The July 1
battle in which the Egyptian Armed Forces regained control of a small border
town from the self-proclaimed Sinai Province of the Islamic State (formerly
known as Ansar Beit al-Maqdis or Supporters of Jerusalem) has heightened fear,
anger, and above all self-congratulation among both the government’s supporters
and its critics. Days after still
unknown assailants had assassinated the country’s Attorney General by means of
a car bomb, IS fighters attacked a series of checkpoints in the northern Sinai
peninsula and appeared briefly to have taken control of Shaykh Zuwayed near the
border with Gaza and Israel. The attack
occurred more or less on the anniversary of massive demonstrations (June 30)
and subsequent coup (July 3) in 2013 when former President Mohammad Morsi was
removed from office.
Most
commentary, and especially in English, has focused on the incapacity of the
Egyptian armed forces to prevent such attacks and the threat to the Egyptian
state of an IS insurgency. The rapidity
with which IS took control of important cities in Syria (notably Raqqa) and
Iraq (Tikrit, Falluja, and Mosul) as well as areas of Libya and Yemen suggest
that much of Sinai and perhaps portions of the Egyptian heartland could fall
easily into its grasp. The argument of
many analysts is straightforward: increasing levels of repression by the
Egyptian dictatorship radicalize the population and drive Egyptians
increasingly to accept the use of violence to overthrow an unpopular regime and
IS stands ready to provide the violence.
In this argument that repression occurs in the context of the massive
uprising of 2011 and the democratic elections of 2012 makes more Egyptians
likely to find the regime intolerable and to sympathize with or participate in
armed revolt against it.
The logic
of the argument is impeccable but as with so many arguments about Egypt and the
Arab world over the past four years it turns politics into a morality tale
whose authors are rewarded with victory.
It is more
useful and far more interesting to place the fighting in northern Sinai in the
context of the last 35 years of Egyptian history. Seen thus, the very real limits of the IS
threat to the Egyptian state and the likely continued degradation of the
Egyptian political scene as the government coercively responds to the military
challenge it faces becomes more apparent.
As Egyptians become inured to a coarser and more violent political life,
it seems unlikely they will be able to free themselves from it for at least a
generation.
IS is a
locally dangerous opponent and it may be true that the Egyptian Army lost more
men in the first week of July 2015 in Sinai than at any time since the 1973 war
with Israel. However in July 2015 the
Egyptian dead were about 1.5 % those who died in October 1973; and other
attacks in the past several years have taken dozens of lives. The violence in Sinai is real and frightening
but so far it is well within the capacity of the Egyptian armed forces to
repress.
To fully appreciate the meaning of
the events in Sinai we need to look elsewhere.
We can begin with the period between 1979 and 1981: the years in which
Egypt, during the presidency of Anwar Sadat, regained control of the Sinai from
Israel and during which Egypt also faced its first (and arguably most
threatening) Islamist insurgency. These
two processes are intricately linked, not least by the assassination of Sadat
in 1981.
Although the Egyptian state
presents the 1973 war as a military victory, Israel won and in the process not
only regained control of the Sinai peninsula that it had first seized in the
1967 war but also a portion of the west bank of the Suez Canal. It was widely believed at the time that it
would not be long before yet another Arab-Israeli war would be fought. Instead
a peace process returned Sinai to Egypt in return for a peace treaty that
removed Egypt from the Arab military front facing Israel and demilitarized much
of northern Sinai.
Egypt regained control of Sinai
through lengthy and domestically contentious negotiations coinciding with a
period of economic stress best remembered for two days of demonstrations and
rioting in 1977 when the government lost control of the streets in downtown
Cairo. To limit political opposition to
the treaty and to counter popular discontent rooted in economic distress, Sadat
ordered the arrest of some 1500 people in the late summer of 1980. Islamic activists engaged in what we would
now call a Salafi-jihadi current assassinated Sadat and including members of the
self-named “Islamic Group.”
Sadat’s assassination while he
presided over a parade celebrating the October war as a victory is well
remembered globally. Its shadow has
obscured another side of the events of October 1981: the attempt to overthrow
the regime by force. In the days after
Sadat’s assassination, Islamist militants launched an insurrection in the
southern Egyptian city of Asyut.
