First, it was a magazine office and a kosher food market. Then a concert venue, football stadium and terrace restaurants. Now it’s the seaside city of Nice.
Since the beginning of last year, gunmen have targeted France in a series of shootings, including a November massacre that was among the deadliest terror attacks in the nation’s history.
Before a truck rammed through a crowd in the beach city of Nice on Thursday night, killing more than 80 people, previous major attacks shared one connection: Islamist extremists claimed responsibility for them.
While it’s unclear who was behind the attack in Nice, it occurred on a French national holiday that marks the storming of the Bastille prison, a big moment in the French Revolution.
It struck at the heart at of a city considered a tourist hotspot for its beautiful beaches and vibrant crowds.
Like previous attacks, it left a stunned nation reeling from yet another massacre and its people asking: why France again?
Attack in Nice
The latest, horrifying attack on French soil was carried out by a truck driver in Nice on Thursday.
Hundreds, if not thousands, were out on the streets, celebrating Bastille Day, France’s answer to July 4th, with fireworks and a beachfront concert.
After the last firework fizzled out, an apparent single driver in a large white truck first opened fire into the crowd before plowing through horrified tourists and residents at one of the city’s main thoroughfares.
Although the road was cordoned off, the driver drove for more than a mile along a crowded waterfront before police shot him.
The dead included several children.
November attacks
Not too long before the attacks in Nice, France was in mourning after terrorists targeted a concert venue, football stadium and terrace restaurants in Paris on November 13.
The attackers, armed with assault rifles and explosives, targeted six locations across the city. ISIS claimed responsibility.
In the deadliest of the six incidents, three attackers armed with assault weapons raided the Bataclan concert hall and opened fire during a performance by the U.S. band Eagles of Death Metal. They fired on people as they lay on the floor, moaning with gunshot wounds.
By the time French police stormed the concert venue, at least 89 people were dead.
Another attacker targeted a sports stadium in a suburb north of Paris, where Hollande was watching France play Germany in a soccer match but was safely evacuated.
Other terrorists stormed four terrace restaurants in Paris, firing assault weapons on people sitting outside eating and drinking.
The attacks killed at least 130 people and wounded hundreds more.
French officials said the ringleader was a Belgian of Moroccan descent who lived in Brussels. He was killed in a police raid in a Paris suburb three days after the attacks.
Three days of terror
Three days of terror started with a massacre at the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on January 7 last year.
On the first day, gunmen raided the magazine’s office in Paris, killing 12.
The next day, a French policewoman was gunned down in a suburb of the same city.
On the third and final day, four hostages were killed when a terrorist seized a Jewish grocery.
By the time the nightmare ended January 9, a total of 17 people had been massacred by at least three terror suspects.
When gunmen forced their way into the Charlie Hebdo offices, they allegedly said they were avenging the Prophet Mohammed. The magazine had irked some with its past caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed.
French officials said the attackers were three French-born citizens of Algerian descent, and a French-born citizen of Senegalese descent.
Failed attempts
Some attackers have tried and failed — like the attempted mass shooting aboard the Thalys train traveling from Amsterdam to Paris in August. Three Americans, a Briton and a French national helped thwart the shooting and subdue the gunman, keeping the number of fatalities at zero.
Just this year, after a year of jihadist violence, police shot dead a man carrying a knife in January — on the anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo magazine attacks. An image of the ISIS flag, printed on paper, was found on his body, Paris prosecutors said. The man was shot as he tried to enter a police station in a northern Paris neighborhood.
Why France?
“Human rights are denied by fanatics and France is quite clearly their target,” French President Francois Hollande said after the attack Thursday.
Hollande described the latest killings as a terrorist attack and called an emergency meeting at the Interior Ministry in Paris to address the situation. He plans to travel to Nice later Friday.
‘It keeps getting worse’
While the identity of the Nice attacker is unknown, experts say the previous terror attacks have been by terrorists from disenfranchised communities.
“You have a very large disaffected North African community. They are French citizens now … but they’ve been excluded from French society,” Robert Baer, a former CIA operative, told CNN’s Don Lemon.
“I went to school in France … I worked there and they are really totally excluded,” Baer added.
“And it keeps getting worse since attacks in Paris because they are using profiling and they are stopping people who look like Arabs on trains and buses, checking their IDs which we don’t even do in this country. The French have been very aggressive … radicalization of people of North African origin is actually picking up rather than lessening.”
Tom Fuentes, a former FBI assistant director who served on the executive board of Interpol, said homegrown terrorism is a major concern in Europe.
“We have third generation immigrants that came there from Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Tunisia … and even when their children are born in France and their children’s children are born in France, they don’t consider themselves French,” he said.
“These immigrant populations stay in confined neighborhoods and only assimilate with each other and aren’t accepted into the general population.”
Fuentes said the radicalization of “homegrown people” is becoming an issue in the United States as well following the attacks in San Bernardino, California, and Orlando, Florida.
