Raqqa.
One of the targets were a munitions depot and training camp, it said.
There was no word on casualties or the damage inflicted.
Few strategists expected change or a drawn-out economic impact in prevailing market ways, although the Paris strikes were seen causing a short term selloff in international stock markets on Monday.
The investigation into the attacks of Friday, the worst atrocity in France since World War Two, led quickly to Belgium after authorities found that a couple of the automobiles employed by the militants had been leased in the Brussels region.
By Sunday, Belgian officials said they had arrested seven individuals in Brussels. But one of the folks who’d hired the automobiles slipped through the fingers of law enforcement. World was pulled over on the French-Belgian border on Saturday, but after released.
Cops named the man they were seeking as Salah Abdeslam, saying the 26-year old was “dangerous”. French authorities said he was a French national, although he was born in Brussels.
“The abject strikes that hit us on Friday were prepared abroad and mobilised a team in Belgium that benefited … from help in France,” French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve told reporters after meeting his Belgian counterpart in Paris.
Stunned by the carnage, thousands of men and women thronged at four where the assaults took place, putting flowers and lighting candles to remember the dead.
“It’s all so senseless. She had only just got married.”
The death toll increased with three more people expiring on Sunday. Some 103 happen to be identified, including many foreigners and many young folks, out relaxing in one of the world’s most visited cities on a Friday night.