In Egypt's Sinai desert, Islamic militants gaining new foothold

By Ernesto Londoño, Published: July 13 2012
The Washington Post

RAFAH, Egypt — Vast areas of Egypt’s Sinai desert have descended into lawlessness in recent months, providing fertile ground for small cells of extremist militants that have emerged from the shadows and quietly established training camps near the Israeli border, according to Bedouin elders and security experts.

The militants include men who have fought in Afghanistan and Pakistan in recent years, as well as Islamists who were released from prison after the 2011 popular revolt that toppled President Hosni Mubarak and drove much of his potent security apparatus underground.

Drawing little notice during a period of dramatic developments in Cairo, the militants have become increasingly bold and visible amid a broader breakdown of security in the strategically important desert, a buffer zone between Israel and Egypt. The eclipse of authority has also given rise to Sharia courts run by Islamic scholars who settle disputes according to Islamic law.

The Egyptian government’s failure to restore order in the Sinai has unnerved Israel, in part because of a recent attack on an Israeli border post. Some local residents worry that Israel might ultimately respond unilaterally, a prospect that alarms those who survived successive wars in the Sinai between the neighbors in the 1960s and 1970s.

“In one year, this could all become extremely dangerous,” said Nassar Abu Akra, a merchant and elder in the area who fears that the rise of a violent militant movement could spark a crushing response from Israel. “If Israel responds to protect its land, it would be a disaster — a massacre. Even normal people, not just jihadis, would fight and die if Israelis came back.”

U.S. officials have grown increasingly concerned about deteriorating security in the Sinai. The subject is all but certain to come up during Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s visit to Cairo this weekend, particularly because two U.S. citizens were reportedly kidnapped in the area Friday.

(Read correspondent’s diary: Taking a trip to North Sinai.)

The Sinai peninsula was contested territory for much of the past century, largely because it is a gateway to the Suez Canal, which connects the Mediterranean Sea and Red Seas. Israeli forces occupied the Sinai in 1956 and 1967 and fought a war against Egyptian troops in the following decade. Egypt regained full control of the Sinai after the 1979 peace treaty brokered by the United States.

A U.S. Army battalion consisting of several hundred soldiers is stationed in the Sinai as part of an international peacekeeping force.

In the recent turmoil, militants have been carrying out attacks on lightly armed police officers in recent months and have repeatedly bombed the pipeline that carries natural gas to Israel. Bedouin tribesmen with grievances against the state, meanwhile, have kidnapped foreign tourists and international peacekeepers. Drug runners and human smugglers have also seized the moment, making both lucrative trades increasingly violent.

Soon after Egyptians rose up in Cairo in late January 2011 against Mubarak’s authoritarian regime, residents in northern Sinai went on a looting rampage, burning police stations and other symbols of a state that became despised for the heavy hand of its security forces and the few services it offered to the residents of the impoverished, barren area.

As Mubarak was ousted, the black-clad police officers who for decades treated bearded men in the Sinai as terror suspects melted away. Police stations and checkpoints were reduced to piles of ashes and debris. Soldiers took up positions along the road that connects Cairo and the Gaza Strip, barricading themselves inside tanks and other fighting vehicles surrounded by walls of sandbags.

As pillars of the police state eroded, hundreds of Islamists left prison — some through release orders, others by breaking out. Maree Arar, a 41-year-old with a scraggly beard, was among those freed Islamists. Arar said he does not endorse acts of violence committed in the Sinai by militants, some of whom he said he knows, but they ought to be seen in proper context.

“They feel that there is still lingering injustice,” he said while fiddling with an iPhone. “We still have prisoners we want to get out; there are violations against our brothers in Palestine; there is a war on Islam all over the world. They are affected by it. They can’t control themselves.”

‘The law is not respected’

Retired Egyptian Gen. Sameh Saif el-Yazl, who heads a center for political and strategic studies in Cairo, said the status quo in the Sinai is untenable. Hard-line fighters in the Sinai include men who fought in Afghanistan and Pakistan in recent years, he said. They have joined forces with Islamists released recently from prison.

“They want to impose Islamic law over the state,” said Yazl, whose views on security matters are widely seen as reflective of those of the country’s military chiefs. “The government must impose its control and rule over Sinai. Right now the law is not respected.”

A police official based in the Sinai city of Arish said in an interview that respect was the least of his worries. Men like him are being hunted.

“We leave our families to do our duties,” said the officer, who spoke at a beachfront cafe just above a whisper and insisted on anonymity for fear of reprisals. “Why are we coming home as dead bodies? We want to know why. If we are being targeted, let us leave this place for the people and the army.”

