Out of Desert Poverty, a Caldron of Rage in the Sinai
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
The New York Times
May 7, 2006
EL ARISH, Egypt, May 6 — The Melahy tribe of northern Sinai is the poorest in the region, its members herding other people's cattle, farming other people's land, its very name used as a slur among local Bedouins. And so Nasser Khamis al-Melahy held great promise for his family when he left his sun-baked home here for law school in the Nile Delta.
But he never did practice law. Instead, he returned to this city on the banks of the Mediterranean and, the authorities say, helped set up an Islamist terrorist cell that has staged five suicide attacks in the Sinai, including a triple bombing in the resort town of Dahab last month.
Mr. Melahy's turn to terrorism is one aspect of the strong undercurrent of anger and tension roiling the Middle East, where disillusionment and hostility toward national governments move many young people to adopt Islam as an identity, supplanting nationality or ethnicity. It also underscores a challenge facing many Arab countries where local customs and heritage are being abandoned by young people who instead adopt the dress, customs and behavior of conservative Islam.
In these ways, this northeast corner of the Sinai serves as a microcosm of the forces pulling at the strings of authoritarian governments all over the region, which have maintained power by relying primarily on security services. From Syria to Jordan, from Morocco to Algeria, officials have struggled to manage these trends by simultaneously trying to appease and control the rise in religious feelings.
But El Arish also has its own story, in which Mr. Melahy's is just one of many unraveling threads of a centuries-old Bedouin culture, oppressed, impoverished and, simultaneously distrusted and ignored.
In the jumble of crumbling public housing clumped along unpaved, sandy lots, there is a burning resentment of the central government, in particular the security services, which have made mass arrests through the region, and there is a conviction that the people here have been ignored for too long. People are furious that they must use salt water to brush their teeth, wash their clothes and cook with because that is what comes out of their taps at home.
"We now feel like the Egyptian government is an occupation government," said Emad Bullock, 43, an engineer and carpet merchant. "It is hard to look at this and accept it as our national government."
Like the rest of the Middle East, this area has been buffeted by a huge population of young people with no work and by anger over the Iraq war. El Arish is just 30 miles from the border with the Gaza Strip, and its youth, once isolated, see the world via satellite television and the Internet.
Local community leaders said they are most worried about the unemployment. One local study concluded that just 8 percent of those age 20 to 30 have full-time jobs, and that 92 percent depend on seasonal work, like farming, which can pay as little as $2 a day.
"The most important thing is our living standards," said Reda Saleh, a Palestinian whose brother, Ayad Said, was a suicide bomber in an attack in Taba in 2004. "Why would he want to die if he had a decent life? Why would he go and do this if he had a decent life?
"This life," said Mr. Saleh, a 20-year-old illiterate mechanic, "isn't worth living."
The animosity in El Arish is so deep that some people here say they admire the bombers. Some say they are resisting the government, others see them as bringing the misery of Bedouin lives home to foreigners who come on carefree vacations.
"Because of the security pressure here people feel proud," said Khalid Arafat, a local tribal leader. "They think most of those killed were Jews and foreigners."
It remains impossible to say what ultimately drove the sons of this coastal city toward terrorism. Friends of Mr. Melahy said that while he was growing up he was observant but not fanatical. He listened to music, a sign that he was not extremist, and went off to law school in Zagazig in the Nile Delta.
But when he returned, he had grown a long beard. He started yelling at his friends, telling them not to smoke or listen to music, and he gave up law, because he said the only law was God's law. Instead of opening a legal practice, he started working as a farmer, struggling to grow tomatoes and cantaloupe in a patch of sand with salty well water.
The police now say that is when he and a group of other local young men began to form their terrorist cell. The cell, Tawhid and Jihad, was heavily influenced by men like Osama bin Laden, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and by Wahhabism, an austere sect of radical Islam whose roots lie in the Arabian Peninsula.
Besides the attack in Dahab last month, the authorities contend the group is also responsible for the suicide attacks on Taba in 2004, Sharm el-Sheik in 2005, and three separate bomb attacks on multinational peacekeeping forces at the border with Israel.
