France’s policy towards the war in Syria has been more forward than any other western country. It was early in calling for President Bashar al-Assad to step down, still insists he must go, and recently joined airstrikes inside Syria against the Islamic State – unlike the UK, which has not taken that step.
The Isis claim of responsibility for Friday’s Paris attacks referred directly to French aircraft “striking Muslims in the lands of the caliphate”.
Earlier this week, French warplanes attacked oil and gas installations in the Deir ez-Zor area, describing this as part of an effort to destroy Isis infrastructure and undermine its financial resources. President François Hollande also announced the deployment to the Gulf of France’s only aircraft carrier, the Charles de Gaulle, to support operations against Isis in Syria and Iraq. French warplanes struck their first targets in Syria in late September.
On 8 October, France attacked an Isis training camp in Raqqa, capital of the group’s self-proclaimed caliphate in north-eastern Syria. It was believed to house foreign fighters, including French nationals, but Hollande denied they were targeting a specific individual.
Le Monde reported that the target was Benghalem Salim, 35, responsible for the reception of French and francophones into Isis. Hollande repeated that about 600 French nationals were currently fighting in Syria and Iraq.
In all, France has carried out about 1,300 sorties in Iraq, with 271 airstrikes destroying more than 450 terrorist targets. Only a few strikes have been carried out in Syria. It is using six Rafale multi-role fighter jets stationed in the United Arab Emirates and six Mirage 2000 fighters deployed in Jordan.
France was the first country to join the US-led coalition in Iraq and has provided logistical support to anti-Assad Syrian rebels it considers moderate, including Kurdish fighters.
In many ways its policy is similar to Britain’s, but France has pushed diplomatically for stronger measures, including a recent proposal for a UN resolution designed to protect civilians from the barrel bombs used by Syrian government forces.
In 2013, when Assad was accused of using chemical weapons that killed 1,400 people in the Ghouta area near Damascus, Paris called for military intervention but was isolated after the US president, Barack Obama, refused to act despite the breach of what he had earlier declared was a “red line”. Opposition by US Congress and the British parliament reflected a deep reluctance for direct military intervention.
France has continued to stand firm on the demand that Assad must go if the four-and-a-half-year-long war is to end. Britain, like the US, has been signalling that he could remain in a transitional government for a a few months.
Conservative politicians in France have attacked Hollande’s policy as unrealistic and inflexible. “I think the moment has come for us to eat some humble pie and sit down at the negotiating table in Geneva with Bashar al-Assad,” said the former French prime minister Alain Juppé. “Maybe we will be able to save some face.”
In September, the French authorities launched a criminal investigation into the Assad regime for alleged war crimes committed between 2011 and 2013, drawing on evidence provided by a former Syrian army photographer known by the codename “Caesar” who defected. It is claimed he has evidence of the torture and killing of 11,000 people.
The mainstream western-backed anti-Assad opposition, the Syrian National Coalition, still sees France as its most supportive ally. Its leader, Khaled Khoja, often holds talks in Paris, pressing on the need to secure the protection of civilians.
“The Syrian people who are daily experiencing Assad and Isis terrorism stand in solidarity with the French nation against all kinds of terrorism,” Khoja said in a statement on the Paris attacks. “I stress again the responsibility of the international community to eliminate all kinds of terrorism from the roots, including all regimes which patronise and finance it, above all the regime of Bashar al-Assad.”
In advance of the latest round of international negotiations in Vienna on Saturday, France’s foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, said profound differences remained, especially with regard to the future of the Syrian leader. “We consider that Mr Bashar al-Assad in the end cannot govern Syria and we also consider it impossible that the Iranians, who have troops on the ground even if they say they are military advisers, stay in Syria permanently,” Fabius told MPs.