what have you learned? that european security officials believe that the senior ringleader behind this plot was fabian claude, who is a senior french fighter in isis. he s the guy that claimed responsibility in an audio tape the day after the attacks, and he spoke of an attack that was meant to have taken place in the 18th arrondissement of paris, but that attack actually never took place, and investigators belief that salah abdeslam may have actually aborted a plan to launch an attack there. but the fact that fabian claude was talking about meticulously selected targets and an attack on the 18th arrondissement, which never happened, suggested that he had foreknowledge of this plan, because otherwise he would have just reacted to media attacks and have not talked about the 18th arrondissement. so all this talk about that fabian claude may be the senior ringleader in this attack, someone who s still in raqqah, in syria, in a senior position in the isis hierarchy, who is
the mali attack was to get attention for al qaeda after isis got so much attention for these paris attacks. i was talking to aurm inform of people about isis specifically. with al qaeda i understand the group has been condemning attacks for killing children and women and in some cases muslims drawing almost like a terrorist line in the sand, which sounds bizarre to even say. isis has no such thing. and it s almost a generational difference. so the successor to osama bin laden is 64 years old. and he claims that muslims should not be killed and the split between the two groups occurred in iraq and in. the past the local iraqi insurgents were slaughtering these attacks in markets. when al qaeda asked them to stop that, they refused to do that. the leader of isis is 44. that s 20 years younger.
the capital of isis s self- self-declared caliphate and our senior international correspondent nick paton walsh has more in this exclusive report. sfwlr after paris the sinai and the cross hairs is here, raqqah. lost in the haze, yet they can hear it. heaviest at dusk. three days ago, we saw 40 airstrikes suddenly hit just nearby. the french said they started bombing. we ll do our best to avenge paris. he, like the other young fighters here, have lost friends but say fighting isis is a duty for humanity rather than vengeance as they manage an outpost 20 miles from the city. . we have just heard the distant sounds of what could be two airstrikes. from where we re standing is the kurdish front line and a trench dug as far as we can see.
still plotting to send more waves of belgium and french and european isis recruits back to launch a rolling series of attacks. it s believed he was working in tandem with abdelhamid abaaoud, the junior ringleader of the plot, who was sent over to france with the plotters. and juliette, at last, this just speaks everything that paul had just reported speaks to the notion that you can t ever celebrate too much that one ringleader has been, you know, eliminated or arrested because the ladder just keeps going up. that s right. and this is the world we live in, it is scary, and i recognize that, and our response has to be proportionate to this persistent fear. every city is going to face at some stage what belgium is facing right now. and to close it down for an indefinite period has not only an economic impact, which we re hearing about already, but the
isis has posed and has been one of the key players on the ground against isis in syria. so there are some players from the beginning who have been very strong and opposed against isis. we don t like them for other reasons, but i think what paris has done in some ways educated us, that we have to work with people who are there, who have the capacity. just as we worked with stalin in world war ii against the nazis, we can work with putin. hillary, help me understand something. there are so many more of us than there are then. there are billions of people in the world who don t subscribe to the isis ideology. there are, what, tens of thousands of isis fighters, maybe 100,000 isis fighters. why are they proving so difficult to fight? that is such a critically important question. and i think it gets to the much larger pool that isis can draw from. the pool, i would cap wildly, not just the broader muslim