Something like 60 police were killed in the fighting and ultimately the
government regained control of the city by sending in Army paratroop units. Asyut is one of the largest cities in Upper
Egypt and has long been an important government and economic center for the
region. The Egyptian government has, on
occasion, found it difficult socially or politically to dominate many urban and
rural areas but Asyut is the one time in recent memory when it lost control of
a major city for several days due to an armed uprising. That events in Asyut had no echoes in the
rest of the country was, for some Islamist activists, a clear indication that
armed uprisings were doomed as a means to confront the regime.
Sadat’s actual assassins were executed
but other members of the Islamic Group, notably the cousins Abbud and Tariq
al-Zumor, were given lengthy prison sentences.
They remained in jail even after they had served the judicial sentences
imposed on them because the Egyptian government believed they posed a
continuing threat.
Sadat made significant progress in
realizing the goals of the Camp David treaty before his murder. As befits a treaty aimed at ending a series
of increasingly costly and destructive wars between states, Camp David provided
strong reassurances that neither party could easily launch a surprise war
again. It did this primarily by limiting
troop deployments on each side of the Sinai border between Israel, the
Palestinian enclave of the Gaza Strip (then still under direct Israeli
occupation), and Egypt. Although Egypt
had regained sovereignty over the entire peninsula, Sadat had agreed that it
would station no members of the armed forces in a zone stretching from Sheikh
Zuwayed on the north coast to Sharm el-Sheikh on the southern tip. Only lightly armed civil police would patrol
“Zone C.”
In years since 1981 development in
the Sinai has centered mainly on the tourism industry in the south. South Sinai with about 160,000 people is
lightly populated but it has world-class beaches, scuba diving, and
hotels. One of the few issues that
divided the Israeli and Egyptian governments after the signing of the treaty
was the determination of the exact boundary demarcating the countries at
Taba. A court decision awarded a small
slice of land and two hotels to Egypt, one of which is today the Taba Hilton. In
the first decade of the 20th century there were attacks on tourist
facilities in South but these were decidedly aimed at destroying the traffic
rather than in creating a “liberated zone” such as IS has in Syria and Iraq. Tourism
has not done well in the years since 2011; revenues have shrunk from over $14
billon to under $ 5 billion a year.
North Sinai, never the object of
much investment by Egyptian governments, has suffered an even more catastrophic
economic collapse than the south. Although North Sinai is also lightly populated,
with 420,000 people it is much larger than the south. The largest city, El-Arish, with about
164,000 people, has roughly as many people as all of South Sinai. Sheikh Zuwayed has about 60,000. El-Arish is the largest city in Sinai
proper, but it is not the largest city in the region. Almost as large is Rafah which has 150,000
inhabitants thirty miles away on the Palestinian side of the border. Not far beyond Rafah is Khan Yunis with more
than a third of a million people and 18 miles further north is Gaza City with another
half million.
Much has been written about the
tunnels under the Egyptian-Palestinian border.
They have supplied Gazans with cement, medications, and food (most of
which is ordinary and some of which is luxurious). They have been used for weapons (which became
cheap and available after the collapse of the Libyan regime) and drugs such as
tramadol (an opiate medication). They
have been viewed as engines of growth, survival and incubators for
entrepreneurship as well as security threats and lifelines. Less frequently has the estimated $700
million to $1 billion that passed through them been evaluated as vital to the
economy of Egyptian North Sinai. An
impoverished area with little industry, however, would inevitably orient its
economy toward the largest market in the region. North Sinai may be part of Egypt politically
but eastern North Sinai is necessarily connected to the Gazan economy.
In addition to goods, the North
Sinai economy includes traffic in human beings.
By some estimates tens of thousands of Eritrean and other African
citizens have attempted to illegally enter Israel through the Sinai border
crossings. Although it is impossible to
accurately measure the number of people involved, international human rights
organizations have described large numbers of people pressed into servitude,
tortured, and held for tens of thousands of dollars in ransoms. As is clear from the American Southwest,
lengthy borders in desolate regions are difficult to police even for a strong
state; where the state has withdrawn it is effectively impossible.
Northern Sinai is also the route of
a pipeline that until 2012 was the major export artery for Egyptian natural gas. A main line connects the central Egyptian
network to El-Arish on the northern Sinai coast where it splits into two parts:
one, underwater, connects with Ashkelon in Israel; the other, significantly
larger, connects to Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.
