ISIS Attacks Hotel in Tripoli

The Daily Mail reports:

At least eight people, including five foreigners, were killed during an attack by gunmen against a luxury hotel in the Libyan capital of Tripoli on Tuesday, a security official told local television. 

Mahmoud Hamza, director of Libya's special deterrence force, told al-Naba television that five foreigners, including two women, as well as a security officer and two of the gunmen, died in the attack on the Corinthia Hotel in Tripoli. He did not give the nationalities of the foreigners. 

Militants from Isis in Libya claimed responsibility for the attack.

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A hotel staffer said the attack began when five masked gunmen wearing bulletproof vests stormed the hotel after security guards at the hotel's gate tried to stop them. He said they entered the hotel and fired randomly at the staff in the lobby. 

The staffer said the gunmen fired in his direction when he opened his door to look out. He said he joined the rest of the staff and foreign guests fleeing out the hotel's back doors into the parking lot. 

When they got there, he said a car bomb exploded in the parking lot, only a hundred meters away. 

He said this came after a protection force entered the lobby and opened fire on the attackers. He said two guards were immediately killed. 

The article indicated that the Libyan Prime Minister normally resided at the hotel, but was not there at the time of the attack. It wasn't clear from the article, but it sounds as though some of the attackers had taken hostages and were still in the building.

It is apparent from this report and the recent attack in France that the various terrorist franchises (I would be willing to bet that ISIS in Libya has little oversight and control by ISIS) have stepped up their game. Its only taken them 13 years of fighting U.S. forces to learn the value of body armor. And the herding of victims toward a car bomb shows that this was a sophisticated operation by terrorist standards, even if the tactic was an ultimate failure since the bomb was too far from anyone. Of course, the biggest failure of the terrorists (and we saw this in the French attack) is the lack of reconnaissance for tactical intelligence. The terrorists here undoubtedly hoped to catch the Libyan Prime Minister, but completely missed him; in the Paris shooting, the attackers knew which building to attack, but did not even know which specific office to go to, did not know their targets except by name, and could have been potentially foiled by the electronic lock on the doorway.

Nevertheless, this is a great example of 4th Generation Warfare. Although ISIS appears to be pursuing a classic Maoist insurgency strategy of using terrorism in areas it does not control, and military force where it is in control, the conflict is an ideological one that transcends national borders. Whereas Oswald Spengler used art as a tool for determining the inflection point between the death of culture and the rise of civilization, I think 4th Generation Warfare provides a similar measure as to the collapse of nations and civilizations. Chaos is nibbling away at the extreme edges of Western civilization.