Paris Attack: Bloodied Streets Of The City Of Light.

Shaken by the mayhem brought home by the IS, France prepares to hit back with more of the violence that ravaged the West Asia and spawned the worlds deadliest merchants of terror. Shiraz Sidhva reports from the bloodied streets of the city of light.

- Shiraz Sidhva

Five days after the deadliest carnage on French soil since World War II, Parisians and the rest of the world are still reeling under the shock. They are finding it hard to come to terms with the fact that Paris has been hit for the second time this year. While irreverent atheist cartoonists and people of the Jewish faith were targets during January’s Charlie Hebdo attacks, this time it was ordinary people, enjoying an unusually balmy autumn evening out on a Friday, 13 November, who were singled out. Their only crime was eating and drinking together, watching football, or listening to a rock concert. Many of the 129 people dead and more than 300 injured were under 30, because the two arrondissements targeted, the 10th and 11th, close to the city centre, are a bohemian neighbourhood where mostly young people hang out.

The French authorities believe the very precise military-style attacks were carried out by eight assailants, several of whom were French nationals, working in three teams. Wearing suicide vests and armed with machine guns, they held a city to ransom for three long hours, prompting people to compare the attacks to 26/11 in Mumbai. Seven of the men died in the attacks, while a massive manhunt is underway for the eighth, Salah Abdeslam, a Belgian-born French national. For the first time since the London bombings in 2004, a very real sense of insecurity has gripped Europe. The distant wars of the West Asia, triggered by 9/11 and dubbed by Pope Francis as a “piecemeal World War Three”, have landed on the West’s doorstep. And experts warn that this is only just the beginning of a new style of warfare that targets innocent civilians going about their lives in what we would like to think is the free world.