Israeli End Goals in Gaza: A Palestinian Expulsion?

Terrorism Monitor Volume: 22 Issue: 2

Andrew McGregor

January 31, 2024

(NPR)

Executive Summary

  • Nearly all of Gaza’s 2.2 million people have been displaced by the current conflict, with Israel potentially considering “voluntary” resettlement plans for the Gazan population.
  • Various Israeli officials have proposed several such plans for the removal of Gazans to other nations like the Democratic Republic of the Congo or Egypt, which they have justified by declaring that Gazans’ main desire at this point is to destroy Israel.
  • Egypt has firmly rejected Israeli proposals to resettle Gazans in its country, equating any “voluntary” resettlement to illegal forced displacement. In particular, relocating the Gazan population to the Sinai is felt by Cairo to risk peace between Egypt and Israel.

In January 2008, Hamas fighters blasted holes through the border wall separating Gaza and Egypt to allow hundreds of thousands of starving Palestinians to access food and fuel supplies in Egypt. The incursion occurred five days after Israel imposed a complete blockade on Gaza, following a series of Hamas rocket attacks. Egyptian security forces backed off to alleviate the growing humanitarian crisis, but forced the Gazans back across the border several days later (Al Jazeera, January 24, 2008).

Now, sixteen years later, Israel may be seeking a more permanent repetition of this incident by forcing nearly all of Gaza’s 2.2 million people into the Egyptian Sinai. Some 1.9 million Gazans are now displaced, with little or nothing to return to when the bombing stops (United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, January 4). In this context, high-level Israeli discussions regarding the “voluntary” resettlement of Gaza’s Palestinian population have become an indicator of the Israeli government’s war objectives.

Israeli Plans for Transferring Gazans to Sinai and Beyond

Schemes to transfer Gaza’s population to Sinai have appeared repeatedly since the 1950s, but the Sinai is not the only place to have been considered as a destination for Gaza’s Arabs. Israel’s Likud government is reported to be engaged in secret negotiations with several nations to accept displaced Gazans, most notably the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a nation beset by environmental crises, humanitarian challenges, political instability, and ceaseless internal warfare (Times of Israel, January 3).

General Alfredo Stroessner, Dictator of Paraguay

A secret 1969 plan to encourage Gazans to migrate to Paraguay was only revealed in 2020. Negotiated by Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency with Paraguayan dictator and Nazi sympathizer Alfredo Stroessner, the deal called for 60,000 Palestinians to move to the South American nation. However, ultimately, only 30 Palestinians did so, two of whom stormed the Israeli Embassy and killed the ambassador’s secretary (Jerusalem Post, August 12, 2020).

Israeli Intelligence Minister Gila Gamliel (X)

On January 2, Intelligence Minister Gila Gamliel outlined a post-war plan to take control of the Egypt–Gaza border. She noted that by war’s end, there will be no municipal authorities in Gaza, no source of work, a 60 percent decline in agricultural land, and a complete dependency on humanitarian aid. All these conditions encouraged “voluntary emigration” (Times of Israel, January 3).

Israeli Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich (Israel Hayom)

Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich (of the Religious Zionist Party), National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir (of the Otzma Yehudit Party) and numerous members of the Likud Party have also advocated the external resettlement of Gazans and their replacement with Israeli settlers. Smotrich justified the “voluntary” emigration by claiming “two million [Gazans] wake up every morning with a desire to destroy the State of Israel and to slaughter, rape, and murder Jews” (Jerusalem Post, January 3). However, these calls do not have universal support in the Israeli government, with two Likud ministers describing them as “unrealistic” and damaging to Israel’s international reputation (Times of Israel, January 4).

“An Integral Part of Israel” – Israel’s Projected New Western Border

In mid-December, extremist Rabbi Uzi Sharbaf, a founding member of banned Israeli terrorist group “The Jewish Underground” (HaMakhteret HaYehudit), told a Tel Aviv conference attended by Knesset members that Jewish settlements must return to Gaza as part of an historic opportunity to “liberate” biblical lands from the Sinai up to the Nile River (Jordan News, December 15, 2023; Al-Ahram [Cairo], December 14, 2023). This “unique and rare opportunity to evacuate the entire Gaza Strip” was also cited in an October 17 paper released by former senior defense and intelligence officials of the Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy. Rather than the Sinai, the plan called for the resettlement of Gazans in existing housing in the Cairo satellite cities of “6 October” and “10 Ramadan” that would be purchased by Israel at a cost of $8 billion. [1]

General Giora Eiland (Jerusalem Post)

Giora Eiland, an influential retired IDF major-general and former head of the Israeli National Security Council who has compared Gaza to Nazi Germany, declared at the beginning of the current conflict that: “Israel needs to create a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, compelling tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands to seek refuge in Egypt or the Gulf… Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist” (Ynetnews, October 12, 2023; Yedioth Ahronoth, November 19, 2023). Eiland has promoted a population transfer from Gaza to Sinai since 2004.

