Train Gunman May Had Ties to ISIS Fighters; Train Gunman May Have Had Ties to ISIS Fighters
ALISON KOSIK, CNN BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT: This one trader telling me, look, the S&P 500, a broader indicator of the market --</s>POPPY HARLOW, CNN ANCHOR: Yes.</s>KOSIK: That's yet to hit correction territory. Two percent to go on that. Glass half empty, watch the Asian markets on Sunday night.</s>HARLOW: Right.</s>KOSIK: That could be a precursor of how we do Monday.</s>HARLOW: We will. We will all be watching come Sunday night. Thanks, Alison.</s>KOSIK: You got to, Poppy.</s>HARLOW: We appreciate it. Next hour of NEWSROOM starts right now.</s>ANNOUNCER: This is CNN breaking news.</s>HARLOW: I'm Poppy Harlow. Five o'clock Eastern. Thank you so much for being with me. We begin with breaking news this hour. Just in to us at CNN, the man who opened fire on that train overseas and was tackled by three Americans has been identified as Ayoub el-Khazzani. And now, we now know where he is from. These three Americans, two of them U.S. service members, being hailed as heroes around the world after they took down the gunman, they restrained him and they delivered him to French authorities. Nic Robertson joins me live in France. What do we know about this man? We know his name. Do we know his motivation, who he was with, what drove this?</s>NIC ROBERTSON, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Counterterrorism officials across Europe from Spain through France to Belgium all have reasons to believe that he is connected with radical Islamists. As recently as May this year he went off to Turkey, he is believed to have joined or connected with a French ISIS group there in Turkey before coming back to Europe in July this year. So, two months in Turkey. Question is, did he get into ISIS, to join ISIS in Syria. That's not clear. But the concern is, the same French ISIS group that he met with in Turkey is the same group that directed an Algerian living in France to attack a church in April this year. That attack was thwarted but not before he killed somebody else. So this group has a track record and they seem to have directed this man to attack from the train. That is sort of one of the starting places for the investigation here at the moment into this man. So a man with a lot of weapons on the train taken down by some heroic Americans. And we have seen amazing support from the streets for these three men today here -- Poppy.</s>HARLOW: Yes. Well, let's talk about that. I mean, they are Nic being treated like rock stars in France. Thanked by everyone that has come into contact with them. President Obama calling them.</s>ROBERTSON: Yes, the President Obama calling them, congratulating them, thanking them for the disaster that they averted, driving out of the police station here, Sadler and Skarlatos, both being driven away in a French police convoy. But as they came out of the police station, the French people will on the side of the road here were cheering them, cheering them. You don't see that here very often. That was quite an amazing thing to witness and get that emotion. But on Monday along with our friend Stone, they are going to meet the French president at the French president's palace. That is pretty cool too. But it's not just the president. It's the prime minister, the foreign minister, the interior minister, the minister of transport as well. So, it goes from the French man on the street here all the way up to the president. We even had a woman and a daughter walk past, we've been working</s>HARLOW: Yes. You always ask yourself what would I have done in that moment. They did exactly what we would all hope we do. Nic Robertson, thank you very much. Now, let's talk more about the gunman. French officials trying to find out how closely tied he may be to radical Islam and whether he carried out the attack as part of a larger plan or if this was an isolated event. Let's go straight to Bob Baer, international intelligence and security analyst, also a former CIA operative. So, I know the information is relatively thin right now but now we know his name and we know that he was likely meeting with ISIS supporters in Turkey. Does this tell you that this is a lone wolf?</s>ROBERT BAER, CNN INTELLIGENCE AND SECURITY ANALYST: I think it's probably a lone wolf in the sense that there was just one gunman. If it was the Islamic State, you know, carrying out a concerted attack, there would have been two gunmen, they would have been better positioned, they wouldn't have been grabbed as they were. I think the fact that he went to Turkey, he's from Moroccan and the rest of it, he sounds like somebody who wanted to join but did never got the weapons training that some might.</s>HARLOW: What about the fact though that this appears, he appears to have met likely with French ISIS fighters in Turkey and the fact that there is growing concern about Turkey being a hotbed for this, not just a conduit for travel into Syria, but potentially a place for Europeans who have been radicalized or Americans who have been radicalized are turned around and said go carry out an attack in your home country?</s>BAER: Well, Poppy, you don't actually need to get into Syria or Iraq to join the Islamic State.</s>HARLOW: Right.</s>BAER: They've got offices of sorts all across Turkey. They have a lot of sympathizers. They have got a lot of allied groups you could go find, it would be fairly easy to get to them in Turkey, to get instructions to go back, attack people in the west. You know, Kalashnikov, you cannot buy, of course, in Belgium or France. So you would have to have somebody, a supplier there, whether it's an Albanian organized, you know, criminal group, it doesn't really matter. So, there was some organization in this. And the Islamic State has gone out and said just attack a western target. It doesn't matter what. So you know, things are bad in Europe.</s>HARLOW: Yes. No question. What about how these Americans and this British man took down the gunman? Can you talk to us about how hard tactically it is to carry off what they successfully carried off?</s>BAER: You know, Poppy, there is no other way to describe this as heroic. Most people when faced with an automatic weapon freeze. I have been in a run of gunfire and that's my first reaction, just not move. The fact these guys organized and went after him and by the way, Poppy, this isn't something you learn, the average guy in the military, how to disarm somebody and you're not armed. That's not just not part of the training. So these guys had incredible presence of mind.</s>HARLOW: Yes.</s>BAER: They acted in concert, disarmed this guy, a pistol and a Kalashnikov, it's just amazing. I have had this training before. And I always wondered whether I could actually make the correct moves to disarm somebody and these guys actually did it. I really do applaud them.</s>HARLOW: Yes. We all do. Wait for the welcome they get when they do come home. Bob Baer, thank you as always, my friend. Coming up, we turn to politics and the debate over this term you probably heard a lot this week. Anchor babies. Is it a serious conversation, an important one to have or a campaign diversion and how insulting is it? We will talk about this. Ben Ferguson, Marc Lamont Hill, next.