The stakes are high for Egypt, and the president.
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At Barakat’s funeral Tuesday, el-Sissi pledged to bring his killers to justice.
“They fired rockets and bullets at the army camp in Zuhour and the Sheikh Zuweid police station”. Earlier this week, Egyptian Prosecutor General Hisham Barakat was assassinated in Cairo, most likely by Muslim Brotherhood supporters seeking to mark the two-year anniversary of the end of deposed Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi’s regime.
The army’s escalating military and media campaign to wipe out the terror group took a gruesome step Wednesday with two posts featuring dozens of contorted bodies clutching machine guns.
The militants, now calling themselves the “Sinai Province” of the Islamic State, appeared to have shifted from their usual guerrilla-style tactics, he said.
The peninsula has been plagued by a growing militant insurgency following the ouster of Islamist leader Mohamed Morsi in 2013 by the army in response to mass protests against his rule. I assume that the Egyptian army has regained control for the moment.
The MENA report didn’t describe the proposed laws.
In 2012, Ansar Beit al-Maqdis carried out a similar attack, infiltrating a military base and killing 17 Egyptian soldiers during Ramadan.
The coordinated assaults in the morning set off fierce fighting between the army and the militants with soldiers and police chasing the attackers using ground and air force.
In a separate development, on Wednesday, security officials reported that nine members of Mr Morsi’s now banned Muslim Brotherhood, including ex- MP Nasr al-Hafi, was killed in his flat in western Cairo following a police raid. It was not immediately clear if the incidents were related.
“In the latest attacks Hamas gave support with weapons and organisation to groups supporting IS”, Major General Yoav Mordechai, said in an interview in Arabic with Al-Jazeera television.
The officials say three automatic rifles and a hundred rounds of ammunition were found in the residence. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief media.
Egypt and Israel share a border in the Sinai and have cooperated in the past on cross-border militant threats.
The Coptic Church was that the Egyptian military is engaged in a struggle “against the forces of evil”, and prayed that God would “save Egypt from evil”.
The attack was one of the largest co-ordinated assaults in the area yet by IS’s local affiliate, Sinai Province. Clashes were still ongoing through Wednesday afternoon.
Dozens of Islamic militants coordinated simultaneous attacks on Egyptian army checkpoints in the restive northern Sinai Peninsula on Wednesday, killing at least 64 soldiers, officials said. Later Wednesday, Samir said on his Facebook page the country’s armed forces targeted two militant gatherings in northern Sinai, completely destroying them.
The assault was one of the most sophisticated on the powerful army in decades and challenged Egypt’s efforts to portray itself as a bulwark of stability in a region awash in violence.
Following yesterday’s attacks in the Sinai, Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon and IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eizenkot have ordered a highway in the south of the country closed to civilian traffic starting 5 a.m. on Friday, Israeli time.
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Egypt’s military spokesman, Brig.
