Charlie Hebdo Is Attacked, ISIS Burns a Pilot, Boko Haram Massacres Thousands and Saudi Arabia Enters Yemen

Jamaica Homes Global Conflict & Caribbean Impact Review | Published 3 April 2015 | Reporting Period: 3 January – 2 April 2015

Quarterly Briefing

• Islamist gunmen attack the Paris offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on January 7, killing 12; a related attack on a kosher supermarket kills four more; four million people march in Paris on January 11 in the largest demonstration in French history.
• ISIS releases a video on February 3 showing the burning alive of captured Jordanian pilot Muath al-Kasasbeh; Jordan executes two ISIS-linked prisoners in response and intensifies its air campaign.
• Boko Haram kills an estimated 2,000 people in a January 3–7 massacre in and around the town of Baga in northeast Nigeria, the deadliest single attack in the group’s history.
• Saudi Arabia launches Operation Decisive Storm on March 26, beginning an air campaign against Houthi forces in Yemen that have seized Sanaa and are advancing on Aden.
• Ukraine and Russia-backed separatists sign the Minsk II ceasefire agreement on February 12; Russian-backed forces seize Debaltseve days later as the agreement takes nominal effect.
• Syriza’s Alexis Tsipras wins the Greek election on January 25, becoming prime minister on an anti-austerity platform; immediate confrontation with European creditors begins over bailout terms.

Prologue: A Season of Mass Violence

The first quarter of 2015 produced a catalogue of mass violence whose scale and variety illustrated the plurality of the threats facing an international system that had proved inadequate to any of them. A satirical magazine was attacked in Paris by gunmen willing to kill in defence of a religious prohibition. A young man was burned alive in a cage on video for the world to see, and his killers released it as propaganda. Two thousand people were massacred by a militia in rural Nigeria in a week when the world was looking at Paris. A country’s capital fell to a rebel movement backed by a regional power. And a ceasefire agreement was violated on its first day of operation. For Jamaica and the Caribbean, these events mattered in different ways and at different degrees of proximity: Paris was a reminder of what mass terrorism could do to a tourism-dependent world; Yemen was the beginning of a conflict that would affect oil markets for years; and Boko Haram’s massacre illustrated the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in a region that global attention rarely reached.

Charlie Hebdo and the Je Suis Charlie Moment

On 7 January 2015, brothers Saïd and Chérif Kouachi forced their way into the Paris offices of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo and opened fire, killing 12 people including editor-in-chief Stéphane Charbonnier and several of France’s most celebrated cartoonists. The brothers, French citizens of Algerian descent who had received training from Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, fled and were killed by police two days later in a standoff northeast of Paris. Simultaneously, a connected attacker, Amedy Coulibaly, killed a police officer and then took hostages at the Hyper Cacher Jewish supermarket on the eastern edge of Paris, killing four before being shot dead. On 11 January, an estimated four million people marched in Paris and across France in solidarity with the victims, in what was described as the largest demonstration in French history. Forty world leaders joined the march.

The Charlie Hebdo attack was the most devastating terrorist atrocity in France in decades and triggered an immediate intensification of the broader debate about freedom of expression, religious extremism and security in European democracies. For Caribbean tourism destinations, the attack and the broader “Je suis Charlie” moment reinforced the security sensitivity that surrounds major tourism markets and reminded the industry of how quickly political events in source countries translate into traveller anxiety.

ISIS: The Burned Pilot and Expanding Terror

The Islamic State’s propaganda operation reached a new level of calculated horror on 3 February when it released a video showing Jordanian Air Force pilot Muath al-Kasasbeh being burned alive in a steel cage. Al-Kasasbeh had been captured when his F-16 crashed in December 2014 during a coalition airstrike. Jordan, which had been a hesitant participant in the US-led coalition, responded with immediate executions of two ISIS-linked prisoners and a public intensification of airstrikes. King Abdullah cut short a visit to Washington to personally oversee the response. The episode briefly galvanised the coalition but did not alter its fundamental trajectory: air campaigns continued, ISIS held most of its territory, and the lack of effective ground forces to consolidate any territorial gains remained the campaign’s central strategic problem.

Elsewhere in Africa, Boko Haram — the Nigerian Islamist group that had seized territory roughly the size of Belgium in northeast Nigeria — carried out a sustained multi-day attack on the town of Baga and surrounding villages between 3–7 January, killing an estimated 2,000 civilians in what Amnesty International described as the group’s most devastating attack. The massacre occurred in the week of the Charlie Hebdo attacks but received a fraction of the media attention. Boko Haram pledged allegiance to ISIS in March, formally joining the global network. Nigeria’s Goodluck Jonathan administration’s inability to defeat Boko Haram militarily was a significant issue in the March 28 presidential election, which Jonathan lost to Muhammadu Buhari — the first democratic transfer of power between rival parties in Nigeria’s history.

Yemen and Ukraine

Yemen’s Houthi movement, which had been advancing across the country since September 2014, seized the capital Sanaa and forced President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi to resign in January; Hadi subsequently fled to Aden and then to Riyadh. Saudi Arabia, alarmed by the advance of a movement it characterised as an Iranian proxy, assembled a coalition and launched Operation Decisive Storm on 26 March 2015 with airstrikes targeting Houthi positions and military infrastructure. The intervention opened a new chapter in the Middle East’s expanding wars: a Saudi-led coalition confronting Iranian-backed forces in a country with direct access to critical shipping lanes. Oil markets responded to the Yemen escalation with a modest price rise that slightly offset the structural downward pressure from US shale overproduction and OPEC’s refusal to cut output.

In Ukraine, the Minsk II agreement signed on 12 February by France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine called for a ceasefire, withdrawal of heavy weapons and political negotiations on autonomy for the eastern Donbas region. Russian-backed forces seized the strategically important rail hub of Debaltseve before the ceasefire took effect; the ceasefire was subsequently violated repeatedly. The crisis did not escalate into direct NATO-Russia confrontation, but the sanctions architecture that the West had erected against Russia remained in place, adding geopolitical complexity to energy markets in which Russia was a central player.

Looking Ahead

Saudi Arabia’s Yemen intervention is in its first weeks; its duration, cost and outcome are completely unknown. The Iran nuclear negotiations have a framework agreed at Lausanne — which happened on 2 April, just as this edition publishes — but a final comprehensive deal with its complex verification arrangements remains to be concluded. ISIS holds its territory and continues to inspire attacks globally. Boko Haram’s new alignment with ISIS extends the global jihadist threat to West Africa in ways that will affect regional security and economic development. And Greece’s new anti-austerity government is on a collision course with European creditors whose resolution will test the eurozone’s political cohesion. Jamaica enters the second quarter of 2015 with its own reform programme proceeding, but navigating a world where the sources of geopolitical risk are multiplying faster than the institutions designed to manage them can respond.

Jamaica Homes Global Conflict & Caribbean Impact Review is published quarterly, examining how wars, geopolitical tensions and major international crises have shaped Jamaica, the Caribbean and their economies.