The gas connection with Israel was highly controversial and the
pipeline, which provides little direct economic advantage to North Sinai, has
been bombed more than 25 times since the 2011 uprising. Increased demand for gas in Egypt prompted
the government to end the contract with Israel in 2012 and reduce supplies to
the Arab countries. The Egyptian
government has recently decided to allow the import of natural gas via a
reverse flow from Israel through the same pipeline.
Before returning to connect the
strands of the argument so far, it is worth pondering what would happen if Gaza
could trade freely with its Israeli and Egyptian neighbors. Gaza City alone has roughly the population of
the four largest nearby non-Palestinian cities combined: Ashkelon, Ashdod, and
Beer Sheva in Israel and El-Arish in Egypt.
The 1.8 million people of the Gaza Strip (or Gaza province of Palestine
if you prefer) are the largest concentration of human beings in the Sinai and
southern Israel region and probably the largest supply of labor.
North Sinai is a gateway for Gaza
as long as its 1.8 million people can neither import directly through their own
port or trade with Israel. The northern towns of Shaykh Zuwayed,
El-Arish, and ultimately Rafah (on the Egyptian side) have provided the otherwise
absent gateway. Egyptian governments
from Mubarak through Muslim Brother president Morsi to now-president El-Sisi
have limited legal economic exchange with Gaza and frequently closed the
official border crossings. Trade has thus required transport
through tunnels, ie, as a form of criminal activity. This is a trade that initially the lightly
armed police were not equipped to deter and were sometimes paid to ignore. Morsi’s government placed more pressure on
this trade but governments since his ouster have been even more assiduous in
shutting it down.
Returning
where we left off: as the 2011 uprising in Cairo and other major cities grew
and the police forces collapsed, the maintenance of public order devolved to
the Egyptian Armed Forces. This required
pulling troops into central Egypt, especially the cities, and left the borders unguarded. The Supreme Council of Armed Forces did
negotiate a very early agreement with the Israeli government to send troops in
South Sinai partly to prevent attacks that would have damaged the tourist
industry but North Sinai receded even further from effective government control.
Unlike other
equally impoverished areas of Egypt, North Sinai in the wake of the 2011
uprising did have one important economic sector: illegal trade. It was precisely its illegality that made it
rewarding. Illegal trade (in the north) and tourism (in the south) are important
drivers of the economy and politics in these two areas.
Foreign
mass tourism in Egypt is a post-Sadat phenomenon and it has provided regime
opponents with a soft target. The most famous and still the most murderous
incident is the 1997 attack on Hatshepsut’s Temple in Upper Egypt in which 68
people (including 6 attackers) died. The
attack was carried out by members of the Islamic Group who opposed a truce some
of their leaders had arranged with the Mubarak government. In 2004, 2005 and 2006 hotels and tourist
attractions in Taba, Sharm el-Sheikh, and Dahab in South Sinai were attacked
and more than 150 people killed in total.
Salafi
groups claimed responsibility for the attacks in South Sinai although the
Egyptian state and many external observers see them as the work of North Sinai
Bedouin who hoped to affect the tourism industry. One aspect of the attacks that differentiates
them from 1997, is that they all occurred on holidays associated with the
Egyptian state or Egyptian society broadly speaking. The 2004 Taba attack occurred on October 7 (a
day after the anniversary of the start of the 1973 war and Sadat’s
assassination) and the Sharm attack occurred on the anniversary of the 1952
revolution. The 2006 attack in Dahab
occurred on Sham El-Nessim (the only holiday celebrated by both Christians and
Muslims) that occurs in spring and whose origins are pre-Islamic and
pre-Christian. These attacks thus struck
at the economic roots of the state as well as its cultural and social claims to
legitimacy.
It is not
surprising that within weeks of the beginning of the 2011 uprising some North
Sinai residents had also attacked the gas pipeline. In May 2011 unknown
attackers used a rocket propelled grenade to attack the tomb of the eponymous
Sheik Zuwayed during a period in which attacks on Sufi shrines created mounting
tensions in Egypt. These attacks also
made it clear that not all the arms that traveled through the region had been
sent to Gaza: rocket propelled grenades, high explosives, and automatic weapons
were widely available. In mid-summer of
2011, in addition to the earlier attacks on the gas pipeline and the shrine,
the police station in El-Arish was attacked and 6 policemen killed. In November 2012 an RPG was used to attack a
cement factory in El-Arish.
