PARIS — French leaders vowed Monday to hunt down Islamic State militants after last week’s attacks in Paris as European authorities intensified efforts to untangle a plot that they think leads all the way back to Syria.
President François Hollande, in his first address to French lawmakers at Versailles — assembled in a joint session of the two chambers — promised an unforgiving campaign against the Islamic State and proposed changes to France’s constitution to help authorities beat back militant threats.
“It is not about containing but about destroying that organization,” Hollande said before the members of Parliament stood to sing the national anthem. “They are not out of our reach.”
Hollande is expected to put forward a bill this week to extend a state of emergency for three months, enhancing police power to restrict freedom of movement and gatherings at public places.
At Versailles, he also proposed constitutional changes that would allow authorities to withdraw French citizenship from people with dual nationality, even if they were born in France, and to prevent French terrorism suspects from returning to France.
Hollande said he would meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Barack Obama in coming days to discuss pooling their efforts to destroy the Islamic State.
France’s airstrikes overnight Sunday were its heaviest yet on the city of Raqqa, the group’s de facto capital in Syria. French authorities said the bombings destroyed a jihadi training camp and munitions dump.
Speaking at a Group of Twenty summit Monday in Antalya, Turkey, Obama characterized the violence as a “terrible and sickening setback” but said it did not detract from progress being made by the U.S. and its allies in Iraq and Syria.
He said the United States and its allies need to stick with their strategy of relying on airpower and friendly, local forces to gradually roll back the Islamic State’s territorial gains.
“We play into the (Islamic State) narrative when we act as if they’re a state and we use routine military tactics that are designed to fight a state that is attacking another state,” he said at a news conference.
Obama said a new agreement to expand intelligence-sharing would help the U.S. more quickly provide France information about threats from groups such as the Islamic State.
Putin, who met with Obama for more than 30 minutes at the summit, suggested Western leaders are dropping their aversion to working with him.
“We offered cooperation in the anti-ISIL coalition and unfortunately our partners in the U.S. initially refused,” Putin said Monday. “They sent us a note that said, ‘We decline your proposal.’ But life moves on and very quickly and often teaches us lessons.”
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who arrived in Paris on a hastily arranged visit, expressed American condolences.
“Don’t mistake what this represents,” he said of the fight against the Islamic State. “This is not a clash of civilizations.” These “terrorists,” he said, have attacked “all civilizations. There is nothing, nothing civilized about them.”
Hollande spoke as European authorities expanded the manhunt for suspects involved in Friday night’s violence, which killed 129 people in a series of coordinated assaults.
By late Monday, French and Belgian officials had conducted more than 160 raids, arrested more than 20 suspects and seized weapons as they sought to identify others involved in planning the attacks and pinpoint links between attackers and the Islamic State’s leaders in Syria and Iraq.
Authorities were zeroing in on the role of a man they think is a key figure in the Islamic State’s operations in Europe and possibly played a coordinating role in the Paris plot from Syria.
Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a 28-year-old Belgian of Moroccan descent, has been linked to terrorist attempts in Europe this year, including a foiled assault aboard a high-speed Paris-bound train in August.
A French official familiar with the case described Abaaoud as the “guru” of several assailants, including Salah Abdeslam, a 26-year-old thought to have taken part in Friday’s bloodshed who is now the subject of an international dragnet.
While the expanding investigation produced tantalizing clues about possible plotters, it also underscored the limitations of Western security agencies as they face homegrown terrorism plots.
New information about the attackers showed that at least some were known to French and Belgian security officials. Turkish and Iraqi officials also reported having warned Western officials about potential threats before Friday’s attacks.
Manuel Valls, the French prime minister, said the attack was “organized, conceived and planned” from Syria.
Waves of migrants fleeing the civil war there have traveled to Europe, raising worries that militants also could have used the exodus as way into the continent.
Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, also said emerging intelligence about the plot suggests that it originated in Syria.
“It certainly looks as if the general plotting originated in Syria,” Schiff said in Washington, adding that it remains unclear “to what degree operatives in Europe may have been exercising their own discretion in choice of timing and targets.”
Schiff spoke after he and other lawmakers received a briefing Monday.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
