"Blowback"

The tabloid coverage from the likes of the Guardian aside, here is a semi-official view

"Blowback! That was REALLY clever supporting the Syrian Islamist revolution…Any terrorists they choose - assuming that said Islamists would never bite the hand that fed them - Hollande obviously missed the lesson of the American support for the Taliban"

---Eric Kraus (who live in Moscow)

Why, it needs to be asked, (as the Saker does), if the French authorities had prior warning did they have only one policeman on duty outside? This does not make an anti-terror operation, even in France

Charlie Hebdo: Killings follow official warnings of attacks

FT,

7 January, 2015

French authorities have been dreading — and warning of — a big terrorist attack on home soil for months, their concerns fuelled by large numbers of French recruits to Islamist groups fighting in the Middle East and previous murderous incidents.

The perpetrators of the attack on Wednesday on the offices of Charlie Hebdo, the relentlessly irreverent satirical cartoon weekly, have yet to be identified. But President François Hollande, visiting the scene in central Paris where 12 people were shot dead, immediately declared it a terrorist attack. “There is no doubt,” he said.

Immediate suspicion inevitably fell on Islamist militants. Charlie Hebdo has repeatedly mocked Islam, along with other religions, with ribald caricatures. Its offices, under police guard for years, have been firebombed in the past after the magazine spoofed Islamic sharia law.

It was, inevitably, an obvious target in circumstances that Prime Minister Manuel Valls has called an “unprecedented threat” to France from homegrown jihadis. France has been the source of the largest number of European citizens and residents who have gone to join jihadi militants in Syria and Iraq in recent years.

The authorities have warned for some time of the risk of “blowback” from these militants when they return to France, which has become an increasingly proactive member of the international coalition fighting the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, better known as Isis, in Syria and Iraq. Late last year, official estimates put at about 1,000 the number of French citizens or residents who had been or were currently involved in Islamist groups in Syria and Iraq.

Official tallies then said some 200 had returned home, of whom more than 50 had been jailed. Some of the returnees may be disillusioned with the jihadi cause. But the fear concerns those who may have slipped under the radar, motivated to bring the fight back home.

Numerous plots in France have been thwarted by the French security services. The domestic intelligence agency, the DGSI, Direction Générale de la Sécurité Intérieure, stopped five major terror plots in the 18 months to December, according to the French ministry of the interior.

The nature of the attack is likely to raise concern for European security chiefs. The fact that more than one attacker was involved, and that the atrocity was conducted with automatic weapons, implies a greater degree of planning and co-ordination than would have been the case for a lone assailant, according to one European security official. Early reports that the terrorists also sought out individuals by name at the magazine also imply that detailed preparations were made.

Questions are likely to be asked about how such a plot was missed. In particular, security officials will be anxious to know whether there are other members of a cell who helped plan the attack, or if there are further targets for the Charlie Hebdo assailants, all of whom are still at large.

The government has in the past year introduced tougher antiterrorist legislation in response to the Islamist threat, allowing for the confiscation of passports of suspected aspirant jihadis, stronger powers of arrest and new provisions against internet support for terrorism.

The clearest example of the threat came last May when Mehdi Nemmouche, a 29-year-old French citizen, was arrested in Marseille and charged with an attack on the Jewish museum in Brussels a few days earlier in which two Israelis and a French national were killed. He had spent a year in Syria.