Although
the army and the Egyptian media have recently alleged these weapons arrive in
Egypt from Gaza, it earlier recognized that their primary source was
Libya. After the collapse of the regime
there weapons became widely available for export. Controlling the border with Gaza is probably
more important as a way of draining financial resources from the state’s
opponents in northern Sinai and also preventing them from having a safe haven
from the Egyptian army.
By August
2011, regaining control over the border area had become a priority for the
Egyptian Armed Forces after a series of cross-border attacks from southern
Sinai into Israel. Who was responsible
for these attacks remains unclear but they did provoke the first serious
exchange of gunfire between Israeli and Egyptian troops in decades. Five Egyptian soldiers were killed when
Israeli soldiers crossed the border pursuing the attackers. Coupled with the earlier attacks on the gas
pipeline, the police station, and the threat to the tourism industry Sinai
became more prominent to the government.
Few if any Egyptians were sympathetic to Israel’s security needs but
equally few wanted the decision about whether renewed war would break out to
pass into the hands of North Sinai Bedouin and guerrillas.
A year
later, on August 5, 2012, armed men again attacked an Egyptian military
outpost, killing 16 soldiers, stealing armored vehicles and attempting to enter
Israel where they were killed. In the
days after the attack, then President Morsi asked General Muhamed Tantawi to
resign as Defense Minister and replaced him with Abdel Fattah Sisi who later
mounted the coup that overthrew Morsi.
In mid-May
2013, as the Egyptian political crisis that ended with the coup deepened, seven
Egyptian soldiers were kidnapped. They
were freed but not before a video in which they appealed for help was shown on
the web. Their freedom came after negotiations
between tribal leaders and the kidnappers during which the Armed Forces
appeared to be irrelevant and powerless.
In late
October 2014 armed men launched yet another attack on army checkpoints in
northern Sinai with car bombs, explosives and automatic weapons in which 27
soldiers died and 26 more were injured. This
was the largest guerrilla attack on the armed forces in the history of north
Sinai to date although this, along with the incidents mentioned above, are only
a few of the stream of violence occurring in the area.
The Egyptian
Army, like most militaries, has few tools other than overwhelming force with
which to re-establish control over North Sinai.
Opening the border with Gaza would have antagonized Israel and empowered
the Hamas government but it would not have solved the economic problems of
North Sinai; it more probably would have exacerbated them as the smuggling
trade diminished. Of course neither did
directly attacking the smuggling trade endear the military government to the
inhabitants of North Sinai. Specific
investments in North Sinai would take years to result in significant economic
growth and the overall Egyptian economy was shrinking any way as foreign and
domestic investment stalled and then declined.
Even had the central government been willing to pay fees to allow gas
exports to transit the national territory, there was no politically appropriate
way to allocate them to local inhabitants.
Armed
elements in North Sinai have proclaimed allegiance to the Islamic State and
asserted that they are the nucleus of a “Sinai Province.” How exactly does a region whose insurgents
are, even if loosely, connected to smuggling goods and trafficking people, fit
with the creation of a state-building enterprise whose core is in eastern Syria
and western Iraq? And how does it relate
to a project whose leaders claim it to be based on “strict” Islam?
One obvious
connection is that the Islamic State has emerged in areas where structures of
governance have been destroyed by war and where existing elites have been
politically marginalized. IS itself is
not an armed insurgency against an existing government. It was not organized in the wake of a popular
uprising. It exists where the old state
ceased to exist and few if any structures of governance are in place. In Iraq the American invasion and occupation effectively
destroyed the old Iraqi state and the army.
The reconstruction of institutions of governance in the Kurdish north
and the Arab south left the Sunni Arab center largely adrift. A prolonged and exceptionally destructive
civil war in Syria abetted by external actors accomplished an even more severe
result there. In both places armed Sunni
militias competed for influence and control.
