Attack in Paris: should we see the hand of Al-Qaida?

DECRYPTION

The motivations of the perpetrator of the knife attack, which left two injured on Friday in front of the former

premises

in Paris, remain unclear for the moment.

But the modus operandi and the location prompted the national anti-terrorism prosecution to open an investigation for "attempted assassination in connection with a terrorist enterprise".

This attack comes in a heavy context, in the midst of the trial of the attacks of January 2015. And a few days ago, Al-Qaeda threatened to attack again

, which republished the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.

If the jihadist group has not published a demand, its shadow hangs over this attack, the main suspect of which is an 18-year-old man born in Pakistan.

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- Attack in Paris: a modus operandi "probably inspired by jihadist propaganda"

A very weak organization that recently threatened

Charlie Hebdo

Al-Qaeda may be terribly weakened and tracked down for nearly twenty years by all the counterterrorism services on the planet, the jihadist group has not disappeared for all that.

The organization suffered extremely severe blows, starting with the elimination of Osama bin Laden.

It also faces competition from the outbidding of the Islamic State, which sometimes results in violent clashes between the two groups, as at the moment in central Mali or in north-western Syria.

But Al-Qaeda continues to survive in regions where conflicts drag on, such as the Sahel, Libya or Somalia.

It is also active in Yemen, which is historically its rear base and where the attack on

was organized

in January 2015. It was also in Yemen that its last call for murder was launched, during the opening. the trial of the attacks from January 2015 to mid-September.

Al-Qaeda then issued a five-page press release targeting the satirical weekly again and urging its jihadists to return to France to stab journalists.

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Encourage radicalized Islamists to take action

This extremely specific threat corresponds to the scenario of Friday's knife attack in Paris.

Al-Qaeda, however, is no longer an organization with the ability to project commandos from abroad to carry out heavy and complex operations, such as those of September 11, 2001 or the 2015 attacks. The military pressure imposed on the jihadist group, such as to the Islamic State, prevents them.

On the other hand, Al-Qaeda has developed an opportunist strategy which consists in promoting the passage to the act with rudimentary means among the radicalized Islamists who live in France.

At the latest scores, they were more than 8,000 in the country, including 1,510 already convicted of terrorism.

The suspect in the Paris attack, on the other hand, is not known to the intelligence services.