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What Happened at Stade de France?
That’s what I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around for the last five days. Stipulating that things are still in flux and that we may be getting some more answers soon, I sense that it’s an important and relevant question how three suicide bombers — three! — recruited into an otherwise competent terrorist cell could have been so spectacularly incompetent as to kill only one other person.
What follows is some basic information and some questions, but consider this an exercise in crowd sourcing:
Some basic information about the stadium bombings:
- The Paris Attacks began with the first stadium bombing which happened at 9:20 PM locally, about 15 minutes into the game that President Hollande was attending. Almost no one else was around. According to reports, this first bomber detonated near one of the gates, but after being turned away for not getting a ticket. His victim — the only non-terrorist casualty at the stadium — was apparently a passerby, not one of the gate guards or stadium personnel.
- The second bomber detonated his vest five minutes later at the next gate over, while the other operations were going on. He managed to kill only himself.
- The third bomber detonated his vest a full 23 minutes after the previous attack at the stadium, apparently near no one else and hundreds of meters away.
Obviously, this did not go as planned, which makes for an interesting contrast to the general competency of the rest of the attacks, particularly, at the Bataclan theater. (Interestingly, the only other unsuccessful part of the attacks involved yet another suicide bomber who similarly failed to kill anyone else). Here’s what I’d like to know:
- Why was the stadium — the highest profile target and the one in which President Hollande was in attendance — given to three such incompetents?
- Were they trying to kill Hollande, or merely kill a lot of people in the vicinity of Hollande?
- If the former, were they hoping to do so as he left? That is, the first one was meant to cause him to evacuate and then the others were meant to get him?
- If the latter, why did all this start after the game was in progress? Were they simply late? If so, why did the others groups wait for them?
- Why did the first bomber attempt to gain access to the stadium through the ticket booth? Why not just stroll up and detonate?
- What were the others doing and/or planning to do while the first one was blowing himself up? If you put three suicide bombers in the same place, shouldn’t they work in tandem?
- Why did the final bomber hesitate for so long before blowing himself, and only then not around anyone?
- Why use suicide vests at an open-air venue? Explosives work best in confined spaces such as building or vehicles where the blast can be contained and people can be corralled.
To be clear, I’ve no unifying theory for all this, but the incompetency seems both persistent and baffling, to the extent that I’m not even sure what was being attempted. Finding out how this one went so (blessedly) poorly may give us useful information about our enemy.
Image Credit: “Stade de France, April 2015” by Frédéric BISSON. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Published in Islamist Terrorism
Warning: armchair theorizing below
Maybe they figured the stadium would be evacuated after the first explosion? Second two bombers are waiting for crowds/Hollande to come out?
Seems like the third bomber chickened out, then eventually just committed suicide.
My answer is by God’s grace – that being said, my question is how three suicide bombers were undetected and had a ticket? And these other thugs were on watch lists? It could have been much worse –
That more than crossed my mind, but doesn’t seem to explain the second bombers’ behavior (or the third’s, though he seems to have gotten some kind of cold feet, as you say).
Maybe the bombs were pretimed. And when the first guy failed to set off a panic the whole thing collapsed.
This is just a WAG, but could these ineffective/incompetent bombers been unwilling participants? Is it possible that they were threatened/blackmailed in someway that forced them to go through the motions? I read of failed suicide bomber attacks in Iraq where the would be suicide bomber claimed that their family was being held hostage and threatened with death if they did not carry out the mission.
There is only one way to know for sure. You might find several things:
Relying on our enemy to remain incompetent is not a good plan though. They will get better. The fish in a barrel plan seemed to work well and that will be repeated. Maybe their conclusion will be to attack smaller venues with less security.
The emotional and mental inner terrors of strapping on an explosive vest and seeking to innocently infiltrate amongst the infidel is seemingly more erratic and less efficient that the straightforward assault with heavy arms, which no doubt gives the jihadi the satisfaction of witnessing his mayhem and the hope, however remote, of surviving the attack intact.
We should simply ask Putin. I am sure there are numerous studies and doctoral dissertations on the relative effectiveness of slaughtering scores of civilians in the stacks of Patrice Lumumba University.
Putin might be able to recite some relevant statistics from his old college textbooks.
I can still remember the outlines to numerous question/answers in the Summa Contra Gentiles.
Our new allies.
Tom,
I’m just guessing but it would seem to me that they didn’t anticipate the heightened security that would be at the stadium because of Holland. The first guy can’t get in so he panics and detonates. Now the other two can’t possibly get in so they detonate outside also.
What is the real question? The real question is what ideology convinces people that their own death in the mission of killing totally innocent people at random is a forgone conclusion.
I suggest that Jihad is the only unifying theory. Training doesn’t matter, competency doesn’t matter, only the willingness to die for an absurd cause matters. Only Jihad can produce that.
Regards,
Jim
I chalk this up to the overall general incompetence of terrorists.
