The group
has been exporting Iraq-style sectarian tactics to the Arab world’s most
populous country.
Four months after an Islamic State suicide bomber killed 28 Christian worshipers in Cairo, the group struck
Egypt’s Christians again—this time with a double church bombing on Palm Sunday
that left at least 44 dead and scores injured. The attacks, only hours apart,
targeted a church in the Delta city of Tanta as well as a church in Alexandria
where Coptic Pope Tawadros II was leading
a service. It was the single deadliest day of violence directed against the
Middle East’s largest Christian community in decades.
When the ISIS claim of responsibility came within
hours of the attacks, it wasn’t a surprise. For months, the Islamic State has
been accelerating the import of Iraq-style sectarian tactics to Egypt. In doing
so, the group hopes to destabilize the Middle East’s most populous country and
expand the reach of its by now clearly genocidal project for the
region’s minorities.
Egyptian authorities
have thus far been unable to keep up with this escalating threat. This may be
largely due to their own incompetence, but it also reflects the increasing sophistication
of ISIS assets directed at Egypt. As the group
goes on the defensive elsewhere, mainland Egypt is too attractive a potential
front in its jihad to pass up. It appears that the group is now focusing more
time, resources, and most importantly ISIS talent on
Egypt, making the situation likely to worsen in the future.
Targeting
Egypt’s Christians is a cold and calculated strategy for the group. ISIS hopes
that inflaming sectarian strife in Egypt will be the first step in the
country’s unraveling. Several explosions have rocked Cairo and the Delta since
2013, carried out by both ISIS and its precursor group Ansar Bayt
al-Maqdis, which pledged its allegiance to Raqqa in 2014. Yet
despite this, Islamic State efforts had before now largely floundered in
mainland Egypt—where nearly 97 percent of the population resides—due in part to
the strength of the central government, the amateur nature of Islamic State
assets, and perhaps most importantly, the relative cohesiveness of Egyptian
society. The group has fared much better in the remote North Sinai, where it
has killed over a thousand government troops in recent years, but the area is
simply too far away from Cairo to constitute an existential threat to
the government.
And so, although the Palm Sunday attacks were
hardly the first time Egypt’s Christians were targeted by
jihadis, Islamists, or even ordinary Muslim mobs, they represent a sea change
in the nature of the threat Egypt’s Christians now face, with far-reaching
implications for the country as a whole.
ISIS has taken the radical step of
positing that Christians are to Egypt what the Shia are to Iraq, embracing the
position that they can be killed indiscriminately and for no reason other than
for what they believe. Since the December 2016 Cairo church bombing, the
group’s supporters online have been forcefully pushing this notion, claiming
that the Christians of Egypt were first and foremost polytheists and that due
to the “treachery” they had showed, by presumably “allying” with the West and
the Egyptian government, they had to be killed.
Egyptian ISIS supporters launched an
online “Campaign to
Surveil Egypt’s Apostates” in order to crowdsource targeting information; they
produced crudely made “wanted dead” posters to urge supporters to take action.
A glimpse of the possible implications was on display last February, when
hundreds of Christians in North Sinai fled their homes in panic after seven
Christians were brutally murdered by IS fighters.
The strategy is in reality not the result of
an ideological revision inside ISIS. And its implementation has serious repercussions
for Egypt’s security, and if successful, for regional stability. For years
members of the group, and jihadis in general, have struggled with the important
question of why jihad has failed in mainland Egypt. The question is fundamental
for the group not only because of Egypt’s size, but also because it tests
whether the jihadi project can succeed in countries not already torn by civil
war or hopelessly destabilized.
One 2014 jihadi “study”
by an ISIS ideologue, Abu Mawdud al-Harmasy, is instructive. Titled
“The Secret of The Egyptian Enigma,” the author first laments that Egyptian
Muslims are like cattle for not understanding “the reality of the struggle,”
before offering his “keys for jihadi success.” Among them is “sectarian killing
of Christians” in order to inflame certain rural areas, and “most importantly
targeting directly every Christian without exceptions.” He goes on to say that
inflaming sectarian strife will be the key to “revealing the reality of the
conflict and [inciting] the latent feelings of the Muslims towards their
[Christian] creed;” to him, only after targeting minorities happened in Iraq,
Syria, and Yemen did jihad take hold in those places. The author
concludes with this exhortation: “Do not leave any infidel Christian in Egypt
until you threatened their life.” In recent months in Egypt ISIS has
also begun to take a similar tone toward Sufis, who constitute a large share of
Muslims in Egypt, North Africa, and elsewhere, decapitating two Sufi clerics in
Sinai and forcing others to “repent.”
It is unlikely that this strategy will succeed
the way ISIS envisions in Egypt, but the attempt to implement it will
leave a trail of destruction that will primarily devastate Egypt’s Christian
minority. The group’s genocidal program may perhaps backfire as it did for
their jihadi predecessors of the 1980s and 1990s, whose wanton killing of
civilians dried up any base of popular support. But as the ISIS ideologue
al-Harmasy hints, there is deep-rooted sectarianism in Egyptian society that
has been fanned by Islamists for decades, to which government policies have
also contributed. Egypt, like many other states in the region, still enforces
blasphemy laws, places discriminatory restrictions on the building of churches,
and fails to prosecute sectarian offenders, while Islamists continue to spew
hate against minorities unchecked. Sectarianism wouldn’t have worked so well
for ISIS in Egypt, or elsewhere before it, had the group not found an
ideological context where its radical ideas could thrive.
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