Ibrahim el-Meneey, a powerful Bedouin tribal elder who lives a few miles from the Israeli border, said that arrangement would be ideal, as long as the military sticks to guarding the road. The tribes, which have stockpiled everything from small arms to antiaircraft missiles, are doing a fine job of dealing with violent human smugglers, drug runners and other miscreants who have taken advantage of the security vacuum over the past year, he said.

“Here, it’s all tribes,” Meneey said, sitting on a moonlit sandy patch outside his house, which is close enough to Israel that cell phones roam onto the country’s mobile networks. “Security is very stable.”

The increasing boldness of militant cells in the area does not yet concern him, Meneey said, noting that he does not share their goal of creating an Islamic caliphate. The fighters who set up a small training facility about three miles from his home earlier this year are respectful of locals, and number no more than 150.

But he worries that such groups could evolve into a powerful movement with links to militant groups in Palestinian territories and other Muslim countries. For the time being, there is little support for the budding jihadist cells among the members of his tribe, the Sawarka, the elder said. That could change, he cautioned, if the government once again carries out indiscriminate arrests.

“The bedouin is a peaceful being,” Meneey said, sipping sweet tea. “But if he feels humiliated, he will never forget. The government has to work quickly to deliver justice.”

If the Egyptian government fails to find the right approach to restore security and services, he said: “This could become like a second Afghanistan. It could become an international war.”

Residents assume state functions

Whether or not armed conflict is imminent, Sinai leaders say they have increasingly taken on tasks the state is not performing. Roughly six months ago, Hamdeen Abu Faisal, an Islamic scholar, became among the first in the region to set up informal tribunals that settle cases that would normally be the jurisdiction of local courts.

“The people started to need someone to sort out their problems,” Faisal said. “There are no functioning courts, police stations or district attorneys.”

The courts are not imposing corporal punishments, Faisal said, and are only arbitrating disputes among people who agree in writing to adhere to the decision of the scholars.

“Don’t worry,” joked Faisal, who was among the Islamists detained following the 2004 bombings in Taba, a resort town then popular among Israelis. “We don’t use whips.”

Ingy Hassieb and Hassan Elnaggar contributed to this report.

The Islamist ascendancy

By Charles Krauthammer, Published: July 12 2012
The Washington Post

Post-revolutionary Libya appears to have elected a relatively moderate pro-Western government. Good news, but tentative because Libya is less a country than an oil well with a long beach and myriad tribes. Popular allegiance to a central national authority is weak. Yet even if the government of Mahmoud Jibril is able to rein in the militias and establish a functioning democracy, it will be the Arab Spring exception. Consider:

Tunisia and Morocco, the most Westernized of all Arab countries, elected Islamist governments. Moderate, to be sure, but Islamist still. Egypt, the largest and most influential, has experienced an Islamist sweep. The Muslim Brotherhood didn’t just win the presidency. It won nearly half the seats in parliament, while more openly radical Islamists won 25 percent. Combined, they command more than 70 percent of parliament — enough to control the writing of a constitution (which is why the generals hastily dissolved parliament).

As for Syria, if and when Bashar al-Assad falls, the Brotherhood will almost certainly inherit power. Jordan could well be next. And the Brotherhood’s Palestinian wing (Hamas) already controls Gaza.

What does this mean? That the Arab Spring is a misnomer. This is an Islamist ascendancy, likely to dominate Arab politics for a generation.

It constitutes the third stage of modern Arab political history. Stage I was the semicolonial-monarchic rule, dominated by Britain and France, of the first half of the 20th century. Stage II was the Arab nationalist era — secular, socialist, anti-colonial and anti-clerical — ushered in by the 1952 Free Officers Revolt in Egypt.

Its vehicle was military dictatorship, and Gamal Nasser led the way. He raised the flag of pan-Arabism, going so far as changing Egypt’s name to the United Arab Republic and merging his country with Syria in 1958. That absurd experiment — it lasted exactly three years — was to have been the beginning of a grand Arab unification, which, of course, never came. Nasser also fiercely persecuted Islamists — as did his nationalist successors, down to Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and the Baathists, Iraqi (Saddam Hussein) and Syrian (the Assads) — as the reactionary antithesis to Arab modernism.

But the self-styled modernism of the Arab-nationalist dictators proved to be a dismal failure. It produced dysfunctional, semi-socialist, bureaucratic, corrupt regimes that left the citizenry (except where papered over by oil bounties) mired in poverty, indignity and repression.

Hence the Arab Spring, serial uprisings that spread east from Tunisia in early 2011. Many Westerners naively believed the future belonged to the hip, secular, tweeting kids of Tahrir Square. Alas, this sliver of Westernization was no match for the highly organized, widely supported, politically serious Islamists who effortlessly swept them aside in national elections.

