Egypt: It could have been Syria, but it was Egypt, last week. Black jihadist flags, inset with the white oblong cartouche favoured by Syrian affiliates of al-Qaeda, were being waved above a cheering crowd. An angry speaker addressed the masses.
“We need to form a council of war,” he shouted, sounding hoarse from excitement. “The era of peace has ended. If the army attack us we will attack back. We say to the Egyptian army that the day might yet come when we tell it to leave Sinai.”
[pullquote_left]Click here to read what does Bashar Al Assad said about Egypt coup de etat and Islamic uprising Jihadist.[/pullquote_left]It was not an idle threat. Last Friday, as firework-hurling youths loyal to the Muslim Brotherhood vented their rage at the army’s removal of their president, Mohammed Morsi, another crowd marched on the governor’s palace in el-Arish.
The northern Sinai town was once heralded as the next big thing in Egyptian tourism, a Mediterranean version of Red Sea resorts like Sharm el-Sheikh. No longer: it is now better known as a destination for weapons than for red-faced Britons and Germans stealing the sun-loungers.
[caption id="attachment_3246" align="aligncenter" width="600"]
The Muslim Brotherhood’s message of non-violent Islamism could be drowned out following the Army's overthrow of President Mohamed Morsi - Photo credit AP[/caption]The crowd, demanding Mr Morsi’s return, drove off the guards, stormed the palace and raised another black flag on the roof. In all, five policemen and a soldier were killed across Sinai at the weekend. On Saturday afternoon, Mina Aboud Sharween, a priest serving el-Arish’s Coptic Christian community, was shot dead by two gunmen on a motorbike. All this went almost unnoticed in the international media wrote Telegraph UK journalist, Richard Spencer.
It was not an idle threat. Last Friday, as firework-hurling youths loyal to the Muslim Brotherhood vented their rage at the army’s removal of their president, Mohammed Morsi, another crowd marched on the governor’s palace in el-Arish. The northern Sinai town was once heralded as the next big thing in Egyptian tourism, a Mediterranean version of Red Sea resorts like Sharm el-Sheikh. No longer: it is now better known as a destination for weapons than for red-faced Britons and Germans stealing the sun-loungers.
It is one of the odd things about Egypt’s current political contortions – many, if not all, involving Islamism – that the constant Islamist violence in Sinai is hardly mentioned. Sinai is home both to Egypt’s beach tourism industry, and to the desert roads where foreigners are most likely to be kidnapped. Yet when it comes to consideration of the broader picture, it is all but ignored: it is too different from the rest of the country, is what most experts say, Egyptians and non-Egyptians alike.
We had all better hope they are correct. Sinai’s population is 500,000; the rest of the country weighs in at 85 million.
The second half of the argument about Sinai, militant Islamism and the nation’s political impasse goes as follows: while Sinai may be the heartland of whatever violent jihadist groups remain in the country after their gradual defeat in the 1980s and 1990s, the brand of political Islam that dominates the rest of the country is the Muslim Brotherhood. The difference is that the Brotherhood believes in peaceful and often charitable endeavour, rather than war.
Even after this week’s massacre of 50 of its supporters outside the Republican Guard barracks in Cairo, most shot down by the police and army as they called for the reinstatement of their deposed president, its leaders say they are committed to non-violent resistance. It is hard to portray the Brotherhood as a warrior caste, though attempts have been made, when the casualty list from Monday morning’s “clashes” are so one-sided: just one soldier and two police died, and we have still not been told how.
Yet fears that the worsening fighting between supporters of Mr Morsi, troops, and the largely secular protesters who demanded his overthrow might descend into civil war are not limited to scare-mongers. Here is what the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, the organisation it set up and controls to run in elections, had to say in the immediate aftermath: “The party calls on the international community and international organisations and bodies, and all the free world, to intervene to stop further massacres and end military rule, so as not to create a new Syria in the Arab world.”
If it does not intend to take up arms against the new order, how could Egypt end up like Syria?
By Richard Spencer Read more Telegraph UK
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