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France’s president has said his country will step up its fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group, launching a week of diplomacy with a meeting with the British prime minister in Paris. Francois Hollande and David Cameron held a joint press conference in the French capital yesterday, a day after French police appealed for help in identifying one of the men involved in the Paris attacks.

In a Twitter post on Sunday evening, the police said the man was the third participant in the attack, which occurred in the national stadium, Stade de France, where the French football team was playing Germany and with Hollande present. The attack was one of several carried out across Paris on November 13 by suspected ISIL members, and left 130 people dead. At least one of those involved in the attacks, Belgian national Salah Abdesalam, is believed to be on the run and hiding near or around Belgium’s capital, Brussels.

Police in Belgium arrested 16 people in overnight raids across the capital Brussels as the hunt continued on Sunday for a key suspect in the Paris attacks. The search to find Abdesalam and find out who his accomplices are comes as France deploys its military assets to take on ISIL.

The country has dispatched its Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier to the eastern Mediterranean to help step up its air strikes on ISIL positions in Syria. Al Jazeera’s Mohammed Jamjoom, reporting from Paris on Sunday, said the Charles de Gaulle’s arrival in the area will greatly boost France’s capacity to take on ISIL.

“We have been told there are going to be 26 fighter jets [on the carrier] targeting ISIL targets in Syria,” he said. “This is in addition to the 12 other fighter jets that have already been carrying out bombing raids [since the Paris attacks].”

Our correspondent said that public support for Hollande was high following the country’s increased air strikes against ISIL. Hollande’s meeting with Cameron yesterday was part of his campaign to gather international support for a military response after the Paris attacks.

“We are convinced that we must continue to strike ISIL in Syria. We will intensify our strikes. We will choose the sites that will cause the most damage to this terrorist army,” he said. Hollande and Cameron agreed to increase intelligence coordination and ensure tougher checks at entry points coming into Europe. Hollande is set to meet US President Barack Obama today, and he will visit Russia later in the week.

The US, France and the UK are carrying out a coordinated campaign against ISIL in Iraq and Syria. Russia has its own campaign against ISIL that has been criticised by Western officials for focusing on Syrian groups opposed to both President Bashar al-Assad and ISIL. — AFP