French President Francois Hollande (C), French Prime Minister Manuel Valls (L) and Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo (R) leave with politicians from the Elysee Palace to take part in a solidarity march (Marche Republicaine) in Paris January 11, 2015. French citize
French President Francois Hollande (C), French Prime Minister Manuel Valls (L) and Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo (R) leave with politicians from the Elysee Palace to take part in a solidarity march (Marche Republicaine) in Paris January 11, 2015. French citizens will be joined by dozens of foreign leaders, among them Arab and Muslim representatives, in a march on Sunday in an unprecedented tribute to this week's victims following the shootings by gunmen at the offices of the satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo, the killing of a police woman in Montrouge, and the hostage taking at a kosher supermarket at the Porte de Vincennes. REUTERS/Yoan Valat/Pool REUTERS/Yoan Valat/Pool

Exactly a week after the horrendous Paris terrorist attacks that left 17 people dead, French lawmakers overwhelmingly approved on Tuesday to expand its participation in the airstrike campaign against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) militants in Iraq. The extension was for another four months.

The extension, which came under a vote of 488 ballots to 1, with 13 abstentions, was reinforced after the attacks on satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo on Jan 7, then later on to a Jewish supermarket in Paris. Three policemen died during the three-day terror rampage.

The lawmaker who made the lone vote out of the extended airstrike, Jean-Pierre Gorges of the center-right UMP party, said the extension could invite more extremist violence. But fellow lawmakers wouldn't hear his explanation and instead vigorously defended the campaign. One of last week's killers said the motivation for his acts was France's military campaign in Iraq.

"France is at war with terrorism, jihadism and radical Islamism," Prime Minister Manuel Valls told the National Assembly shortly before the vote. "France is not at war with a religion. France is not at war with Islam and Muslims."

France joined the U.S.-led coalition and immediately carried out airstrikes against ISIS in Iraq after the militants took over sections of the latter as well as in Syria. The country has the largest number of planes and troops in the coalition, next to the U.S. The Daily Star reported its troops and Special Forces operating in the Sahel-Sahara region hunting down Al-Qaeda-linked militants' number to about 3,500.

"The response is inside and outside France. Islamic State [ISIS] is a terrorist army with fighters from everywhere," Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian told Europe 1 radio. "It is an international army that has to be wiped out and that is why we are part of the coalition."

But analysts and observers said that despite the airstrikes launched in August against the terrorists in Iraq and Syria, the coalition has yet to produce tangible results that it had indeed been able to hurt the core of the terrorists' operations. Joachim Hagopian, a West Point graduate and former U.S. Army officer, in his article published on Global Research, claimed the U.S. is just using the ISIS and consequently the airstrikes to destabilise the region to be able to establish a permanent military base in Iraq. Up until now, all the damage the airstrikes was able to make involved Syria's infrastructure, taking out oil refineries and food storage silos, "hurting the Syrian people in the process, but not the supposed enemy ISIS," he said.

Read more: US Goes To War To Make Money, Not Save Lives - American Peace Activist