Egypt deployed helicopter gunships and an anti-terror team in north Sinai as President Mohamed Mursi ordered the military to take “complete control” of the region after unidentified militants killed 16 Egyptian soldiers.
Mursi, drawn from the ranks of the Muslim Brotherhood, described yesterday’s attack on the troops as they broke their Ramadan fast as a “cowardly” act and vowed the assailants would “pay a high price, as would those who cooperate with them,” the state-run Middle East News Agency reported.
The attack on the border post near the Rafah crossing with the Gaza Strip comes a month after Mursi was sworn in as Egypt’s first democratically elected civilian president. Security nationwide has deteriorated since Hosni Mubarak’s 2011 ouster, while Sinai has seen an increase in kidnappings of tourists and attacks on security forces that have alternately been blamed on al-Qaeda-affiliated militants and Bedouins.
Sinai has “become a kind of lawless no-man’s land, and it seems to be getting worse,” Shadi Hamid, director of research at Brookings Doha Center, said by phone. It’s also “probably the one area where Egypt and Israel share some common ground. The Muslim Brotherhood and Israel have an interest in stabilizing the Sinai.”
‘Wakeup Call’
Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said in an e-mailed statement by his ministry that the attackers had suicide-bomber vests and that, along with the amount of explosives brought in a small truck at the start of the incursion, “could have caused very serious damage.”
“I appreciate that this will not be the last time we come across attempts to harm us,” he said while touring the border region. “I hope this will be a wakeup call for Egypt regarding the necessity to be sharp and efficient on their side.”
Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman said “we need to understand this war is continuing daily and it is clear today also to Egypt that it is an interest of Egypt to stop this.”
Liberman said a barrage of rockets fired from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip fell on southern Israel around the time of yesterday’s attacks. While he didn’t connect the two, he repeated his position that “there must be an end to the terrorist regime in Gaza. Everyone knows what needs to be done and decisions need to be made.”
Bloomberg has the full article