The details of how the Islamic State defeated its rivals are unclear but
in the absence of a functioning army able to defend the national territory
those are unimportant. The existing
militias (which in Syria include the Lebanese Hizbollah and the remains of the
former Syrian Armed Forces) can defend themselves and their territories. The Islamic State has been unable to move
into ethnically or religiously different areas and its opponents have shown
little willingness or ability to defeat it on its home ground. The Islamic State itself survives, as the
late scholar of state-building Charles Tilly would have recognized, by engaging
in racketeering. It operates a
“protection racket” against competing militias and enforces its own power with
displays of ruthlessness on a par with those of the Zetas and other drug
cartels. The Islamic State has clearly,
as its name implies, created state or state-like institutions but it continues
to require external aid (in the form of recruits and finance), external trade
(in oil and looted goods) as well as internal political acquiescence if not
support.
This brings
us to the events at Shaykh Zuwayed in mid-2015.
On May 16 shortly after deposed President Muhammad Morsi was sentenced
to death, three judges in north Sinai were murdered in a drive-by shooting of
the mini-van carrying them from their homes to court. The
execution the following day of six men convicted of membership in a terrorist
cell provoked some domestic outrage and international concern. Far
less attention was paid to events in north Sinai itself where, according
to the daily Al-Misry al-Yawm, the army and police “eliminated seven takfiri
jihadists.” The newspaper described the
killings as revenge for the deaths of the jurists. Government spokesmen began to walk back the
claim that the Armed Forces and the police are involved in a vendetta rather
than enforcing the law, but the immediate perception of the headline writers
may be quite accurate. Something similar
happened after the October 2014.
Headlines in the daily Al-Masry Al-Youm proclaimed in large type “No
Mourning Before Retaliation” which may have reflected sentiments in the Armed
Forces but was not itself reported as official policy.
Unofficially retired generals, who
had taken up posts as security advisers and experts, such as Sameh Saif
al-Yazal, Hamdi Bekheit, and Gamal Abu Zikri called for clearing the population
from the area so that the army could eliminate its opponents. Since
the fall of 2014 the Egyptian government has followed this policy and created a
buffer zone up to a kilometer wide on its border with Gaza, razing hundreds of
residences in the process.
The coordinated attack on several army
checkpoints indicated that the Sinai Province fighters have the capacity to
engage in such operations against stationary and lightly held positions. Reports about casualties vary and the Egyptian
government has been careful to limit much news of the operation but it is
generally agreed that dozens of people—soldiers, insurgents and civilians—died.
Unlike the Syrian or Iraqi armies, the Egyptian Armed Forces are extremely
well-armed due to years of aid from the United States and they have retained
their operational capacity and institutional chain of command. It is therefore neither surprising nor the
cause for particularly great congratulations that, using armored vehicles and
jets, they rapidly overwhelmed the fighters of the “Sinai Province.” Nor is it surprising that the army’s
operation took civilian lives as well as that of the IS combattants.
Less
obvious is how events in Sinai play out on
the broader stage of Egyptian politics.
The fear of many foreign (and some but fewer domestic Egyptian) analysts
is that Sinai is the beginning of a larger Islamist insurgency against the
nominally civilian but essentially military dictatorship that now rules
Egypt. The reasoning is, as noted above,
straightforward and certainly has merit.
The military ousted the democratically elected president of Egypt,
Muhammad Morsi and outlawed the party he represented that was itself the
political expression of the Muslim Brotherhood.
The MB is now outlawed, its members are being arrested, tortured, and
(most recently) killed out of hand.
Consequently it will (and some of its younger members already have) turn
to violence against the state. Given
that the MB had mass support, a membership of perhaps a million Egyptians, and
that Morsi won millions of votes an insurrection that it leads will be more
powerful than even the ones led by other (Salafi) Islamists in 1980 or the
early 1990s. The fighters of the “Sinai
province” are one pole around which a larger insurrection might ultimately
coalesce.
This is a
powerful scenario but it deploys an overly simple psychology to underpin a
policy argument based on an understandable normative antagonism to
dictatorship. Existing states, whether
democracies or dictatorships, rarely lose to insurgencies. Egypt may be an exception but it is
unlikely. The Egyptian state retains
significant international support—from a superficially unlikely coalition that
includes the United States, Israel, and Saudi Arabia—while Egyptian insurgents
(whether former members of the MB or the “Sinai Province”) have little. It is rare for insurgencies to win when they
have little or no external support and while the central government retains
international allies who provide it with arms and financial support.
