ISIS Rampaging in Sinai, Vows to Behead Egyptian President
Thursday, 29 Jan 2015 09:50 PM
By Joel Himelfarb
Egypt's Sinai Peninsula is increasingly coming to resemble the battlefields of Iraq and Syria, where the Islamic State (ISIS) terror group controls large swaths of territory.
On Thursday, at least 26 people were reported killed in a series of ambushes against Egyptian soldiers and police, Britain's Guardian newspaper reported.
ISIS' local affiliate, the "Province of Sinai," claimed responsibility for the violence, which involved car-bomb and mortar attacks targeting army bases and police headquarters. With the fighting continuing well into the night, fatalities appeared certain to mount.
Last month the group released a chilling video making clear that ISIS has exported its particular brand of terror to northeastern Egypt, The Wall Street Journal reported.
It showed gunmen arriving in pickup trucks on a busy highway linking the city of Rafah, bordering the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, with the city of El Arish. They set up checkpoints and begin hauling away those deemed to be "collaborators" with Egypt's "apostate" government.
The video concluded with forced confessions and grotesque close-up images of killings.
While ISIS also has established franchises in parts of Algeria, Libya, and Yemen, the Province of Sinai appears to be the most dangerous one right now, according to the Journal, "inflicting serious casualties on the Egyptian army in what's likely to be a prolonged and extremely vicious insurgency."
Issandr El Amrani, North Africa director with the International Crisis Group think tank, likened the situation in Sinai today to the Iraqi insurgency of the mid-2000s. He said this was cause for alarm because ISIS "has a methodology and a network of expertise based on causing splits in society to rally people around them — which is how it worked in Syria and Iraq."
While the Province of Sinai has not staged large-scale attacks outside the Sinai, it has made clear that given time, it will try to do so. After a bloody attack on another Egyptian Army barracks in October, a group leader railed at Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi in a video: "We will be the sword that cuts off your neck and the bombs that destroy your kingdom and break your back."
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