Egypt's Terrorist Crisis
On Nov. 24, Sufi Muslims came together in the small Sinai town of Bir al-Abed for a weekly Friday sermon, only to have their prayers stamped out by bombshells and gunshots. Carried out by 30 flag-bearing, masked militants with alleged ties to ISIS, the massacre left more than 300 people dead. Though unique in that the perpetrators targeted fellow Muslims, the mosque attack brings back memories of Metrojet Flight 9268, which exploded with 224 passengers and crew over northern Sinai, as well as the more recent bombings of Coptic Christian churches. More importantly, it begs the question of whether the Egyptian government has been complicit in this violence.
The deadliest terrorist attack in Egyptian history occurred in an area long renowned for its militancy and violence. Northern Sinai consists of approximately 370,000 tribal Bedouins, many of whom have turned to the black market in search of economic opportunities. North Sinai is Egypt’s poorest region, and government development projects have done little to appeal to disaffected youth. When Israel relinquished Sinai to Egypt in 1982, the Bedouin Arabs were stripped of their livelihoods. Luxury hotels materialized where petite fishing villages previously stood; factories and mass-production farms sprang up on tribal lands. More concerning, the hiring practices of these capitalist enterprises discriminated against Bedouins and favored Egyptians from the Nile River Valley. For many of these tribal youth, unemployment is not an option; terrorist groups and smuggling organizations exploit this insecurity to wreak havoc in Bedouin communities.
Now is not the time to endow the Egyptian leader with our unconditional support.
“The military and the police will take revenge,” Al-Sisi vowed in an official speech, repeating a decades-old platitude. He is flogging a dead horse: with every new terrorist attack, Egyptian leaders have enlarged the security state at the expense of the Bedouins’ autonomy and encroached on personal liberties in the name of ruthless “counterterrorism.” But this “iron fist” approach has been counter-productive thus far. Rather than pouring its resources into infrastructure projects, the government treats the Sinai Peninsula as an incessant war zone and applies martial law as an excuse to subdue the local populations. Egyptian security forces arrest and torture Sinai residents — often only on the mere suspicion of terrorist ties — and destroy their homes. Members of the military have gone as far as to perform extrajudicial killings in northern Sinai. Even more, some reports have found that police are directly involved in the drug trade across the Egypt-Gaza border. While Trump Tweeted that the attack directly resulted from unhinged immigration and suggested that a “wall” could help, the atmosphere of mistrust and instability is bred from within, and not from external factors.
To create a long-term solution to Egypt’s terrorist problem, al-Sisi will need to reconsider his hardline approach. Yes, strengthening law enforcement will help in installing law and order on the anarchy-prone Sinai Peninsula, but only if the security personnel are held accountable for their breaches of individual privacy. The Bedouins of Sinai will defend their communities from terrorists if they have a stake in their safety. The Egyptian government should set quotas for Bedouins in both federal and local governing bodies, and depict the tribes as an integral part of Egyptian culture. Local populations should be employed in government-contracted development projects, with all initiatives happening at the grassroots level.
Now is not the time to endow the Egyptian leader with our unconditional support. Unlike his predecessor, Trump has turned a blind eye to Egypt’s violation of human rights. When al-Sisi visited the White House in April 2017, Trump extended a warm welcome, stating that the United States is “very much behind President al-Sisi.” This offhand policy should worry lawmakers, as Egypt is one of the largest recipients of US foreign aid. Without more leverage from the US side, and furthermore, without a more broad-based strategy from the Egyptian side, this aid will only entrench the power of Egypt’s ineffective, vicious military.