"I don't like the way he was religious," said Osman Abu Khoaiter, who said he and Mr. Melahy were friends before Mr. Melahy became "committed." "It was too much. Most of his friends went to die in Gaza or are now hiding in the mountains."
Mr. Melahy disappeared from his home a few days before the Taba attacks and, his family said, has not been seen since. The police say he is alive and believed to be hiding in the mountains to the south.
The trajectory of his life is similar to others the police say have been involved in these attacks, like the Felaifel brothers, who were connected to the bombings in Taba and Sharm el-Sheik. Their father said that he disowned his boys — a drastic act in Bedouin culture — after they grew beards and began preaching an extremist religious ideology, telling him he did not dress right, or pray right, or eat right.
Religious extremism began to arrive here in the 1980's, just as the tribal traditions that governed the people of the Sinai for centuries were slowly being undermined both by the state and by a rising influence of conservative religious ideology alien to this region.
The Muslim Brotherhood from Egypt had worked here, but it was the arrival of Wahhabism that began to change the local culture, people here said. Women, for example, have abandoned the traditional Bedouin dress for the far more concealing Islamic gown popular in the Persian Gulf.
"Bit by bit, more people are becoming religious extremists," said Mahmoud al-Sawaraka, 49, a leader of one of the region's largest tribes. "Late in the 1980's it really started and it is mostly young people."
There has always been a degree of distrust between the Egyptians of the Nile Valley and the Bedouins of the Sinai, a distrust that grew after Israel ended its 12-year-occupation.
Those who lived through the occupation said Egyptians from the other side of the Suez Canal always questioned their loyalty to the state and blocked them from positions of influence in the military, the police and even within their own government.
"We are not the Kurds of Egypt," said Ashraf Ayoub, a local political leader. "The government keeps calling us Bedouin as if we are third-class citizens."
The modern Egyptian state has dealt with the Sinai and its people the way it has confronted most domestic problems, as a security issue. Local officials, for the most part, are not from the area, and no one is allowed to own land because the entire area is considered a military zone, officials here said.
But the authorities in Egypt say the treaty that ended the Israeli occupation of the Sinai constrained their ability to deploy forces across the peninsula's vast and rugged expanse. So they demanded the aid of the Bedouins and their leaders.
For centuries, tribes collectively selected their sheik until the Egyptian government decided that it needed to make the tribal leader an arm of the state security.
First slowly, and then more rapidly, religious and government pressures began to undermine the one institution that served to maintain public order: the tribe.
"They destroyed the most important thing in the tribe, the power of the sheik," said Salah el-Bollak, a writer and expert in local Bedouin culture. "Now the sheik is nothing but an informer for the government."
People here said that the government inadvertently made the same mistake with the mosques, by requiring that all imams be employees of the state. That dictate undermined their credibility and sent people elsewhere for religious guidance, many local people said.
Mr. Sawaraka, who used his tribal name, not his family name, for fear of retribution from the police, said that the tribal system was also being undermined from another direction. One day a few years ago, he said, a package of religious books from Saudi Arabia was delivered to his house. He checked with the postal office and found it was meant for a young man with the same name.
"When I delivered the books, the father told me to throw them out and if any more ever came again, to throw them out too," he recalled.
As these forces gained momentum, the police say, local young men scoured the desert for explosives left from previous wars, and fashioned crude but deadly bombs in small workshops. People here say that any outside involvement was unlikely, as the community is so tightly knit, outsiders would have been noticed.
After the attacks on Dahab, police swept back into the area and chased Mr. Melahy and two others across northern areas of the Sinai Peninsula before finding their hideout between Gifgafa and Maghara in North Sinai. Since the manhunt began, the police said, six suspects have been killed in shootouts, and two officers, including a major.
The Interior Ministry said that machine guns, live ammunition and a notebook sketching the details of the two most recent terrorist attacks had been found. It said that the notebook proved that the attacks were planned by people from the Northern Sinai.
