three air strikes southerly hit just nearby and the french said they d started bombing. we ll do our best to avenge paris. he, like the other young kurdish fighters here, have lost friends, but say fighting isis is a duty for humanity rather than vengeance, as they man a series of trenches and outposts about 20 miles from the city. we have just heard the distant thuds of what could have been two air strikes, but from where we re standing, here is the kurdish front line, a trench dug, as far as we can see, and then all in this direction, flat, open land, until you reach the outskirts of raqqah, the capital of isis self-declared caliphate. reporter: four russian missiles hit raqqah this day, activists say, but otherwise, it s the silence of stalemate in the desert. weapons here are scant. this man carries the ak-47 of his friend, who died eight months ago. out here in the flat, open ground, with isis in the next village, they still scorn isis
are a lot fewer people. it s almost eerily calm here. keep in mind, this is a monday sort of early afternoon at this point in time. this is not only the capital of belgium, but in my ways, of course, also the mentorive capital of europe. and instead of many people pouring in here as would normally happen, what you have is you have soldiers on the street, you have a lot of police on the street, you have armored vehicles on the street, trying to make sure that nothing happens. as that terror alert level iv, the highest that this country has, which warns of an imminent threat remains in place here, it s unclear at this point in time how long that imminent threat level is going to stay in place, chris. it seems the more they learn, the more they realize they cannot control there. fred pleitgen, thank you very much. president obama meeting tomorrow with french president hollande to talk about what this bigger plan will be to destroy isis. and he s urging americans not to overreact to the
what have you learned? that european security officials believe that the senior ringleader behind this plot was fabian claude, who is a senior french fighter in isis. he s the guy that claimed responsibility in an audio tape the day after the attacks, and he spoke of an attack that was meant to have taken place in the 18th arrondissement of paris, but that attack actually never took place, and investigators belief that salah abdeslam may have actually aborted a plan to launch an attack there. but the fact that fabian claude was talking about meticulously selected targets and an attack on the 18th arrondissement, which never happened, suggested that he had foreknowledge of this plan, because otherwise he would have just reacted to media attacks and have not talked about the 18th arrondissement. so all this talk about that fabian claude may be the senior ringleader in this attack, someone who s still in raqqah, in syria, in a senior position in the isis hierarchy, who is
where we a collective body has conducted these air strikes and have made them absolutely smothering and air bleeding. you know, in our most recent past, we did this against meloovich in the air campaign. so there s a comparison to be drawn, that we can increase the air campaign and the strength of that, but we need to be prepared for ground forces. that s not an intellectual leap from the insertion of the 82nd airborne right into the middle of raqqah. there are plenty of options. such as, spider? spell that out for us. what does your vision of ground force mean? can do. initially, what we can do, we can create in northern iraq, let s take that piece of terrain where the kurds and the iraqi security forces have secured a portion of it, agenda to the syrian border in sin jar, in that particular area, the united states in concert with regional partners could create what s called a theater support
we weren t expecting this large number to join, but there are now 4,000 tribesmen, he says. when we want to move, all of them are ready, and we ve already managed to sneak weapons to them. we re moving forward. western leaders call this a global fight, but here, alone, you feel the dust, death, and determination. nick, so powerful, what you ve seen there and experienced. give us an ideas, from those that you re talking to on the ground, how effective that air assault is. reporter: for those kurds, they are a series of thuds in the distance of intense fire, but activists inside raqqah has been giving a long list of targets, they believe, have been hit by those french and possibly russian air strikes, too. and they seem to focus mostly on key parts of infrastructure. large buildings of roundabouts. something called the al shabaab club, it s a youth club, effectively. even the fact that some of these munitions dropped, we can t