If the MB
is indeed moving from confrontation to violence, several of its presumed
harder-line Salafi allies have been conspicuously absent from joining it. The move toward violence by younger members
of the MB may be accompanied by increasing use of Salafi-Jihadi rhetoric but
neither the Salafi Nour party nor the Islamic Group have yet broken with the
regime. Nor, despite significant
criticism of the government, have some of their better-known sympathizers such
as the daily newspaper Al-Misriyyun. This
may be the last legacy of the Sadat era and a final irony of the way in which
contemporary politics has developed.
In the year
after the uprising of January 25, 2011 the Armed Forces freed hundreds of
members of the Islamic Group and other Salafi trends in the same part of the
political spectrum who had been imprisoned
by both Sadat and former President Mubarak.
Whatever political calculations the generals made, at the time it was
presented primarily as accepting court orders mandating the release of
prisoners who had served full sentences.
Holding them in indefinite preventive detention was not, the courts had
said in previously ignored orders, in accord with the law or the
constitution. These men, including the
Zumor cousins who had been part of the conspiracy to assassinate Sadat,
re-emerged into political life. Some
have been associated with both the Nour party and others with the Building and
Development party, linked to the Islamic Group.
The experience of many of these
leaders with armed conflict against the Egyptian state was bitter. It had begun with the uprising in Asyut and
continued sporadically until it developed into a medium insurrection in the
early 1990s. This period culminated with
an attack on a Pharaonic temple and prominent tourist destination in the Upper
Egyptian city of Luxor in 1997 where 62 tourists were killed. This attempt to destroy the tourist industry eliminated
what remaining the popular support the Islamic Group had. Thousands of Egyptian police, soldiers,
political activists and ordinary citizens died and those leaders appear, for
now at any rate, to have little desire to resume the bitter conflict that they
survived and lost. Whether this is a
counsel of prudence or commitment to public order we cannot know but they
continue their peaceful (if often politically controversial and extreme)
political activity. They write articles
for newspapers, give interviews, and organize their supporters for what they
hope will be parliamentary elections in the future. They also claim to desire an Islamic state
but evidently not the Islamic State on offer.
The Sinai
Province of the Islamic State will no doubt continue to trouble the border
region of northern Sinai. Until some
agreement is made between the government in Cairo, Hamas in Gaza, and Israel it
will be difficult to catch the Islamic State between the anvil of the border
and the hammer of the Egyptian Armed Forces.
But that agreement will, tacitly or openly, probably come. Until that time the Sinai Province may manage
to survive in a region where the Egyptian state is structurally weakened by its
international commitments, its absence of local support and alienation caused
by its violence and political mis-steps.
Two decades
ago the Egyptian state fought one war with Islamists in Upper Egypt where they
had far more local support in a relatively large population. IS in its incarnation as the Sinai Province
has less support in a far more marginal area.
It is not likely to be the place from which a successful assault on the
Egyptian state is launched nor will it easily become, like the IS provinces in
Syria and Iraq, a “liberated zone.” That
IS and perhaps other opposition groups have been able to use car bombs in Cairo
and Suez is not necessarily indicative of widening support for a popular
insurgency. On the contrary, as Russian
revolutionaries realized a century ago terrorist violence can legitimate the
state for many citizens and demobilize a popular movement. Whatever else they
have done, President Sisi and the generals have worked tirelessly over the past
two years to demobilize Egyptian civil society.
It is instructive in this regard that IS may have paid more attention to
the anniversary of the coup than did the government it brought to power. That Egyptian have become used to much higher
levels of open political violence than at almost any other time in recent
history, however, is a sad reality.
The lasting threat to the Sisi
government lies elsewhere, among core elements of Egyptian society and the
state. These will include general
officers in the Armed Forces if they come to believe that they have lost
control of the way coercion is deployed in society. Loss of control occurs as the forces of order
come to think of their task as the work of vendetta not the provision of safety. And then there will be those with important
economic interests who come to feel threatened by policies that have ceased to
work and who want a larger say in how government is run as well as a growing sense
of fatigue with a military regime. That,
however, is likely to be a long time in coming.
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