Getting in and going off probably would have led either to intentional evacuation (there had been earlier bomb threats aimed at the German team) or a panicked migration. That would have led to many more people being vulnerable as they streamed past. That could have been the plan. If so it was thwarted by the first guy not getting in.
The explosive involved is very unstable. One or both of the other two might have detonated unintentionally.
I wondered why they just didn’t shoot their way in.
From my reading about the stadium bombings, I understood that the first bomber had a ticket. Stadium security frisked him, discovered the vest (or at least that something was amiss), the bomber backed up, and detonated his vest at the gate. Hollande was immediately informed, and he moved to a secure location inside the stadium. While they huddled, they learned of the second bomb. They decided to close the stadium gates, continue with the game, and prevent anyone from entering or exiting. The third bomber detonated 20 or so minutes later, away from the stadium but along the route to a nearby train station.
Assuming all of that is true, I believe Hollande made a very wise decision not to evacuate the stadium. Another consideration – were there other bombers waiting?
A report I read indicated that the explosive used in the suicide vests was tri-acetone tri-peroxide (TATP):
My initial assumption would be that there was a carefully timed attack planned and the weaponry did not cooperate. Perhaps the first detonated early and the others decided to stick with the original plan? or were forced to improvise and unable to do so effectively?
Shooting your way in with the Hollande there would be out of the question.
Studying this failure should provide them with lots of lessons on how to do it better in the future. I can instantly think of several simple tactical tweaks to the plan, which I hesitate to put into writing on a public forum. ;-)
That’s interesting, though perhaps the issue is that they exploded late, hence the nearly non-existent body counts?
I’m curious to know how many people at Bataclan were killed by gunfire vs. explosives.
I can’t figure out why a suicide bomber would back up, then detonate.
I suspect that our old allies, the Israelis, could give a very sophisticated and practical account of psychological and logistical aspects of these attacks, complete with the visual cues and habits that define a potential attacker. The Israelis no doubt have some insight into the seemingly perverse behaviors (eg step back and detonate etc.) after so many post-mortem (literally post-mortem) investigations.
Of course our old allies approach these events with the aim of reducing human carnage and suffering.
Our new allies in Tehran, Moscow and Damascus are better acquainted with challenges of targeting and executing tactical slaughter.
Some have suggested the attackers were on drugs (likely a type of amphetemine):
http://www.lapresse.ca/international/dossiers/le-groupe-etat-islamique/201511/18/01-4922101-le-captagon-drogue-des-terroristes.php
Presumably because the ticket booth wasn’t his target, he backed up to see if he had an escape route, decided that none was available to him, and then said “F it”.
Yeah – I’m guessing that’s it. The folks who turned him away would have had a good guess as to what he was wearing and wouldn’t have been too keen to pursue. On the one that blew himself up away from people if that’s what he did: I wonder if he decided not to die that day and tried to ditch a vest that was wired to go off if taken off. Bomber 1 and 2 and the lack of casualties: I can’t imagine these geniuses are thinking too clearly when the plan goes out the window.
Maybe they were being forced or blackmailed to do this. Perhaps they did not want to kill.Just saying.
A guest on the John Batchelor show last night (Larry Johnson, I believe) made the same point re: TATP. Apparently, a very unstable explosive, potentially made by unskilled bombmakers (i.e. they couldn’t use their best bombmakers and then transport the vests).
Sorry – Larry Johnson appeared on the show on Monday night.
Sounds reasonable. They had a Plan A – Steps 1 then 2 then 3. Step 1 goes sideways. Young and untrained, uhhhh… No Plan B.
Randomness ensues.
Maybe they just wanted the virgins and didn’t really care about killing anyone.
I keep seeing references to TATP being “unstable,” but it’s not THAT touchy. Generally, it’s dangerous when you’re making it or when you’re putting it into whatever package you’re using. Friction and static electricity can set it off, as well as a strong impact. Once you have it prepared and ready, it’s probably not going to just randomly go off unless you trigger it or whack it pretty hard.
If they managed to make bomb vests using TATP, the next biggest issue would be the actual trigger mechanism – and that’s where the problems usually start. It’s reasonably hard to make a detonating mechanism that will reliably make something explode on command without also making it easy for some idiot to press the button ahead of time.
I’d bet that the bomb-maker (not one of the guys directly involved) put in a manual detonator AND a timer that they didn’t mention – or an obvious timer that was set to go off earlier than the wearers anticipated, to prevent them from chucking off the vest and running away.
“Yeah, it’s armed. You need to go deliver it now. And don’t come back here, for… um… security reasons! Yeah, that’s it!”
Thanks. I’ve been wondering about this myself but was fearful of verbalizing it, what with all the Yale grad, screaming harpies running about. My guess is that these folks just drip with delusions of grandeur and I’m just picturing in my mind these buffoons going into some outrageous screaming profession of hate and bile that completely tipped off everyone around them enough to cause the general scatter effect needed to save lives. These people seem to be so utterly incapable of being engaged in any reality that extends beyond the tips of their own noses that they can’t even kill others properly let alone love or serve others in any meaningful way that might allow an actual culture to be born of them.