

France’s only aircraft carrier, the Charles de Gaulle, is to leave Toulon for the Gulf on Wednesday to ease the burden on its warplanes already operating against Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.

France has 12 planes operating against Isis targets from bases in Jordan and the United Arab Emirates. The carrier will add another 20.



The Charles de Gaulle, Europe’s biggest carrier, will also fill in a gap in US aircraft deployment, with the USS Theodore Roosevelt scheduled to leave the region soon and the USS Harry Truman not due to arrive until early next year.

President François Hollande said on Monday that the Charles de Gaulle would bolster French firepower in the region. “The aircraft carrier will enable us to be more efficient in coordination with our allies,” he said.

While the dispatch of the nuclear-powered carrier to the Gulf in the wake of the Paris attacks is a powerful symbolic gesture, it does not represent a change in strategy on the part of the US-led coalition, which remains committed to air power alone and resistant to sending in combat troops.

The deployment of the Charles de Gaulle was announced on 5 November. Nick de Larrinaga, Europe editor of IHS Jane’s Defence Weekly, said: “The deployment is not a response to the tragic events in Paris on Friday. It is to relieve the pressure on the 12 planes in the region.”

The Charles de Gaulle was first deployed against Isis after the attack on Charlie Hebdo in January. France, which joined in airstrikes against Isis in Iraq last year, began airstrikes against Isis in Syria in September.

The problem for France, as with the US and the UK, is the lack of targets. Since the initial airstrikes, Isis has been reluctant to operate in the open in large numbers.

France has carried out 1,300 aerial missions over Iraq but only 271 airstrikes, which it claims has hit 450 Isis targets. Until this week’s airstrikes against Isis in Raqqa, the organisation’s stronghold in Syria, France had conducted only a handful of strikes in the country.

The UK defence secretary, Michael Fallon, said it was right for France to step up attacks on Raqqa as it was clear that attacks such as those on Paris were being organised and planned from there.

“We’ve seen attacks now in Ankara, we’ve seen attacks on a Russian airliner and now in Paris – all this is being masterminded from Isil’s headquarters of operations in north-east Syria,” Fallon said.

He reiterated that UK would have to look at all the options for joining the fight in Syria, which he said France, the US and Turkey would welcome.



“So we have to think again about how we can help hit Isil harder and that leads inevitably to considering strike operations in Syria, alongside the operations the RAF are already conducting in Iraq,” Fallon said.

The UK government would like to press parliament to a vote on extending airstrikes to Syria but only when it is sure that it will secure a majority.