Egyptian Reactions

A leaked document from Israel’s Intelligence Ministry dated October 13 called for a permanent relocation of Gazans to Sinai, initially to tent cities, and then to more stable accommodation in the Sinai Peninsula, with a buffer zone along the border preventing their return to Gaza. The first step would consist of shifting the population to Gaza’s south. Egypt’s minister of foreign affairs, Sameh Shoukry, described the leaked document as “a ludicrous proposition,” noting that displacement was itself “an illegal activity” (Asharq Al-Awsat, November 4, 2023). Shoukry later denounced calls for a “voluntary” displacement as a “full-fledged war crime” (Al-Ahram [Cairo], November 21, 2023).

Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry (Daily News Egypt)

Israeli sources report that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu suggested the World Bank write off Egypt’s considerable foreign debt (an estimated $165 billion) in return for accepting Gaza’s population (Yedioth Ahronoth, October 31, 2023). Some financial aid from the rich Gulf states might be included, but Egyptian authorities have loudly proclaimed their rejection of the deal (Egypt Independent, November 1, 2023). Egyptian prime minister Mustafa Madbouli has noted his government’s own plans to settle eight million Egyptians in the Sinai by 2050 (Al-Ahram [Cairo], November 23, 2023). [2]

Egypt fears that discontented and resentful Gazans might use Sinai as a base for attacks on Israel in contravention of the peace agreement between the two nations. President Abd al-Fatah al-Sisi has instead suggested that Israel transport the two million Gazans to Israel’s Negev Desert in the south of the country until they can be returned after the defeat of Hamas (Egypt Today, November 22, 2023).

Conclusion

Bitter divisions are already emerging in Israel’s war cabinet over the post-war destiny of Gaza’s people. The implications for Israel of a forced depopulation of Gaza are many, including international isolation, the collapse of the Abraham Accords, and even a renewal of hostilities with Egypt. So long as both Egypt and the Palestinians of Gaza reject the idea of resettlement, the scheme cannot be fulfilled without dangerous consequences for Israel’s future.

Notes:

[1] “A Plan for resettlement and final rehabilitation in Egypt of the entire population of Gaza: economic aspects,” Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy, October 17, 2023. The paper was taken down from the web after an international backlash. See Middle East Eye, October 26, 2023.

[2] Cairo’s full plan for development in Sinai can be found here: “The New Republic Implements Comprehensive National Plan to Change Life in Sinai: The Land of Turquoise,” State Information Service, April 26, 2022, https://www.sis.gov.eg/Story/165520/Mega-Projects-on-every-inch-of-Sinai?lang=en-us

Regime Change in Gaza: Trajectories for a Post-Hamas Future

Terrorism Monitor 21(22)

Jamestown Foundation, Washington DC

Dr. Andrew McGregor

November 17, 2023

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant (All Israel News)

The deadly October 7 Hamas operation was designed to use shock and terror to force a change in the status and future of Gaza’s Palestinian population. In this regard, the operation has been successful—life in Gaza will never be the same. According to Israeli authorities, part of these changes will include the disappearance of Hamas as a political and military entity. During a meeting at the Israeli Air Force operations headquarters, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said of the planned Israeli Defense Force (IDF) land offensive into Gaza: “This has to be the last maneuver in Gaza, for the simple reason that after it, there will not be a Hamas” (Arutz Sheva, [Beit El] October 22). National Security Council chief Tzachi Hanegbi has pledged Israel will “wipe [Hamas] from the face of the earth” (Times of Israel, October 14).

What then will a post-Hamas Gaza look like if the IDF succeeds? To follow are eight possible directions for Gaza’s future, which may involve one or more of these scenarios in combination:

Scenario 1: Return of the Palestinian Authority

After Hamas’s violent expulsion of Fatah from Gaza in 2007 and the subsequent dissolution of the Palestinian Unity government, Gaza and the West Bank have had little official interaction. This means the Palestinian Authority (PA) government in the West Bank (dominated by the Fatah Party of President Mahmud Abbas) has little presence or influence in isolated Gaza.

