for the isis commander dubbed the voice of death after claiming the paris massacres on behalf of the terror group. he may have been one of the masterminds of those and several other attacks. brian todd has been digging into this, brian, what are you learning? wolf, tonight our information suggests a sophisticated role in the paris attacks by this man, fabien clain, one of isis top speaking french operatives. there are indications he may have issued commands remotely to his cells on the ground. his apparent tactics read from a plot right out of homeland. just hours after the carnage in paris, a claim of responsibility from isis senior french operative fabien clain. he gives extraordinary detail on the targets saying they were meticulously chosen. translator: sites in the 10th, 1 19 and 18th districts. reporter: no attack in the 18th district ever materialized, but a car believed to be driven by alleged conspirator salah abdelsalam was found parked in the 18th district. he s stil
constituency. which is they have framed this as a war between quite literally the world and sunni muslims. and sunni muslims are honor bound and duty bound to defend their faith. and that is going to increase the ranks. that will swell the ranks for isis. doesn t matter how many targets in the west or how many innocent civilians here they will kill. tom fuentes, these recent isis attacks they represent a shift in their strategy how they are planning their attacks, what they re doing, right? no, i don t think so. i think it represents carrying out a strategy they started more than a year or two ago of bringing people from all over the world to syria to learn how to put together attacks, learn how to operate weapons and explosives and then go back to your homelands and carry them out. we ve had tens of thousands of people that have gone to syria from all over asia, from all over europe, from the u.s., canada, australia, and now all you have are that many of them have returned home an
missing man to that same area. it seems too great a coincide e coincidence. if salah abdeslam dropped it off there, what does it mean? does it support what his family said, that he somehow had a change of heart, dumped the vest and abandoned the mission and fled back to belgium? we doesn t know. it s certainly a question authorities are trying to figure out. you can bet they are looking at surveillance video and everything else in that area that might give them a clue, wolf. they certainly are. thanks very much. france is launching the first air strike against isis from its aircraft carrier, the charles degal in the eastern mediterranean. cnn is learning top isis leaders are fleeing the self-proclaimed capital as the area increases daily. let s go to our pentagon correspondent barbara starr. barbara, this isis stronghold in raqqah is now clearly under a major assault. absolutely, wolf. raqqah continues to be pounded by coalition aircraft and isis
it may be a long-term strategy, but phil, until recently most of their efforts were designed to expand their territory inside their so-called caliphate in syria and iraq. al qaeda and other groups they would try to strike against western targets, the u.s., the europeans, but now isis has really started to compete with them in that area as well. that s right. they re competing. there is a shift here that i see and that is in the past over the past year or two we ve seen passive encouragement. that is if you re an isis supporter in western europe, united states, is go do something. now what we ve seen change is active, we re going to create an isis organization directing plots overseas. to my mind that s pretty substantial. very substantial. i want all of you to standby. coming up we re following more of the breaking news. a major european capital now on lockdown as authorities hunt for terrorists amid what the belgium prime minister is calling a serious and imminent threat against
they were in and out of palestinian refugee camps in lebanon recruiting, radicalizing. there was a host of european terror operations, many of them aborted thankfully, that aqi was responsible for. what we re seeing now think of isis like a balancing scale. you suppress one side and the other side goes up. so as they lose ground, particularly in northern syria where they have the most entrenched presence, they re going to escalate, they re going to increase these foreign terrorist spectaculars as a recruitment drive. i mean, i ve seen the videos they ve been putting out since the paris attacks. fluent french speakers showing what they present as the carnage delivered by coalition aircraft killing innocent muslim civilians in raqqah. they re speaking in islamic chanting that accompany many of these jihadi videos. they re in french now. so they are egging on every and all commerce particularly in europe to carry on this winning streak of theirs. i mean, i mentioned before, you had ankara