Paris Terrorist Attacks
Coordinated attacks by Islamic State gunmen and suicide bombers killed 130 people in Paris on the evening of 13 November 2015, the deadliest day in France since the Second World War. Three teams operated almost simultaneously. Bombers detonated outside the Stade de France during a football match between France and Germany, which President François Hollande was attending; gunmen fired on café and restaurant terraces in the tenth and eleventh arrondissements; and three men entered the Bataclan concert hall during a performance by the Eagles of Death Metal and killed ninety people over some hours before police stormed it. Around 400 were wounded. Islamic State claimed the attacks within a day. Most of the attackers were French or Belgian nationals, several of whom had travelled to Syria and returned, and the cell had been organised from Molenbeek in Brussels. The organisation had claimed the downing of a Russian airliner over Sinai two weeks earlier and a double bombing in Beirut the day before. France declared a state of emergency, which was renewed repeatedly and largely written into ordinary law in 2017, and intensified air strikes in Syria and Iraq. The European response included border controls and a re-examination of the Schengen system in the middle of the refugee movement of that year. Salah Abdeslam, the only surviving attacker, was captured in Brussels in March 2016, four days before bombings there killed thirty-two. Twenty defendants were tried in 2021–22 in the largest criminal trial in French history. Abdeslam received a whole-life sentence. The attacks marked the peak of Islamic State's external operations; its territorial state was destroyed within four years.
- Year: 2015 CE
- Category: Military
