Richard Engel: Paris Attack Appears To Be ‘Islamist-Motivated’ ISIS-Related Attack

"Well, as Chris Dickey was saying, you have to be cautious when you don’t have all the details, but it certainly does appear to be an ISIS-related kind of attack or an Islamist-motivated attack when you consider the target, when you consider how they were operating: the two gunmen dressed in black, wearing hoods, burst into this newspaper, looking for specific names, began to open fire; when you consider that this satirical newspaper had been targeted in November, 2011, I believe, for publishing satirical cartoons of the Muslim prophet Mohammed; when it recently put out a tweet lampooning the ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

There certainly is a quite a bit of a reason to suspect that it could have been ISIS related; then the French president calling it a terrorist attack, it shows how vulnerable soft targets are, soft targets in city centers. It was just a few months ago ISIS-inspired gunman took over [indecipherable] a coffee shop in Australia. This was a much more organized, a much more lethal attack. But it shows the logic of militants who for several years now have been leaving from European countries, leaving also from the United States to go fight in Iraq and Syria. And the militants are saying, 'Don't come here. Stay at home and carry out attacks in your own homeland. You will be more effective that way.'"