A deadly and sophisticated attack by an ISIL affiliate in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula on Wednesday and early signs of an escalated security crackdown by
President Abdel Fatteh El Sisi have experts warning that more violence
is just around the corner in the Middle East’s most populous country.
Two days after Egypt’s chief prosecutor was killed on the streets of
Cairo — the country’s most significant political assassination in
decades — members of an armed group called Wilayat Sinai, or the Sinai
Province, launched an assault on the northern Sinai town of Sheik
Zuwaid, holding their own for several hours until Egyptian forces,
backed by F-16 warplanes, were finally able to drive them out. Dozens of
Egyptian soldiers and police were killed in the assault, local media
reported, along with over 100 fighters, according to Egypt’s military.
The steep body count and heavy weapons deployed in the attack spurred
Prime Minister Ibrahim Weleb to declare that Egypt is now “in a real
state of war.”
The attack has worried many on the peninsula, where the group —
formerly known as Ansar Beit Al-Maqdis, until it pledged allegiance to
the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant last year — has waged a
low-level insurgency of sporadic hit-and-run attacks and
suicide bombings since at least 2011. But Wednesday’s assault suggested
an evolution of the group’s anti-government campaign: For the first
time, it displayed tactics that closely resembled those of the
organization to which it has pledged allegiance.
Just as ISIL has done in numerous assaults on towns in Syria and
Iraq, the Sinai insurgents first set off a string of coordinated car
bombs, simultaneously trapping police officers and soldiers in the town
by booby-trapping roads. In a significant departure from the isolated
potshots the Sinai fighters have taken at security targets for years,
“they actually tried to take a town and control territory, which they’ve
never done before,” said Patrick Skinner, an analyst at the Soufan
Group, a security firm. “It shows a shift, that the group is more true
to the ISIS name than we may have thought,” he said, using an
alternative acronym for ISIL. “They’re learning tactics,” which may even
suggest more direct communication with ISIL in Syria and Iraq.
Though the Sinai Province was unsuccessful in holding on to Sheik
Zuwaid, analysts say there is reason to believe the group will strike
again and soon. “The high degree of planning, the number of militants
involved and the tactics used indicate that this was likely to be a
probing operation intended to test the army’s capabilities and prepare
the ground for capturing territory in north Sinai,” said Firas Abi Ali,
the head of Middle East analysis for IHS Country Risk, a consultancy.
As was widely expected, Sisi reacted just hours after the attack by
signing into law new anti-terrorism legislation that expedited criminal
sentences, including executions. And in the latest sign that Egypt’s
Muslim Brotherhood opposition could be held accountable — whether
directly or indirectly — for the week’s violence, security forces on
Wednesday killed 13 Muslim Brotherhood leaders accused
of plotting attacks, in a raid outside Cairo. (The men’s relatives
claimed they were unarmed and that they had already been arrested when
they were each shot multiple times.) It is unclear whether these
developments are related, but they fit the narrative Sisi has used to
justify his ongoing crackdown on the country’s anti-secular political
and military factions by conflating them as one “terrorist” entity.
Sisi’s critics, however, argue that his brand of iron-fisted reprisal
has backfired and could even aggravate the situation. “The dominant
faction in the security establishment is the old school,” which favors
eradication, said Omar Ashour, an Egypt analyst and a senior lecturer at
Exeter University. “They have this idea that they can bomb their way
out of this problem, but this is not working.” The Brotherhood, in
response to the killing of its members on Wednesday, has called for supporters to “rise in revolt” against the government.
Ashour noted that Wilayat Sinai, then under its former name, was
significantly emboldened in late 2013 when Sisi began his far-reaching
crackdown on Brotherhood supporters who protested after his
military-backed uprising toppled Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi, the country’s first democratically elected president.
As hundreds of Brotherhood supporters were killed in the streets or
arrested and sentenced to death in mass trials, Ansar Beit al-Maqdis —
which the Brotherhood says it has no relationship to, though both reject
Sisi’s secular, military-backed rule — escalated its attacks in
reprisal.
Others say Sisi’s security-minded response serves to distract from
the societal and economic tensions in the Sinai that have provided
fertile ground for ISIL and other insurgent groups to expand in the
first place. For decades before Sisi came to power, Sinai residents
complained that the peninsula was neglected and underdeveloped and that
they have been relegated to second-class citizenship. More recently, the
Egyptian government has demolished hundreds of houses along the border
with Gaza to create a buffer zone to stem the flow of weapons between
insurgents in the Sinai and Hamas, rendering thousands of Sinai
residents homeless.
“You’re fostering the right environment to host an insurgency,” said
Ashour, “and now they have the weapons and the angry young men too.” The
way things are headed, Sisi could inadvertently be shaping Wilayat
Sinai into “Egypt’s most powerful nonstate actor in a very long time.”
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