This was not a Facebook revolution but the beginning of an Islamist one. Amid the ruins of secular nationalist pan-Arabism, the Muslim Brotherhood rose to solve the conundrum of Arab stagnation and marginality. “Islam is the answer,” it preached and carried the day.

But what kind of political Islam? On that depends the future. The moderate Turkish version or the radical Iranian one?

To be sure, Recep Erdogan’s Turkey is no paragon. The increasingly authoritarian Erdogan has broken the military, neutered the judiciary and persecuted the press. There are more journalists in prison in Turkey than in China. Nonetheless, for now, Turkey remains relatively pro-Western (though unreliably so) and relatively democratic (compared to its Islamic neighborhood).

For now, the new Islamist ascendancy in Arab lands has taken on the more benign Turkish aspect. Inherently so in Morocco and Tunisia; by external constraint in Egypt, where the military sees itself as guardian of the secular state, precisely as did Turkey’s military in the 80 years from Ataturk to Erdogan.

Genuinely democratic rule may yet come to Arab lands. Radical Islam is the answer to nothing, as demonstrated by the repression, social backwardness and civil strife of Taliban Afghanistan, Islamist Sudan and clerical Iran.

As for moderate Islamism, if it eventually radicalizes, it too will fail and bring on yet another future Arab Spring where democracy might actually be the answer (as it likely would have been in Iran, had the mullahs not savagely crushed the Green Revolution). Or it might adapt to modernity, accept the alternation of power with secularists and thus achieve by evolution an authentic Arab-Islamic democratic norm.

Perhaps. The only thing we can be sure of today, however, is that Arab nationalism is dead and Islamism is its successor. This is what the Arab Spring has wrought. The beginning of wisdom is facing that difficult reality.

letters@charleskrauthammer.com

West Speaks with a Forked Tongue on the Arab Spring

Published on Sunday, July 8, 2012 by The Toronto Star
by Haroon Siddiqui

We profess fidelity to democracy, especially in the Arab world. But our commitment seems to come with the caveat that the will of the people is acceptable only if it confirms our prejudices. If not — as in Egyptians’ choice of the Muslim Brotherhood for both parliament and the presidency — some of our leaders, thinkers and media eminences get antsy and irrational.

They begin to echo the logic of Algeria, Iran, Israel and the dictatorships and monarchies of the Middle East that have resisted democratic outcomes.

In 1993, the Algerian military annulled the election of an Islamic party, tarring it as terrorist. In 2006, Israel did the same with the electorally victorious Hamas, with the full support of Stephen Harper. The Iranian clerical regime routinely rejects candidates it does not like, and fiddles with elections to favour those it prefers. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and others hold elections for councils and parliaments that have little or no power.

All these culprits are our allies, except Iran.

In varying degrees, Barack Obama, Harper and other western leaders have paid lip service to the Arab Spring. They have failed to stand by pro-democracy forces at key times.

They have been silent on the series of measures taken by the ruling Egyptian military junta to consolidate its power and even attempt to derail Mohammed Morsi’s election as president.

Yet Washington lectured him on the need to respect the rights of women and Coptic Christians.

This is not surprising coming from a capital that was complicit in the crimes of Hosni Mubarak, who banned the Brotherhood and jailed and tortured hundreds of its members for years.

Morsi himself was detained in 2006 for seven months. His sons Ahmed, Osama and Omar were detained during last year’s pro-democracy revolt and the latter two assaulted, as were thousands of others. But the White House remained mostly silent — as it has for decades about violations of human rights by tyrannical American client states.

When the West speaks up, it does so mostly on behalf of selected constituencies — non-Muslim minorities, in particular. When it advocates for the rights of women, it does so for certain types of women — secular, pro-western, often anti-Islamic. It did not go to bat for the women belonging to the Brotherhood who suffered for long periods under Mubarak.

All this contradicts the West’s cardinal position that there can be no cultural or religious exceptions to universal human rights.

The double standards get more pronounced when it comes to defaming election winners we don’t like.

• Morsi and the Brotherhood are demonized for criticizing the Egypt-Israel peace treaty. But the treaty does not have popular legitimacy in Egypt. That’s why even Mubarak never fully normalized relations with Israel, and had the state media spew poison at Jews.

So long as Israel does not end the occupation of Palestinian land, Arabs of all political and ideological stripes will remain antagonistic. Anti-Israeli sentiment is not confined to “Islamists” and it is not all motivated by anti-Semitism.

Morsi’s position on Israel may be far more moderate than, say, that of those Americans, Israelis and Canadians who are advocating war on Iran. We treat the latter as acceptable political rhetoric or strategic positioning but go berserk at the far less radical positions of the Brotherhood.

