Commentaries

Commentaries Draining the Swamp? Egypt’s Intractable Challenge in Containing the Sinai Insurgency Saud al-Sarhan King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies, Riyadh. Sebastian Maier Middle East Director, GMTL Political Risk, London. During Friday prayers on November 24, 2017, militants staged a coordinated attack on the al-Rawda mosque in the town of Bir al-Abed, the home of one of the largest Sufi orders in the North Sinai governorate. With an appallingly high confirmed 305 killed and more than 100 injured. This despicable act of barbarity marks, by all appearances, the deadliest terrorist atrocity to ever occur on Egyptian soil in modern times. This tragic event is a chilling reminder that perpetrators manage to blend conventional suicide attacks with increasingly complex tactics. After all, the recent attack is said to have involved more than three dozen assailants acting in a coordinated manner. One of the assailants blew himself up in the mosque, while others fired indiscriminately on the fleeing worshippers, all the while surveilling and blocking the adjacent streets and reportedly targeting ambulances that rushed to the scene. The Sinai peninsula, and, in particular, the affected land strip in the vicinity of the northern coastal town of El-Arish, has been the staging ground for a variety of spectacular militant attacks in recent years. In 2015, a suicide bombing and subsequent shooting shattered the Swiss Inn Resort in Arish, while in October 2014 and March 2016 local security checkpoints were targeted, killing dozens of security personnel from both the army and the police. In all instances, the local ISIS offshoot, Wilayat Sinai, has claimed responsibility, including in 2015 when it brought down Russian Metrojet flight 9268 from the resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, ultimately killing all 224 passengers and crew on board. Draining the Swamp? 1 Commentaries Egypt’s Intractable Challenge in Containing the Sinai Insurgency “Ultra-Violence” and “Weak Targets”: The Motives Point to Wilayat Sinai While Nabil Sadeq, Egypt’s chief prosecutor, was quoted as saying that some of the mosque gunmen carried ISIS flags, Wilayat Sinai has not yet declared responsibility for the attack, although ISIS has disseminated their hostility toward Sufism openly. In the fifth edition of ISIS’s propaganda tool, their online publication Rumiyah, ISIS’s Sinai leadership—in their own words, the “amir of hisbah in Sinai”—explicitly vows to “eradicate the al-Rawdah lodge.” By the same token, the nature of the action bears all the hallmarks of the group, whose Syrian and Iraqi heartland has imploded in recent months. One of the main indicators is the fusion of appalling levels of violence with a false justification based on distorted ideological grounds that define some beliefs and practices of some Sufism as apostasy. Another expression of ISIS’s ultra-violent repertoire, which follows the same pattern, is the persecution of Egypt’s Coptic Christians, a minority community, which had endured an alarming string of deadly attacks as of December 2016. Upon closer inspection, the inherent motivations of the insurgents carry two distinct and intertwined patterns. First, they involve ritualized forms of brutality meant to alienate local communities with extensive cultural and historical roots on their home turf. Consider, for instance, al-Jaririyya al- Ahmadiyya, an Egyptian Sufi order whose modern presence in the North Sinai dates back to the early 1950s. One of the order’s theological founding fathers was local sheikh Eid Abu Jarir of the al- Sawarka tribe. Many of those slaughtered in the November 2017 al-Rawda mosque attack belonged to the eponymous Jarirat clan, whose Sufi identity is enshrined in the Sinai by theological practice and customs. It is quite interesting that a rapid initial surge and subsequent repression of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) also occurred in the 1950s. Moreover, less tangible forms of animosity between North Sinai’s Sufis and adherents of the MB reverberate to this day over the extent of alleged tacit consent of the Sufis vis-à-vis the crackdown against the MB starting in 2013. The second motivation of the perpetrators is to seek to instill a sense of frustration that could eventually help erode the deep-rooted social fabric among the targeted communities. In doing so, they try to undermine the already fragile security architecture in an effort to promote distrust between those who are targeted and the state institutions that are tasked to protect them. This sense of frustration is further exacerbated by the particular geopolitical history of the region. The Sinai’s Peculiar Geopolitics With the events in 2013 that saw the removal of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi from the presidency by the former minister of defense, Abdul Fattah al-Sisi, as demanded by the majority of the Egyptian people, surging violence is often portrayed as a riposte carried out by Islamist factions against Sisi loyalists, who have resorted to hitherto unprecedented measures against extremist groups. However, the root causes that provided the backdrop for the continuous state of restiveness predate the fall of former president Mohamed Morsi. Draining the Swamp? 2 Egypt’s Intractable Challenge in Containing the Sinai Insurgency Commentaries For decades, armed insurgents have been operating in large swathes of the Sinai, a place where an indigenous tribal Bedouin identity—and tribal rivalries—prevail and matter to the social conditions on the ground. In light of the marginalization of some local tribes and the increasingly troublesome economic environment they continue to face, it was an easy feat for militant groups to exploit their vulnerabilities with a criminal ecosystem and establish a foothold in the process. Egypt’s counterterrorism dilemma Adding to the problem, the interim Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai in 1979 included provisions that turned notable areas of the peninsula into demilitarized zones and significantly capped the number of Egyptian troops allowed to be deployed there. As a result, Cairo’s security apparatus historically has had limited room for maneuver in attempting to contain the steady expansion of underground insurgent activity. While both the Egyptian and Israeli leadership have stepped up their counterterrorism cooperation since 2013, for Egypt, the underlying security dilemma will continue to persist: Overtly praising Israeli involvement in helping secure the Sinai is highly unpopular among significant segments of the Egyptian public. It also fuels an anti-Egyptian bias across the adjacent Gaza Strip, a sentiment that groups such as Hamas continue to exploit. It therefore comes as no surprise that the immediate aftermath of the al-Rawda attack has seen the Egyptian air force conducting several strikes and President al-Sisi displaying an “iron fist” by kicking off a hunt for the attackers of the mosque. Recent history, whether in relation to the Vietnamese, Afghan, or Iraqi theaters, provides numerous case studies showcasing the fact that draconian use of military air power may change the psychology of warfare. However, taking retributive action in isolation predominantly jeopardizes efforts to tackle basic shortcomings on the ground such as unemployment, poverty, and illiteracy. As a consequence, ramping up the state security presence needs to be compounded by other inclusive measures to stem the vicious cycle in the Sinai. For instance, a quantum leap forward may be the pursuit of a more robust policy in economic, social development, and arming and overseeing cooperative tribal factions and coordinating security sector reform on a grassroots level. As such, draining the swamp of local support for insurgent tendencies has as much need for addressing persistent socioeconomic neglect and spurring tribal resilience as for an otherwise military-focused counterterrorism narrative. Draining the Swamp? 3 Commentaries Egypt’s Intractable Challenge in Containing the Sinai Insurgency.

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