Secretary of State John Kerry vowed Saturday that the U.S. and other world powers would “fight back” against the acts of terror that rocked Paris Friday night and left more than 120 people dead.
“[W]e are witnessing a kind of medieval and modern fascism at the same time, which has no regard for life, which seeks to destroy and create chaos and disorder and fear,” Kerry said in Vienna, Austria, where the U.S. and other countries were meeting to discuss the civil war in Syria.
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“And the one thing we can say to those people is that what they do in this is stiffen our resolve, all of us, to fight back, to hold people accountable, and to stand up for rule of law, which is exactly what we are here to do,” he said. “And if they’ve done anything, they have encouraged us today to do even harder work to make progress and to help resolve the crises that we face.”
While French President Francois Hollande has blamed the Islamic State for the attacks, Kerry stressed in Vienna that at this point, “we don’t know who did it.” Still, he called the series of shootings and suicide bombings “terrorist attacks.”
Kerry spoke along side Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who also didn’t assign blame specifically to the Islamic State. But Lavrov did note other attacks for which the Islamic State has claimed credit.
“The president of the Russian Federation expressed his solidarity with the French people, our outrage at what happened in Paris, and let’s not forget that there were terrorist attacks taking innocent lives in Beirut and in Iraq in the last few days,” Lavrov said. “I think we have to strongly reiterate that there will be no tolerance vis-a-vis terrorists.”
Lavrov also predicted that the Vienna meeting would produce a new mandate to take tougher steps against the Islamic State.
“[T]here will be no justification for us not doing much more to defeat ISIL, al-Nusrah, and the like,” he said. “And I hope that this meeting as well would allow us to move forward.”
The U.S. and Russia have been at odds over how to handle Syria’s civil war, as the U.S. has said Russia is bombing groups that are opposed to President Bashar Assad, groups that the U.S. is trying to help.
It was unclear by Saturday morning what tougher steps the U.S. might agree to in the effort to fight the Islamic State. The Obama administration has so far been hesitant to commit significant ground forces, and instead has preferred to build up a local rebels to fight the group.
But that effort has not materialized so far, and Obama faces many critics in the U.S. who say the absence of stronger U.S. actions is creating chaos in the Middle East and, increasingly, in Europe.
Late Friday, Hollande seemed to be calling for a much stronger series of steps, and declared France would wage a “pitiless” war against those responsible.
