01/07/15 – Mitchell Prothero – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys.
Welcome back to the show.
I got Mitch Prothero on the line.
He's a reporter for McClatchy Newspapers.
That's McClatchyDC.com.
You can also read him at the SAC-B, the Miami Herald, and what's the other one I've been looking at lately?
We got 31.
I can't keep them all straight.
If you get stuck behind a paywall, just clear your cookies and hit refresh, and you can read Mitch Prothero.
There he is at McClatchy DC.
Hey, welcome back to the show.
You could pay money.
Yeah, you could do that too.
Does anybody do that?
I don't know.
I guess somebody must.
All right.
Hey, are you back in Kurdistan now, or where are you at?
Yeah, I'm in Erbil, Iraq.
Okay, there you go.
Well, you and I are going to have to catch up on the war here pretty soon, but right now we've got to talk about massive breaking news.
Paris, France this morning, two gunmen armed with AK-47s killed.
We think three.
Three now.
Well, go ahead, take it from there.
What all do we know about the attack in Paris this morning, and what all don't we know?
Okay, well, at this stage, the French Interior Ministry has come out, and we've been talking to eyewitnesses as well.
Obviously, I've been covering it from Iraq.
We've got a correspondent on his way from Berlin to Paris who will end up giving us some stuff, I think, from the ground.
But I did a lot of reporting earlier this fall on some French jihadist stuff, so I had some contacts that I talked to.
It looks like three gunmen, possibly four, but the French Interior Ministry is saying that they're looking for three suspects right now.
Stormed into the office of a satirical magazine that had spent quite a lot of time making fun of just about every religious group in the world but had also done quite a bit of stuff on Islam, and the Prophet Muhammad had run the cartoons in 2006, and had been very vocal about their refusal to bow before what had been consistent threats.
They were even firebombed, I think, in 2011, and two of their editors were living on around-the-clock police protection.
Guys stormed into the office.
They seemed to know.
It could have been a heck of a coincidence, but they were having an editorial staff meeting with everybody, all the editorial people who worked there, and killed them.
Right now, it's looking at ten dead journalists, four in critical condition, and two dead cops, the cops that were actually tasked with protecting the editors.
So it was just a bloodbath, and apparently it took about five minutes, and the guys were able to break back out and escape in what just seems like a stunningly professional terrorist operation.
Yeah, and they just got away clean.
Nobody has any idea who these guys are so far, huh?
We've just got a few hints.
They were said to have spoken perfect French in the newsroom.
They knew who they were looking for by name.
I heard they even went to the wrong office first and said, oh, pardon us, and turned around and left.
Didn't hurt anyone there.
There's some speculation about that.
I haven't confirmed that part of it yet.
A lot of the stuff on Twitter I get a little skeptical about until at least some of our French colleagues managed to really just sit down and interview people that were there.
But yeah, that does seem to be that they had some kind of problem at the buzzer.
They ended up basically forcing somebody at gunpoint to let them in with a key code.
But they did speak French.
They did say that they had avenged the Prophet Muhammad.
They made clear references to jihadist literature.
At some point they did announce that they were members of al-Qaeda.
There's two disputes there.
They might have said al-Qaeda.
They might have said al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which I'm not sure at this stage is a terribly big distinction.
For quite some time we've considered a QAP to be sort of the operational wing of what you'd consider proper Zawahiri, Bin Laden, al-Qaeda.
But the intriguing thing is that on the way out they also did kill another cop, basically, who tried to intervene, got into a quick gunfight, which I think a lot of people have seen on YouTube by now.
Killed him, executed him very calmly with a shot to the head.
At that stage we're heard speaking a Slavic language.
I'm not an expert.
I've had people tell me that it was Russian, which then would indicate that if they spoke perfect French, then we're speaking Russian with each other out on the street.
Obviously people start looking at the Caucasus, which have a high degree of, not a high degree, but a number of jihadists, both in al-Qaeda and ISIS, have come from Chechnya, Dagestan, and parts of those regions.
That's pretty much what we have now, but these guys are in the wind, and I think they tracked a car to the suburbs of Paris, was the last we heard, that was abandoned, and it just looks like it was a very professional operation, and the guys so far have gotten away.
All right.
Now you broke this huge story that got all this attention a couple of months back about this French intelligence asset agent, exactly what you call him, I'm not sure I'll let you call him it, who is basically a double agent.
I don't know if he was all along or what, but now he's with al-Qaeda, and I think what I'm learning for the first time here, maybe I missed it before, was that the theory is that he was behind the attack on the synagogue back last spring.
Is that correct?
It is strongly believed by French intelligence that he was the mastermind of that operation, and Mohammed Mara had made references to him.
That's the guy who did the attack on the synagogue.
He also shot a French paratrooper who was off duty in Toulouse, and in some ways there's some parallels to this.
And this is an al-Nusra guy now, huh, in Syria?
Well, yeah, keep in mind this is where it gets complicated.
I would say let's refer to them as al-Qaeda as opposed to ISIS.
These are straight guys who trained in Pakistan, Afghanistan, fought in that area, are from the tree that did 9-11, let's say, and probably on some level report to Zawahiri.
Including al-Nusra refers to itself as the Syria branch of al-Qaeda.
So to keep things simple, let's call them Qaeda guys as opposed to ISIS guys, who share an ideology but are operationally distinct.
Well, yeah, I did say Nusra.
You probably misunderstood me, because I was thinking of the attack, the start of the attacks on Syria, where they said, we're going after this group of al-Qaeda.
They did try to kill this guy then, and Nusra, it does appear as though, has been sheltering guys from Afghanistan and Pakistan, including this Frenchman, David Dijon.
But, you know, again, it's splitting hairs.
Nusra, for the most part, has always considered itself to be the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda.
They've just said that they're not interested in doing international attacks.
They just want to fight the regime.
But it turned out that there was a number of guys that were trying to conduct operations under their protection from Syrian territory, and this is one of those guys.
Now, whether or not this attack is going to end up being linked to those guys remains very unclear.
But it would make some sense that if you're talking about French-speaking guys doing an operation for al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda has a young, up-and-coming, very aggressive, and so far very competent French convert who's an operator on their behalf, who's already set off what we believe is this plot in Toulouse in 2012 that was very similar.
Logically, it's definitely something that I'm sure French intelligence is looking into right now to see if there's a connection.
It would not shock me if there was, and it wouldn't shock me if this was something independent.
And you know what, I apologize, too.
I was confused.
I was thinking that this was the lone wolf attack at the synagogue last spring that you were referring to, but this is from three years ago now.
Yeah, the 2012 attacks in Toulouse, you're talking about the synagogue in Belgium.
That was an ISIS guy that had come back, and he was really a lone wolf.
The Toulouse guy was believed to be a lone wolf at the time, but then it came out that he had essentially been trained in a Pakistani training camp and then sent to France to kill people and just sort of ran around Toulouse for a week shooting people.
All right.
Well, we've got to go, but let's see if maybe we can follow up later in the week, and then I need to talk to you about the war, too, so stay in touch.
Yeah.
All right.
Thanks very much.
Always a pleasure, Scott.
Appreciate it.
Always a pleasure.
Bye.
All right, y'all.
That's the great Mitch Prothero.
He's at McClatchyDC.com.
Be right back.
Hey, you own a business?
Maybe we should consider advertising on the show, see if we can make a little bit of money.
The address is Scott at ScottHorton.org.
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