A spate of bombings targeting the Egyptian offices of international mobile phone companies and other symbols of western commerce, including Kentucky Fried Chicken and Carrefour, are alarming security officials and diplomats ahead of a two-day investment conference this week in Sharm el-Sheikh.
Most worrying, security experts and western diplomats say, is that the attacks do not appear to be the work of established jihadi groups, but instead are likely to have been carried out by cells of “lone wolves”. Inspired by social media, they are experimenting with different ways to oppose the government of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the former army officer turned president who toppled Egypt’s first elected president, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi, in 2013.
Security forces have made combating the attacks a priority. “These are elements of the terrorist Muslim Brotherhood organisation that are desperate in general, and they are moving in a very random way in order to take revenge from the Egyptian people,” said Brigadier General Hani Abdel Latif, spokesman for the Ministry of Interior. “There is an extensive security plan being implemented in the Egyptian streets throughout the whole country. There is a big project of surveillance cameras to monitor the streets that has already been implemented.”
The toppling and imprisonment of Mr Morsi ignited civil unrest that included a surge of attacks on security forces in the troubled north of the Sinai Peninsula that eventually spread to Egypt’s heavily populated Nile river basin.
“It’s expected; when you have a military coup and that level of repression against an elected government, subsets of the opposition will become quite angry,” said Omar Ashour, an Egypt and Middle East scholar at Exeter university and Chatham House, the policy institute.
“You will have the angry youth who saw his friend or relative killed and who wants to take revenge. You will have the wider circle of activists who say unarmed civil resistance got them nowhere. The third thing is, you can have organisations that can choose to take up violence.”
Explosions rumble across the capital Cairo almost daily. Some are roadside bombs targeting security forces. An attack on a courthouse last week killed. Often the blasts are described by authorities as “sound bombs”, containing little shrapnel but showing the bomb-makers’ ability to operate with impunity.
Diplomats monitoring the increase in the attacks say they appear to be unco-ordinated, and could be designed to draw out police, create panic and hinder the return of commerce, rather than cause injury.
The recent escalation of incidents may be tied to the high-profile investment conference. Companies from around the world are expected to attend the summit, which is meant to attract investment in Egypt and revitalise its moribund economy.
In addition to discouraging the return of business, many worry the cells organising the attacks could eventually merge with more extremist groups, including the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, and its local jihadi affiliates. An earlier national assessment by Verisk Maplecroft, the risk analyst group, warned that the arrest and continued detention of Islamist leaders has paved the way for the rise of a young, hardline cadre of Islamists “who could seek to introduce a more violent campaign against the state authorities”.
The Islamist youth activists have already popularised the slogan “Anything but bullets”, implying any act of sabotage short of opening fire with weapons was an acceptable form of resistance.
“A more radical and violent posture by an expanding segment of the Muslim Brotherhood could see a conflation of the Brotherhood’s grievances with those of Sunni extremists operating in Sinai,” the report says.
The names of new groups claiming violent actions have been proliferating across social media. They include the Popular Resistance of Giza and Revolutionary Punishment. One markedly active group, with a predilection for pyrotechnics, is the Molotov Movement, which claims responsibility for setting fire to an annex to the embassy of the UAE, which strongly supports Mr Sisi, a police car in Port Said, an interior ministry official’s house, a warehouse owned by a former minister who vocally supported the killing of Islamist protesters at sit-ins in 2013, and the home of Maj Ahmed Kamal Hegazi, an official of the domestic intelligence service.
“A message from the Martyrs Brigade to the coup leaders: you are not safe from retribution and soon we will get you one after the other,” read one message posted by the group’s “Martyrs’ Brigade” military wing on Facebook.
Source: The Financial Times
