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Version 6 Version 7
Egyptian Militants Linked to ISIS Launch Attack in Northern Sinai Jihadist Attacks on Egyptians Grow Fiercer
(about 7 hours later)
CAIRO — Militants affiliated with the Islamic State besieged a town in Egypt’s northern Sinai Peninsula on Wednesday in a coordinated assault that turned the area into a war zone, caught the Egyptian authorities by surprise and underscored their inability to contain a growing insurgency. CAIRO — Two years after President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi led a military takeover promising to restore order and security in Egypt, he faces a rising jihadist insurgency that has shaken the stability of this most populous Arab state, a key ally of the United States.
Dozens of Egyptian soldiers were killed, police officers were trapped in their posts, ambulances were paralyzed by booby-trapped roads and residents were warned to stay indoors by jihadists roaming on motorcycles. The Egyptian Army responded with warplanes in the area around the town, Sheikh Zuwaid, 200 miles northeast of Cairo, near the Gaza Strip. Just two days after militants assassinated Egypt’s top prosecutor on a Cairo street, the military on Wednesday called in F-16 war planes and helicopters to beat back a coordinated assault in Northern Sinai by a jihadist group affiliated with the Islamic State. Egyptian soldiers were killed, police officers were trapped in their posts, ambulances were paralyzed by booby-trapped roads and residents were warned to stay indoors by jihadists roaming on motorcycles.
The attack was the most audacious and deadliest yet for the Egyptian militants who have affiliated with the Islamic State, the extremist group that has emerged as the most potent jihadist force convulsing the Arab world. The group has established itself in Syria, expanded into Iraq and has strong footholds in Libya. The scale and complexity of the attack far exceeded any of the group’s previous strikes in Sinai, raising the possibility that it has begun to more closely coordinate with the Islamic State leadership based in Syria, experts said.
Six hours after the assault began with simultaneous attacks on more than a dozen military checkpoints, the militants still were battling for control of Sheikh Zuwaid. Warplanes roared overhead. More broadly, even as Mr. Sisi has pressed a campaign to marginalize mainstream Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood — with the authorities outlawing the group, jailing thousands, sentencing hundreds to death and using lethal force to shut down protests — he has faced growing opposition from more violent Islamists vowing retaliation for the government crackdown.
“No one is safe here,” Mostafa Singer, a journalist in the city, said by telephone with the sounds of the fighting in the background. “The explosions are everywhere.” That failure to tamp down violence and restore order has undercut Mr. Sisi’s ability to prop up the second pillar he promised to restore: the economy. The vital tourism industry faces new threats from militants just as the government had begun to predict a recovery. The economy remains deeply dependent on tens of billions of dollars a year in aid from Persian Gulf monarchies.
The assault came 48 hours after militants assassinated Egypt’s top prosecutor, bombing his convoy on a residential street in Cairo. That attack, along with the Sinai assault, left the government of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi suddenly struggling to battle an expanding insurgency, fought by multiple groups, on several fronts. At the same time, political life is frozen, with parliamentary elections promised two years ago yet to be scheduled. And the drumbeat of attacks by militants is fraying the public’s nerves.
The prosecutor, Hisham Barakat, was the most senior official killed since the insurgency erupted nearly two years ago, in the aftermath of the military ouster of President Mohamed Morsi by Mr. Sisi, who was Egypt’s military commander at the time. No one has yet claimed responsibility for the bombing on Monday, but analysts said it was possible that it was the work of one of a proliferation of new Islamist militant groups that have vowed to retaliate for the government’s crackdown on its opponents. “After the attacks in Tunisia, Kuwait, and France, I imagined that we were far from this,” said Abdelrahman Essa, a 27-year-old engineer in Cairo. “It is a new stage of violence. I am afraid of the situation, and the way events are developing.”
The Sinai mayhem, and the apparent sophistication that went into planning it, have undercut vows by Mr. Sisi to restore stability here after years of political turmoil. As the security crises mounted this week, though, there was little evidence that the government was preparing to change course. Officials pushed for restrictive new laws, including antiterrorism legislation and amendments that would speed up criminal sentences, including executions.
“The fact that the Egyptian authorities were surprised by this was, well, let me say, a bit shocking,” said Steven A. Cook, a senior fellow for Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington. And in an escalation of the government’s war against the Brotherhood, police officers shot and killed nine members in a Cairo apartment on Wednesday, saying that they had been gunned down while violently resisting arrest.
“The Egyptians are in for a pretty nasty insurgency in the Sinai Peninsula, and what worries me is that they’re not well equipped to deal with it,” Mr. Cook said in a telephone interview. A statement on the Brotherhood’s English-language website said their members, one of whom had been in Parliament, were killed “in cold blood.”
Over the last two years, the killings of hundreds of soldiers and police officers by the militants have served as the violent accompaniment to a vicious and sweeping government crackdown that ensnared thousands of government opponents, among them Islamist supporters of Mr. Morsi as well as leftist and liberal dissidents. “Why is it that they haven’t figured out that this is not working?” said Michael Hanna, an Egypt expert at the Century Foundation in New York, speaking of the counterinsurgency strategy. “Security is deteriorating. The government’s strategies, operations and tactics in Sinai are a failure.”
