A Pack, Not a Lone Wolf

This post is a companion to the one immediately below. One of the ways liberal politicians and commentators have used to minimize terrorist attacks is to attribute them all to “lone wolves.” Being a lone wolf is a step below the junior varsity, apparently. In the case of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, countless media outlets rushed to give it the “lone wolf” label, even though there were at least two “wolves” involved, and they acted with military precision.

As more facts have come out, the lone wolf designation has become risible. The Kouachi brothers likely had accomplices, and they both trained with al Qaeda in Yemen. We don’t know yet whether al Qaeda directed the Charlie Hebdo attack. Further, there was close communication between the Kouachi brothers and Amedy Coulibaly, who followed up their attack with an assault on a Jewish deli. Authorities have said that there were something like 500 telephone calls between Coulibaly and his fellow terrorists. In addition, Amedy Coulibaly’s girlfriend, Hayat Boumeddiene, is now believed to have fled France the day before Coulibaly’s assault in the company of an unidentified man. She is now with ISIS in Syria.

French authorities now say that “as many as six terror-cell members may still be at large after the Paris terrorism attacks.” So we are dealing with a well-planned, well-armed, well-coordinated attack, carried out by a cell of Muslim terrorists that may number ten or more, some of whom were certainly trained by al Qaeda, and all of whom may have been directed by al Qaeda or other overseas Islamic terrorist leaders.

In case of future attacks, we should be aware of this tendency of journalists to jump to the comforting “lone wolf” assumption.

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