Abeer Allam contributed reporting for this article.
The New York Times
May 7, 2006
EL ARISH, Egypt, May 6 — The Melahy tribe of northern Sinai is the poorest in the region, its members herding other people's cattle, farming other people's land, its very name used as a slur among local Bedouins. And so Nasser Khamis al-Melahy held great promise for his family when he left his sun-baked home here for law school in the Nile Delta.
But he never did practice law. Instead, he returned to this city on the banks of the Mediterranean and, the authorities say, helped set up an Islamist terrorist cell that has staged five suicide attacks in the Sinai, including a triple bombing in the resort town of Dahab last month.
Mr. Melahy's turn to terrorism is one aspect of the strong undercurrent of anger and tension roiling the Middle East, where disillusionment and hostility toward national governments move many young people to adopt Islam as an identity, supplanting nationality or ethnicity. It also underscores a challenge facing many Arab countries where local customs and heritage are being abandoned by young people who instead adopt the dress, customs and behavior of conservative Islam.
In these ways, this northeast corner of the Sinai serves as a microcosm of the forces pulling at the strings of authoritarian governments all over the region, which have maintained power by relying primarily on security services. From Syria to Jordan, from Morocco to Algeria, officials have struggled to manage these trends by simultaneously trying to appease and control the rise in religious feelings.
But El Arish also has its own story, in which Mr. Melahy's is just one of many unraveling threads of a centuries-old Bedouin culture, oppressed, impoverished and, simultaneously distrusted and ignored.
In the jumble of crumbling public housing clumped along unpaved, sandy lots, there is a burning resentment of the central government, in particular the security services, which have made mass arrests through the region, and there is a conviction that the people here have been ignored for too long. People are furious that they must use salt water to brush their teeth, wash their clothes and cook with because that is what comes out of their taps at home.
"We now feel like the Egyptian government is an occupation government," said Emad Bullock, 43, an engineer and carpet merchant. "It is hard to look at this and accept it as our national government."
Like the rest of the Middle East, this area has been buffeted by a huge population of young people with no work and by anger over the Iraq war. El Arish is just 30 miles from the border with the Gaza Strip, and its youth, once isolated, see the world via satellite television and the Internet.
Local community leaders said they are most worried about the unemployment. One local study concluded that just 8 percent of those age 20 to 30 have full-time jobs, and that 92 percent depend on seasonal work, like farming, which can pay as little as $2 a day.
"The most important thing is our living standards," said Reda Saleh, a Palestinian whose brother, Ayad Said, was a suicide bomber in an attack in Taba in 2004. "Why would he want to die if he had a decent life? Why would he go and do this if he had a decent life?
"This life," said Mr. Saleh, a 20-year-old illiterate mechanic, "isn't worth living."
The animosity in El Arish is so deep that some people here say they admire the bombers. Some say they are resisting the government, others see them as bringing the misery of Bedouin lives home to foreigners who come on carefree vacations.
"Because of the security pressure here people feel proud," said Khalid Arafat, a local tribal leader. "They think most of those killed were Jews and foreigners."
It remains impossible to say what ultimately drove the sons of this coastal city toward terrorism. Friends of Mr. Melahy said that while he was growing up he was observant but not fanatical. He listened to music, a sign that he was not extremist, and went off to law school in Zagazig in the Nile Delta.
But when he returned, he had grown a long beard. He started yelling at his friends, telling them not to smoke or listen to music, and he gave up law, because he said the only law was God's law. Instead of opening a legal practice, he started working as a farmer, struggling to grow tomatoes and cantaloupe in a patch of sand with salty well water.
The police now say that is when he and a group of other local young men began to form their terrorist cell. The cell, Tawhid and Jihad, was heavily influenced by men like Osama bin Laden, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and by Wahhabism, an austere sect of radical Islam whose roots lie in the Arabian Peninsula.
Besides the attack in Dahab last month, the authorities contend the group is also responsible for the suicide attacks on Taba in 2004, Sharm el-Sheik in 2005, and three separate bomb attacks on multinational peacekeeping forces at the border with Israel.
