FBI director James Comey said he is deeply concerned about a bill which passed the house last week which would require him and other top national security officials personally to certify that each refugee from Syria and Iraq whose application for asylum in the United States is accepted, is not a security threat. DHS secretary Jeh Johnson echoed Comey’s criticism.

About ten gunmen, reported to be speaking English, early Friday morning stormed and took control over a luxury hotel in Bamako, Mali’s capital. Reports from the Mali security forces and hotel guests speak of three people who were killed and about 170 being held hostage by the terrorists. About eighty guests managed to leave the hotel – they either escaped, or were released by the attackers after proving they were Muslim by citing passages from the Quran.

Encrypted communications specialist Silent Circle, after learning that ISIS was recommending two of the company’s products — the encrypted Blackphone handset and Silent Phone applications for private messaging — to the organization’s followers, is taking steps to make it more difficult for terrorists and their followers to use these products.

The French prosecution has just announced that forensic evidence confirms that Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the 27-year old Belgian who was the mastermind of Friday’s attacks in Paris, was killed in Wednesday’s police raid on an apartment building in St.-Dennis. Abaaud’s 26-year old cousin killed herself by exploding a suicide vest, and the police now say that there may be a third body under the rubble of the partially collapsed third floor of building.

Many of the jihadist killers, as they shoot their innocent victims, invoke God with the Arabic phrase “Allahu Akbar.” Indeed, this otherwise innocuous everyday religious utterance is frequently usurped as a jihadist battle cry. But those drawn to jihadism are usually not particularly religious prior to their involvement with violence. They are either raised in largely secular households or possess only a rudimentary grasp of their parental faith, which rarely extends to religious practice of any sort. It is not to exonerate religion in any sense to say that for many French Muslims, whose life in the banlieues consists of not much more than a mix of unemployment, crime, drugs, institutional racism, and endemic cycles of poverty and disenfranchisement, jihadism potentially offers a way out of the banal and inane drudgery of daily life. In direct contrast to feelings of boredom, purposelessness, and insignificance, the jihadists offer redemption through the image of the chivalrous warrior, recast as some sort of avenging hero.

About 200 members of the special units of the French police early Wednesday morning (Paris time) swooped on the Parisian banlieue, or suburb, of Saint-Denis – where the Stade de France, one of the sites of Friday’s terrorist attacks, is located – and arrested seven people. Two people were killed. One of the dead was a young woman who blew herself up with a suicide vest. French Prosecutor Francois Molins told reporters that the operation was a result of a credible tip — in all likelihood, a police informer who resides in the neighborhood — suggesting Abdelhamid Abbaaoud, a 27-year-old Belgian of Moroccan origin, was holed up in an apartment in a residential building.

In response to the terrorist attacks in Paris and Beirut, NATO should invade ISIS-held territory with the goal of creating two semiautonomous, predominantly Sunni Arab regions under restored Syrian and Iraqi sovereignty. This would be difficult and costly. But it is perhaps the only path to long-term solutions of both the Syrian refugee crisis and the threat of ISIS. No options are good, but this is the least bad alternative, and it will give all relevant regional and international actors something they want. Diplomacy is essential to a long-term solution to the Syrian civil war. But someone needs to take over ISIS’ territory, and local forces cannot do it alone. President Obama should reconsider his refusal to contribute ground forces. If he won’t, additional American advisers, special operations forces, air strikes, and intelligence could help troops from other NATO countries and local actors defeat ISIS and reach a lasting solution.

The exact way the terrorists who attacked France last Friday communicated with each other, and their handlers, in the run-up to the attack is not yet clear, but the attack has prompted law enforcement and intelligence agencies in Europe and the United States to renew their call to regulate the use of new encryption technologies which allow users to “go dark” and make it difficult, if not altogether impossible, to retrieve the contents of communication.

Mass casualty terrorist attacks, defined as attacks which kill more than 100 people (excluding perpetrators) in a particular country on a particular day, are on the rise. Between 1970 and 2014 there have been 176 such attacks. Between 2000 and 2014, there were mass casualty attacks in twenty-five countries, but most of them occurred in Iraq and Nigeria. Between January and June 2015 there were eleven attacks in which terrorists killed more than 100 people in a single country on a single day.