In the meantime—at the National Counterterrorism Center, the Lincoln Memorial, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Harbor Place, a string of restaurants along M Street, and at Café Milano—they counted the dead. One hundred and sixteen at the NCTC and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, 28 at the Lincoln Memorial, 312 at the Kennedy Center, 147 at Harbor Place, 62 along M Street, and 49 at Café Milano. Among those killed at the renowned Georgetown eatery were the four ISIS gunmen. All had been shot to death. But in the immediate aftermath, there was confusion over precisely who had done the shooting. The Metropolitan Police said it had been the FBI. The FBI said it had been the Metropolitan Police.
The suicide bomber was identified as a woman, late twenties, blond. In short order, it would be established that she had flown from Paris to New York on a French passport and had spent a single night at the Key Bridge Marriott in Arlington, in a room registered to a Dr. Leila Hadawi, also a French citizen. The French government was then forced to acknowledge that the suicide bomber, identified by her passport as Asma Doumaz, was in fact Safia Bourihane, the woman who had attacked the Weinberg Center in Paris. But how had the most wanted woman in the world, a jihadist icon, managed to slip back into France, board an international flight, and enter the United States? On Capitol Hill, members of both political parties called for the secretary of homeland security to resign, along with the commissioner of customs and border protection. Recriminations and apportionment of blame: Washington’s favorite pastime.
But who was Dr. Leila Hadawi? The French government claimed she had been born in France of Palestinian parentage and was an employee of the state-run health care system. According to passport records, she had spent the month of August in Greece, though French security and intelligence officials now suspected she had traveled clandestinely to Syria for training. Curiously, ISIS seemed not to know her. Indeed, her name appeared in none of the celebratory videos or social media postings that flooded the Internet in the hours after the attack. As for her current whereabouts, they were unknown.
Media on both sides of the Atlantic began calling it the “French Connection”—the uncomfortable links between the attack on Washington and citizens of America’s oldest ally. Le Monde revealed an additional “connection” when it reported that a senior DGSI officer named Paul Rousseau, the hero of the secret campaign against Direct Action, had been wounded in the bombing of the National Counterterrorism Center. But why was Rousseau there? The DGSI claimed that he was involved in the routine security measures surrounding the French president’s visit to Washington. Le Monde, however, politely disagreed. Rousseau, said the newspaper, was the chief of something called Alpha Group, an ultra-secret counterterrorism unit known for deception and dirty tricks. The interior minister denied Alpha Group’s existence, as did the chief of the DGSI. No one in France believed them.
Nor did anyone really care at that point, at least not in America, where blood vengeance was the first order of business. The president immediately ordered massive air strikes against all known ISIS targets in Syria, Iraq, and Libya, though he went out of his way to assure the Islamic world that America was not at war with them. He also rejected calls for a full-scale U.S. invasion of the caliphate. The American response, said the president, would be limited to air strikes and special operations to kill or capture senior ISIS leaders, like the man, still unidentified, who had planned and executed the attack. The president’s critics were livid. So, too, was ISIS, which wanted nothing more than a final apocalyptic battle with the armies of Rome, in a place called Dabiq. The president refused to grant ISIS its wish. He had been elected to end the endless wars in the Middle East, not start another one. This time, America would not overreact. It would survive the attack on Washington, he said, and be stronger as a result.
Among the first targets of the U.S. military response was an apartment building near al-Rasheed Park in Raqqa and a large house of many rooms and courts west of Mosul. At home, however, the American media was focused on a house of a far different sort, a timbered A-frame cottage near the town of Hume, Virginia. The cottage had been rented to a Northern Virginia–based shell entity owned by an Egyptian national named Qassam el-Banna. The very same Qassam el-Banna had been discovered in a small pond on the property, in the front seat of his Kia sedan, having been shot four times at close range. Five additional bodies were discovered inside the cottage, four ISIS fighters in black tactical suits and a woman who would later be identified as Megan Taylor, a convert to Islam originally from Valparaiso, Indiana. The FBI concluded that all five had been shot with 5.56x45mm rounds fired by two AR-15 assault rifles. Later, through ballistics analysis, it would be determined that those same AR-15s had been involved in the attack on Café Milano in Georgetown. But exactly who had done the shooting? The FBI director said he did not know the answer. No one believed him.
Not long after the discovery in rural Virginia, the FBI detained Amina el-Banna, the wife of the man found in the pond, for questioning. And it was at this point that the story took an intriguing turn. For immediately after her release, Mrs. el-Banna retained the services of a lawyer from a civil rights organization with well-established ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. A press conference soon followed, conducted on the front lawn of the el-Bannas’ small duplex on Eighth Place in Arlington. Speaking in Arabic, with the lawyer acting as her translator, Mrs. el-Banna denied that her husband was a member of ISIS or had played any role in the attack on Washington. Furthermore, she claimed that, on the night of the attack, two men had broken into her house and brutally interrogated her. She described one of the men as tall and lanky. The other was of medium height and build, with gray temples and the greenest eyes she had ever seen. Both were quite obviously Israeli. She claimed that they had threatened to kill her and her son—she never mentioned that he was named for Mohamed Atta—unless she gave them the passwords for her husband’s computers. After uploading the contents of the devices, they left quickly. No, she admitted, she did not report the incident to the police. She was frightened, she claimed, because she was a Muslim.