"I don't like the way he was religious," said Osman Abu Khoaiter, who said he and Mr. Melahy were friends before Mr. Melahy became "committed." "It was too much. Most of his friends went to die in Gaza or are now hiding in the mountains."
Mr. Melahy disappeared from his home a few days before the Taba attacks and, his family said, has not been seen since. The police say he is alive and believed to be hiding in the mountains to the south.
The trajectory of his life is similar to others the police say have been involved in these attacks, like the Felaifel brothers, who were connected to the bombings in Taba and Sharm el-Sheik. Their father said that he disowned his boys — a drastic act in Bedouin culture — after they grew beards and began preaching an extremist religious ideology, telling him he did not dress right, or pray right, or eat right.
Religious extremism began to arrive here in the 1980's, just as the tribal traditions that governed the people of the Sinai for centuries were slowly being undermined both by the state and by a rising influence of conservative religious ideology alien to this region.
The Muslim Brotherhood from Egypt had worked here, but it was the arrival of Wahhabism that began to change the local culture, people here said. Women, for example, have abandoned the traditional Bedouin dress for the far more concealing Islamic gown popular in the Persian Gulf.
"Bit by bit, more people are becoming religious extremists," said Mahmoud al-Sawaraka, 49, a leader of one of the region's largest tribes. "Late in the 1980's it really started and it is mostly young people."
There has always been a degree of distrust between the Egyptians of the Nile Valley and the Bedouins of the Sinai, a distrust that grew after Israel ended its 12-year-occupation.
Those who lived through the occupation said Egyptians from the other side of the Suez Canal always questioned their loyalty to the state and blocked them from positions of influence in the military, the police and even within their own government.
"We are not the Kurds of Egypt," said Ashraf Ayoub, a local political leader. "The government keeps calling us Bedouin as if we are third-class citizens."
The modern Egyptian state has dealt with the Sinai and its people the way it has confronted most domestic problems, as a security issue. Local officials, for the most part, are not from the area, and no one is allowed to own land because the entire area is considered a military zone, officials here said.
But the authorities in Egypt say the treaty that ended the Israeli occupation of the Sinai constrained their ability to deploy forces across the peninsula's vast and rugged expanse. So they demanded the aid of the Bedouins and their leaders.
For centuries, tribes collectively selected their sheik until the Egyptian government decided that it needed to make the tribal leader an arm of the state security.
First slowly, and then more rapidly, religious and government pressures began to undermine the one institution that served to maintain public order: the tribe.
"They destroyed the most important thing in the tribe, the power of the sheik," said Salah el-Bollak, a writer and expert in local Bedouin culture. "Now the sheik is nothing but an informer for the government."
People here said that the government inadvertently made the same mistake with the mosques, by requiring that all imams be employees of the state. That dictate undermined their credibility and sent people elsewhere for religious guidance, many local people said.
Mr. Sawaraka, who used his tribal name, not his family name, for fear of retribution from the police, said that the tribal system was also being undermined from another direction. One day a few years ago, he said, a package of religious books from Saudi Arabia was delivered to his house. He checked with the postal office and found it was meant for a young man with the same name.
"When I delivered the books, the father told me to throw them out and if any more ever came again, to throw them out too," he recalled.
As these forces gained momentum, the police say, local young men scoured the desert for explosives left from previous wars, and fashioned crude but deadly bombs in small workshops. People here say that any outside involvement was unlikely, as the community is so tightly knit, outsiders would have been noticed.
After the attacks on Dahab, police swept back into the area and chased Mr. Melahy and two others across northern areas of the Sinai Peninsula before finding their hideout between Gifgafa and Maghara in North Sinai. Since the manhunt began, the police said, six suspects have been killed in shootouts, and two officers, including a major.
The Interior Ministry said that machine guns, live ammunition and a notebook sketching the details of the two most recent terrorist attacks had been found. It said that the notebook proved that the attacks were planned by people from the Northern Sinai.
Abeer Allam contributed reporting for this article.
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