Yesterday six soldiers were killed in a double suicide bomb attack in Sinai and ten soldiers and seven civilians were killed in Rafah, near the Israel border, by bomb blasts. Less than a week earlier, on 5 September, Egypt’s interior minister, Mohammed Ibrahim, survived a bomb attack on his convoy in Cairo. A Sinai-based al-Qaeda inspired group later claimed responsibility for the assassination attempt.
If there’s anything unexpected about this increase in violence against government targets, it’s that it has taken so little time for militant groups to strike beyond their Sinai-stronghold and organise attacks in the capital. When the Egyptian military began its heavy-handed and short-sighted crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood last month, it could only expect a violent response from the extremist wings of Egypt’s Islamist movements. It’s worth remembering that the Salafists initially welcomed the removal of the Muslim Brotherhood in power, it was the army’s brutality that changed their attitude.
The Egyptian government should also expect that a new generation of Islamists will be radicalised and turn to violent confrontation, because the message the military has sent to the Muslim Brotherhood, its supporters and other Islamists is very clear: there’s no place for you in government and your vote doesn’t, and won’t ever, count.
I don’t say this because I support the Muslim Brotherhood. Egypt’s ousted, and now jailed, Muslim Brotherhood president Mohammed Morsi showed alarmingly authoritarian tendencies. I understand why liberals, women and Christian minorities worried for their future under an Islamic government, and why many early supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood grew disillusioned. But by killing over 600 protesters on 14th August, arresting thousands of Muslim Brotherhood supporters and shutting down Muslim Brotherhood newspapers and TV stations, Egypt’s interim government has shown little patience for peaceful dialogue, and a concerning disregard for democratic norms.
Violence often breeds violence, and now Egypt faces the prospect of a return to the 1990s, when the military government faced a low-level Islamic insurgency focussed in Sinai. The difference is that Islamist insurgents will now benefit from greater instability in the region, and a ready supply of arms from neighbouring Libya. The present leader of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was a member of the Brotherhood who became involved in international jihad as a response to state repression in the 50s and 60s. Egypt should beware its disenfranchised and disillusioned Islamist youth.
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