FRENCH PRESIDENT FRANCOIS HOLLANDE began his week at the Palace of Versailles with an appearance before parliament. “France is at war,” Hollande told the lawmakers gathered before him. Three days had passed since terrorists killed more than 120 people and wounded hundreds of others in a series of coordinated attacks in Paris. Hollande promised swift and decisive action.

In the Syrian city of Raqqa, the de-facto capital of the Islamic State, the dust from France’s first set of retaliatory airstrikes had hardly settled when Hollande began his address — the French response was in fact already underway.

Hollande vowed to triple his country’s capacity to launch airstrikes against ISIS. The French Navy’s flagship vessel, the Charles de Gaulle, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier hauling more than two dozen fighter jets, was set to arrive in the eastern Mediterranean by Thursday, Hollande said. “We will continue the strikes in the weeks to come,” he pledged. “There will be no respite and no truce.”

Echoing his president the following day, France’s defense minister formally called upon the European Union to aid in its fight “either by taking part in France’s operations in Syria or Iraq, or by easing the load or providing support for France in other operations.” According to the EU’s foreign policy chief, France’s invocation of the Lisbon Treaty on Tuesday — which requires member states to provide “aid and assistance by all means in their power” following acts of “armed aggression” — was unanimously agreed upon. As the New York Times noted, however, the agreement does not commit the member states to military action.

The French demands and declarations were the latest in a series of fast-moving events across multiple nations following last week’s attacks. The consequences of these developments are likely to add new layers of complexity to the ongoing air war over Syria, further heightening the danger for civilians caught in the conflict.

Since the fighting began more than four years ago, a dizzying array of armed forces has exchanged gunfire on the ground in Syria. In recent years, the skies over the country have become similarly complicated — and similarly lethal. For at least three years, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has made a habit of dropping crude barrel bombs on densely populated Syrian neighborhoods as a means to hold onto power. In a war that has cost the lives of more than 300,000 men, women, and children, Human Rights Watch claims Assad’s barrel bombs pose the greatest threat to Syrian civilians.

A coalition made up of the United States, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates began striking ISIS targets in Syria in September 2014, with the U.S. military taking the overwhelming lead in the bombings. As of this month, U.S. warplanes had delivered roughly 94 percent of the nearly 3,000 coalition airstrikes in Syria, according to coalition figures. While the coalition has maintained that it operates the most precise weapons systems on the planet, evidence that its strikes have caused civilian casualties has steadily mounted — with some estimates indicating as many as 354 civilians allegedly killed in the coalition’s first year of operations. Still, despite launching thousands of airstrikes in Syria since its campaign began, the U.S. Central Command, as of September, had admitted to just one “likely” incident of a civilian casualty caused by a coalition strike.

France announced it would join the coalition air campaign in Syria a year after the Americans did, in mid-September 2015. Prior to last weekend, however, France had carried out only a handful of airstrikes. Roughly two weeks after France joined the coalition, Russia began bombing Syria as well, along the way collecting steady allegations of displaying a blatant disregard for civilian life. In a report published this month, Physicians for Human Rights said it had “documented 10 attacks on medical facilities by Russian airstrikes in Syria” through the end of October.

Prior to this month, coalition airstrikes in Syria had seen a steep decline since peaking in July, a trend that has been attributed, in part, to Arab allies shifting their attention to another source of tremendous civilian suffering in the region: the devastating Saudi-led and U.S.-backed campaign in Yemen. For the remaining coalition forces, the introduction of Russian fighter jets into Syrian airspace further complicated matters. The attacks in Paris appear to have shifted the picture yet again.

Since Sunday night, French warplanes, taking flight from Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, have been dropping bombs on Raqqa daily. There have been questions as to the effectiveness of the strikes, with some reports suggesting little, if any, significant damage to the Islamic State’s infrastructure in Raqqa. The first indication that the strikes were actually killing ISIS members in any significant number did not emerge until Wednesday, when the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported the recent attacks had killed at least 33 fighters and that more fighters may have been killed, “but their bodies were so severely dismembered it wasn’t possible to give an estimated figure.”