France Backfills Front Line Police With Troops as Coming Riot Day Leaves Forces Spread Thin
France will meet planned further demonstrations later this week with a “massive” deployment of law enforcement officers, backed up with soldiers, Emmanuel Macron’s government has said.
Soldiers of the French Army’s Operation Sentinelle, the over-decade-long deployment of 10,000 troops to aid the civil power by protecting vulnerable locations like synagogues and schools from would-be terrorists, will be used to backfill the French police this coming weekend. Protesters have announced an ‘act II’ day of demonstrations on Saturday 24th as a sequel to last Saturday’s riots, which quickly descended into violent insurrection on one end of the scale, and to simple looting for personal gain on the other.
Promising the French people the forces of law and order would do better this time, Emmanuel Macron’s Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu stated the deployment of police and equipment this coming Saturday “will be massive”.
Addressing the French parliament on Tuesday on the deployment plan, Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez acknowledged the police had been “too static and not mobile enough” last Saturday and said next time, the French Army would be made available to free up police officers. He said troops would “replace internal security forces primarily on static security missions” and this would “free up police officers and gendarmes to carry out public order missions.”
This could mean soldiers deployed to guard sensitive sites nationwide so that every possible police officer can be pushed to the front to meet with rioters and insurrectionists, without leaving critical buildings totally unprotected. Among the officers being released to face down violence next weekend are the specialist anti-organised crime BRI brigade, and the elite counter-terror GIGN and RAID units.
In many respects, this new deployment is much like the mission already executed day-in, day-out by the Operation Sentinelle troops for the past 11 years since the deployment was stood up in 2015 to provide a visible, armed deterrent to potentially vulnerable sites across France’s diverse cities. Euronews notes the terrorism magnets now normally patrolled by uniformed and armed soldiers include “places of worship, schools, tourist locations, railway stations and airports.”
The inability of police to protect French streets from takeover by rioters last week has faced some criticism, and particularly from the mayor of Limoges, whose city hall was burned down on Saturday night. Now being treated as not merely an accidental fire from a riot that got out of hand but rather a planned and deliberate attack by left-wing ultras, Mayor Guillaume Guérin said national police deployed to the city had simply run out of ammunition and then withdrawn, leaving the city in the hands of the extremists.
He said: “colossal failure on the part of state services and the leadership of our national police force… For an hour, there wasn’t a single national police officer present to protect the town hall.”
Reflecting on the destruction of the historic city hall, Prime Minister Lecornu said there had been “an insurrectionary scheme led by far-left and ultra-left groups” in some parts of the country, and government spokesman Maud Bregeon said on Tuesday that there was evidence of “planning of the insurrection carried out by far-left groups”.
An arrest of the alleged ringleader of the Limoges city hall attack was made on Tuesday morning, allegedly of a seasoned hard-left extremist.
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