But even as the persistence of the insurgency has raised questions about the government’s strategy, Mr. Sisi has shown little interest in changing course, ramping up the military presence in Sinai while vowing even more aggressive prosecutions of people whom the state considers terrorists. The rising tide of violence did not threaten to topple the government, and may at least for now rally the nation behind Mr. Sisi’s get-tough approach, Mr. Hanna said. “It might erode confidence in Sisi, but they are not going anywhere, because the state is essentially unified,” he said.
Most worrying to Mr. Sisi, the violence this week appeared to signal the convergence of the two streams of violent resistance to his government: from the more recently formed militant groups, operating in the Nile Valley, as well as the jihadists with transnational ties to the Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria, intent on wresting control of territory from the Egyptian government. Yet for Egyptians searching for stability — including the families of conscripted soldiers and the residents of Sinai, lashed together to a shadowy and intensifying war — the growing power and sophistication of the militants posed an immediate threat.
In the last few weeks, militants have also attacked Egypt’s most popular tourist destinations, threatening a pillar of the country’s economy. “No one is safe here,” said Mostafa Singer, a journalist trapped by the militants’ advance in Sinai. “The explosions are everywhere. We do not know if the army will be able to solve this.”The assassination of the prosecutor, Hisham Barakat, on Monday showed evidence of the evolving tactics, and was the first time since the start of the insurgency nearly two years ago that the militants had killed a senior government official. The authorities said Mr. Barakat was killed by a remote-controlled car bomb, placed along the route that his convoy traveled every day.
But the sharpest challenge to the government’s authority has come from the militants based in northern Sinai, who even before Wednesday’s attack, had essentially gained control of several areas, setting up their own checkpoints and carrying out attacks on soldiers, seemingly at will. No one has yet claimed responsibility for the bombing, but analysts said it was possible that it was the work of one of the new Islamist militant groups that have framed their attacks as revenge for arrests and prosecutions by the government.
The threat has persisted even as Mr. Sisi has sent his military in force to counter the threat in Sinai — going as far as razing the town of Rafah, on the border with the Gaza Strip, to prevent the smuggling of militants and arms. The full-scale offensive on Wednesday in Sinai by the Islamic State affiliate began after sunrise with simultaneous assaults on more than a dozen military checkpoints. It was the most audacious yet by the militant group, which calls itself Sinai Province.
Even with those measures, though, the assaults on Wednesday appeared to have dwarfed previous attacks. For hours, as the militants laid siege to the town of Sheikh Zuwaid, Sinai Province even released updates on its progress. The police station was under siege, it told followers in a statement, adding that “the lions of the caliphate were also able to blow up two pieces of machinery belonging to the Egyptian apostate army.”
In a statement distributed via social media sites Wednesday morning, the Egyptian affiliate of the Islamic State, which calls itself Sinai Province, said it had attacked more than 15 security checkpoints and several police installations, using heavy weapons including mortars and rocket-propelled grenades. To finally overcome the militants, the military called in warplanes and helicopters, conducting airstrikes that left the remains of the militants still sitting in their pulverized vehicles, witnesses said. A military spokesman said that 17 soldiers had been killed along with 100 of the militants — lower casualty figures than given by Egypt’s semiofficial state media, which reported throughout the day that dozens of soldiers had been killed and injured.
The Egyptian military sought to downplay its losses while posting photographs on its Facebook page that it said showed “terrorist elements” fleeing its warplanes. There was nothing to suggest the militants were routed, only that they may have staged a tactical retreat. The militants have been able to carry out dozens of smaller attacks in Sinai, seemingly at will, killing hundreds of soldiers and police officers.
Mr. Singer and other witnesses speaking to local news media said the militants were fighting from rooftops in Sheikh Zuwaid, laying explosives in the roads and besieging the local police station. Ambulances were stuck on the outskirts of town, unable to pick up the dead and wounded. Brian Fishman, a researcher at the New America Foundation in Washington who previously taught counterinsurgency strategy at West Point, said that the coordination illustrated by the assailants — suicide bombers backed up by direct and indirect fire, well-aimed mortars used in combination with small arms, and simultaneous assaults in many places — was the strongest evidence yet of strategies used by Islamic State jihadists in Syria and Iraq.
“We do not know if the army will be able to solve this crisis,” Mr. Singer said. “Until now, it is on the side of the militants.” “People need to get training or to have a lot of practice to pull that kind of thing off successfully; it is a lot easier said than done,” he added. “The more we see these kind of sophisticated attacks, the more you have to conclude that there is actual learning going on and potentially direct knowledge transfer by people moving around and providing training in this kind of thing.”
Mr. Fishman also called the attacks more evidence that, even after two years of a heavy-handed crackdown by the Egyptian security forces, “the jihadi elements in Sinai aligned with ISIS are growing,” not retreating, which renews questions about the efficacy of the government’s approach to counter insurgency.
All the signs on Wednesday pointed to an increasingly violent confrontation between the government and its opponents. “We are in a real state of war,” the prime minister, Ibrahim Mehleb said as he spoke about legislation the cabinet was considering “to face the terrorism we are in,” according to state media.
In its statement, the Brotherhood said that its members had been “assassinated” while they were detained. “The criminal Abdel Fattah el-Sisi is laying the foundations for a new phase where it will not be possible to control the anger of the oppressed who will not accept to be so executed in their homes among their families,” the statement said.
“Rise in revolt to defend your homeland, your lives and your children,” it continued. “Destroy the castles of injustice and tyranny. Reclaim Egypt once again.”