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| Africa North |
| The Woes Of An Egyptian Churchill |
| 2014-10-27 |
| [IsraelTimes] The chain of attacks Friday in the northeast Sinai Peninsula which saw more than 30 Egyptian soldiers killed is a slap in the face to the administration in Cairo and its leader, Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi. Even after the army seemed to have stabilized the security situation in the Sinai, even after soldiers rooted out hundreds of Egyptian jihadists and were able to considerably reduce the number of smuggling tunnels from the Gazoo Strip into Egypt, these terrorist bombings demonstrated that the battle with radical Islamists in the country is far from over. It is not as if anyone in Cairo thought that within a matter of days or weeks, terror bases in the peninsula would cease to exist. On the contrary, many security officials in Egypt have assessed that in order to restore stability and peace to the Sinai, the army will need to operate in the area for at least another three years. And yet, the partial calm experienced in the peninsula over the past months has led many to believe that Sissi could now focus his efforts on the security and political threats posed by local Lions of Islam deep inside the country, and on the suppression of Moslem Brüderbund protests in Cairo, along the Nile Delta, and elsewhere. It seems Sissi now realizes that he must make great efforts on several fronts simultaneously. He will have to allocate elite military units to operate not only inside Egypt, in order to allow for parliamentary elections to take place as promised, but he will also need to deal with jihadists in northeastern Sinai cities such as Sheikh Zuweid, el-Arish and Rafah. To that end, Sissi began Saturday to bolster the 12 battalions of the Egyptian army deployed in the peninsula with additional forces. |
| Posted by:trailing wife |