It is a mostly local group of jihadists that feed off long-standing grievances that the population of the Sinai peninsula has with the Egyptian state.
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Tunisia’s government is increasing security measures at airports and on airplanes after last month’s crash of a Russian airliner over Egypt, amid mounting suspicion that it could have been downed by a bomb.
Yet the real impact of ISIS graduating from ground offensives and auto bombs to sophisticated attacks in the air would be the rise in its high appeal for would-be jihadis around the world.
Schiff, who was briefed by intelligence officials on Saturday, raised the possibility that someone working at the airport may have helped the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, place a bomb on the plane.
He confirmed a noise was heard in the final second of the cockpit recording as the aircraft was on autopilot and ascending. Nor did he confirm or deny a CNN report that Israel’s spy services had provided communications intercepts gathered in the Sinai to US and British analysts.
Egyptian officials have discounted terrorism as a cause and challenged Western speculation, asking why intelligence warnings hinted at by American and British officials were not shared.
Russian media said the disaster created many orphans, as many parents left their children with relatives as they went on vacation to Sharm el-Sheikh.
Egypt’s tourism economy is poised to suffer a damaging blow if the huge swathe of holidaymakers don’t return to the resort in the future, officials have warned.
Planes were sent to the country to retrieve Russian tourists.
“We are willing to pay any price to eliminate any repeat of this.” the official said.
“They have been bad on the information flow”.
In a statement following the suspected attack, al-Masri said the alleged bombing was a “blessing of our gathering under a single banner and leader”, in reference to the fact that the suspected attack also occurred on the one-year anniversary of the group pledging to follow ISIS chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
The ISIS affiliate in Sinai is believed to operate mostly in the northern part of Sinai near the border with Gaza and Israel.
She added they were doing “everything possible” to keep passengers informed and were covering all accommodation costs. “They were the premier bomb maker targeting aviation”.
Russian Federation unsuccessfully fought Islamists in Afghanistan for a decade, starting in 1979, and has battled them in its restive province, Chechnya, since 1999.
“And now we have chaos in the Middle East, have ISIS taking over Iraq, Syria, Northern Africa, Egypt. Now we have the Russians in there; it has presented a very complicated strategy moving forward in terms of protecting the American people”. “All of them have been killed, and thanks to God for that”, a narrator in the video said, as translated by Daily Mail.
“If this turns out to be a device planted by an (Islamic State) operative or somebody inspired by it, then clearly we will have to look again at the level of security we expect to see in airports in areas where [ISIS] is active”, United Kingdom foreign secretary Philip Hammond said.
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Security in Sinai deteriorated even further after the ousting of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in 2011. “At all the access points to the city, there is a lot of security, and all the security in South Sinai has been beefed up” since Islamist violence erupted in the north in 2011.
