Tuesday’s developments
— Egyptian helicopter gunships fired rockets at militants in the northern Sinai Peninsula, killing at least eight and injuring 15 others in an ongoing campaign to put down Islamic radicals who have escalated attacks in the largely lawless region, Egypt’s official news agency said. Egyptian troops have stepped up their crackdown on militants in the peninsula bordering Gaza and Israel, arresting suspects and destroying tunnels along the Gaza border used for smuggling weapons and people.
— An Egyptian court ordered Al-Jazeera’s local affiliate and three other stations to stop broadcasting, part of an expanding government crackdown against media seen as supporting the Muslim Brotherhood and the country’s ousted Islamist President Mohammed Morsi.
— A military tribunal issued the first verdicts against backers of Morsi, sentencing one to life in prison and handing sentences of five to 15 years in prison to 51 other defendants for assaulting troops during riots in the port city of Suez last month. The riots were part of a nationwide wave of violence sparked when security forces cracked down on pro-Morsi camps in Cairo, killing hundreds.
Associated Press
An Egyptian doctor once close to Osama bin Laden is bringing together multiple al-Qaida-inspired militant groups in Egypt’s Sinai to fight the country’s military, as the lawless peninsula emerges as a new theater for jihad, according to Egyptian intelligence and security officials.
There have been other signs of a dangerous shift in the longtime turmoil in the peninsula bordering Israel and the Gaza Strip since the military’s July 3 ouster of Islamist President Mohammed Morsi, the officials say. With the shifts, Sinai’s instability is becoming more regionalized and threatens to turn into an outright insurgency.
Sinai has seen an influx of foreign fighters over the past two months, including several hundred Yemenis. Several militant groups that long operated in the area to establish an Islamic Caliphate and attack their traditional enemy Israel have joined others in declaring formally that their objective now is to battle Egypt’s military.
Also, Sinai has become the focus of attention among major regional jihadi groups. A leader of al-Qaida’s Iraqi branch, Abu Mohammed al-Adnani, last weekend called on Egyptians to fight the military, as did al-Qaida’s top leader, Ayman al-Zawahri. The militant considered the most dangerous man in the Sahara — one-eyed terror leader Moktar Belmoktar, a former member of al-Qaida’s North Africa branch — joined forces with a Mali-based jihadi group last month and vowed attacks in Egypt.
Topping the most wanted list in Sinai is Ramzi Mawafi, a doctor who joined al-Qaida in Afghanistan in the 1990s. Mawafi, 61, escaped from an Egyptian prison in 2011 in a massive jailbreak that also sprung free Morsi and more than a dozen Muslim Brotherhood members during the chaos of the uprising against autocrat Hosni Mubarak.
Mawafi is now believed to be in Sinai coordinating among militant groups and helping arrange money and weapons, security officials said. The four officials were from military intelligence, the military and the security forces and spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press.
Sinai’s disparate militant groups are now “on the same page, in full cooperation in the face of the same threat,” Gen. Sherif Ismail, a recently retired security adviser to the governor of Northern Sinai, said. He said the groups are inspired by al-Qaida, but not necessarily linked to the mother group.
Morsi’s fall opened the way for an escalation by Sinai’s jihadis. Most militants had seen Morsi as too willing to compromise in bringing rule by Islamic Shariah law in Egypt. But his removal by the military, backed by liberals, was seen as an attack on Islam. More importantly, it ended the policy Morsi pursued during his year in office of negotiating with Sinai armed groups, restraining security operations against them in return for a halt in attacks on the military.
Hit-and-run attacks take place nearly daily in northern Sinai, targeting security forces in the provincial capital of el-Arish and towns dotting the coast and the borders with Gaza and Israel.
Two militants — a Yemeni and a Palestinian — who were recently arrested in Sinai provided information about Mawafi’s role while under questioning, the security officials said. Recently, Nabeel Naeem, a founder of the Islamic Jihad militant group who has known Mawafi since Afghanistan — said on an Egyptian TV station that Mawafi “is leading the militants in Sinai.”
Mawafi specialized in bomb-making during his years in Afghanistan, the officials said. He also supervised clinics that treated wounded Islamic fighters, earning him the nickname “bin Laden’s doctor” — though Naeem said he never treated the late al-Qaida leader himself.
An Egyptian court in June last year accused Mawafi, along with Morsi and other Muslim Brotherhood members of conspiring with Hamas and Hezbollah to orchestrate the 2011 break from Wadi Natroun prison. The court described Mawafi as “the secretary general of al-Qaida in Sinai.”
The number of jihadi groups operating in Sinai’s rugged, mountainous deserts has mushroomed over recent years, believed to have thousands of fighters.
Ismail el-Iskandarani, a researcher at the Egyptian Center for Social and Economic rights who writes extensively about Sinai, says it’s hard to pin down the number of militants or camps because local jihadis hide in homes among their own families after carrying out hit-and-run attacks.
“Even their relatives might not know they are involved in Islamic militancy,” he said.
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