MAINZ, Germany – Signs of a broader European involvement in the global war against international terrorism are emerging, following deadly attacks in Paris last week that have sent shockwaves across Europe.
In Germany, media headlines warn that NATO’s Article 5, calling on all allies to rush to another’s help, could be invoked if Paris calls for it.
“Europe can no longer afford to be so weak,“ urged Peter Frey, editor-in-chief of Germany’s second largest public broadcaster ZDF. In a broadcast on Sunday.
“We should not deceive ourselves, assuming all Muslims being ticking time bombs. The terrorists are misled, fanatic murderers. Criminals, who abuse their religion in a shameful way,” he said: “What we promised to the United States after 9/11, applies to France all the more.”
NATO’s Article 5 provides that if a member state is the victim of an armed attack, every other member of the alliance will consider the act as an armed attack against itself and all other members. It calls on all members to take the actions necessary to assist the attacked ally, including military intervention.
Immediately after the attacks, German Chancellor Angela Merkel expressed full solidarity with France and said: “We, your German friends, we are so close with you. We are crying with you. Together with you, we will fight against those who have carried out such an unfathomable act against you.“
“This attack on freedom is not only aimed at Paris. We are all targets, and it affects all of us, for that reason we will respond together,” she vowed.
After the 9/11 attacks in New York in 2001, NATO invoked Article 5 for the first time in its history, leading to the war against the Taliban and al-Qaida in Afghanistan.
Invoking the article now would also directly affect NATO’s external frontiers, with Turkey at the center of the the Middle Eastern battlefields.
For Paris to invoke Article 5, the first step would be to call for an Article 4 consultation, which would convene the ambassadors of the 28 member countries to discuss the situation and decide a course of action. The last time this happened was in 2014, when Ankara requested an Article 4 meeting after the bomb attacks on its soil.
On Sunday, after the Paris attacks, Iraqi Foreign Minister Ibrahim al-Jafaari has said that his country has shared intelligence information with other countries.
"Information has been obtained from Iraqi intelligence sources that the countries to be targeted soon, before it occurred, are Europe in general, specifically France, as well as America and Iran, and the countries have been informed.”
Some NATO members, like Germany or France itself, are already involved in the war against ISIS.
But with nearly 30 other countries directly or indirectly involved in the war, a direct NATO involvement would add more than 20 new countries to a battlefield that ranges from the Nigerian rain forests to the deserts of Libya and Egypt and to the mountains of the Afghan Hindu Kush.