• Morsi and the Brotherhood are deemed dangerous radicals.

Sure, Morsi and colleagues have made extremist statements in the past, such as that Christians and women be barred from the presidency (a proposal never adopted by the Brotherhood) or that sharia law be implemented.

Arguably that’s no worse than a significant portion of Americans saying that a Mormon or a black should not be president. Or leading Americans insisting that Christian principles should guide public policy.

• It is said that the Brotherhood does not show sufficient commitment to liberalism. Does the Republican party? The Brotherhood is also accused of being too centrally controlled. Are the Harper Conservatives not?

The Arab world is going through a historic transition. So are several religiously inspired groups, from Egypt to Tunisia and Libya. Emerging from oppression and moving into the democratic arena, they are learning to moderate their ideology, just as Christian and Communist groups did in Europe in another era.

This is a slow and painful but peaceful process. If we hope to influence it, we need to be credible on democracy and human rights. We need to be more principled, less hypocritical.e profess fidelity to democracy, especially in the Arab world. But our commitment seems to come with the caveat that the will of the people is acceptable only if it confirms our prejudices. If not — as in Egyptians’ choice of the Muslim Brotherhood for both parliament and the presidency — some of our leaders, thinkers and media eminences get antsy and irrational.

They begin to echo the logic of Algeria, Iran, Israel and the dictatorships and monarchies of the Middle East that have resisted democratic outcomes.

In 1993, the Algerian military annulled the election of an Islamic party, tarring it as terrorist. In 2006, Israel did the same with the electorally victorious Hamas, with the full support of Stephen Harper. The Iranian clerical regime routinely rejects candidates it does not like, and fiddles with elections to favour those it prefers. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and others hold elections for councils and parliaments that have little or no power.

All these culprits are our allies, except Iran.

In varying degrees, Barack Obama, Harper and other western leaders have paid lip service to the Arab Spring. They have failed to stand by pro-democracy forces at key times.

They have been silent on the series of measures taken by the ruling Egyptian military junta to consolidate its power and even attempt to derail Mohammed Morsi’s election as president.

Yet Washington lectured him on the need to respect the rights of women and Coptic Christians.

This is not surprising coming from a capital that was complicit in the crimes of Hosni Mubarak, who banned the Brotherhood and jailed and tortured hundreds of its members for years.

Morsi himself was detained in 2006 for seven months. His sons Ahmed, Osama and Omar were detained during last year’s pro-democracy revolt and the latter two assaulted, as were thousands of others. But the White House remained mostly silent — as it has for decades about violations of human rights by tyrannical American client states.

When the West speaks up, it does so mostly on behalf of selected constituencies — non-Muslim minorities, in particular. When it advocates for the rights of women, it does so for certain types of women — secular, pro-western, often anti-Islamic. It did not go to bat for the women belonging to the Brotherhood who suffered for long periods under Mubarak.

All this contradicts the West’s cardinal position that there can be no cultural or religious exceptions to universal human rights.

The double standards get more pronounced when it comes to defaming election winners we don’t like.

• Morsi and the Brotherhood are demonized for criticizing the Egypt-Israel peace treaty. But the treaty does not have popular legitimacy in Egypt. That’s why even Mubarak never fully normalized relations with Israel, and had the state media spew poison at Jews.

So long as Israel does not end the occupation of Palestinian land, Arabs of all political and ideological stripes will remain antagonistic. Anti-Israeli sentiment is not confined to “Islamists” and it is not all motivated by anti-Semitism.

Morsi’s position on Israel may be far more moderate than, say, that of those Americans, Israelis and Canadians who are advocating war on Iran. We treat the latter as acceptable political rhetoric or strategic positioning but go berserk at the far less radical positions of the Brotherhood.

• Morsi and the Brotherhood are deemed dangerous radicals.

Sure, Morsi and colleagues have made extremist statements in the past, such as that Christians and women be barred from the presidency (a proposal never adopted by the Brotherhood) or that sharia law be implemented.

Arguably that’s no worse than a significant portion of Americans saying that a Mormon or a black should not be president. Or leading Americans insisting that Christian principles should guide public policy.

• It is said that the Brotherhood does not show sufficient commitment to liberalism. Does the Republican party? The Brotherhood is also accused of being too centrally controlled. Are the Harper Conservatives not?

The Arab world is going through a historic transition. So are several religiously inspired groups, from Egypt to Tunisia and Libya. Emerging from oppression and moving into the democratic arena, they are learning to moderate their ideology, just as Christian and Communist groups did in Europe in another era.

This is a slow and painful but peaceful process. If we hope to influence it, we need to be credible on democracy and human rights. We need to be more principled, less hypocritical.