Shrinking Palestinian Territories in red, including Gaza and parts of the occupied West Bank.

The credibility of the PA, should it return to Gaza, could only suffer by following behind Israeli troops, unless some sort of intermediate administration was established. Even afterwards, it would be difficult to avoid being characterized as Israel’s puppet. If Gazans are allowed to remain, Israel will certainly intensify rather than relax its control of the enclave, which will be sealed even tighter to prevent the supply of money or weapons to any resistance factions in Gaza. Moreover, the PA may not be eager to rush back into Gaza, especially if it remains politically unsettled.

Scenario 2: Islamist Extremist Groups Grow in Influence

Israel’s plan to destroy Hamas (and presumably the Gaza-based Palestinian Islamic Jihad movement and other minor Islamist militias) will leave a dangerous power vacuum in an already deeply traumatized region. This void is unlikely to be filled by any group or movement sympathetic to Israel. Palestinian anger may well encourage the growth of greater extremism. This could possibly manifest itself in new forms or in the rise in popularity in Gaza of more familiar groups, vis-à-vis al-Qaeda or Islamic State.

Scenario 3: Israeli Occupation

If, as expected, the IDF occupies all of Gaza, it will be the third such operation since the 2005 evacuation of Israeli troops and settlers. Returning Gaza to Israeli military occupation 18 years after disengagement is an idea with virtually no support in Israel or anywhere else. Israel is eager to escape an attack-response cycle that is expensive in economic terms, militarily demanding, and politically damaging.

Scenario 4: Return to Egyptian Control

Currently, Egypt has as little to do with Gaza as is possible and frequently closes its single border crossing with the enclave. Despite this, Egypt has a long history of being the dominant power in Gaza, going back as far as Pharaonic times, through the Muslim Ayyubid dynasty to the era of the medieval Mamluks before it passed into Ottoman control in the 16th century. Gaza was absorbed into Gamal Abd al-Nasser’s United Arab Republic (UAR) in 1959, and was ruled by an Egyptian governor until 1967. Before then, Egypt held Gaza with the Egyptian Army’s 8th Division, which was formed from Palestinian conscripts and Egyptian officers. Israel seized Gaza and Sinai from Egypt in the 1967 Six-Day War. While the Sinai Peninsula was eventually returned to Egypt, Gaza was not, and it remained under Israeli military occupation until 2005.

The Rafah Border Crossing between Gaza and Egypt

Officially, Egypt continues to advocate for an independent Palestinian state based on the borders that existed prior to the June 1967 Arab-Israeli War. Pro-Palestinian rallies have been organized under the aegis of President al-Sisi’s Mustaqbal Watan (Future of the Homeland) party and directed by officials believed to be undercover police. Unsanctioned protests of support in Cairo’s Tahrir Square and at al-Azhar mosque, however, have been met with beatings and mass arrests (MENA [Cairo], October 23; Al Jazeera, October 21). It is clear that Egypt’s response to the war in Gaza will be formed in government meeting rooms, not on the street.

Hamas can expect no help from Egypt, because of the group’s close connections to Egypt’s banned Muslim Brotherhood. In Cairo’s view, many Gazans are infected with Islamic extremist ideology, and are suspected of collaborating with Islamist fighters in the Sinai who continue to be engaged in a 12-year-old insurgency. Egypt already hosts 9 million refugees, mostly from Middle Eastern or African countries. There is no desire in Cairo to resume Egypt’s historical control of Gaza or its 2.2 million people. Such an occupation would bring Egypt into direct contact with Israeli security forces in an unstable tinderbox. Five decades of peace with Israel have benefited Egypt, which contends with many other challenges that will not be improved by confrontations with the state. Nonetheless, as a major leader of the Arab world, President al-Sisi asserts that in Gaza “the existing reaction exceeds the right of self-defense on the part of Israel, and is turning into collective punishment” (al-Hurra [Cairo], October 16).

Cairo is also concerned that the Gaza conflict is taking international attention away from the still-raging conflict in neighboring Sudan (Ahram [Cairo], October 22; see TM, April 28). Nine thousand people have been killed in Sudan since April, while Egypt has reluctantly received over 300,000 Sudanese refugees. Cairo is hard-pressed to handle refugee pressures on both its southern and northern borders and is looking for greater international intervention to bring an end to the six-month old war in Sudan.

Scenario 5: Depopulation of Gaza

Israel is using a combination of airstrikes and warnings to compel Gazans to move to the southern part of the enclave, close to the Egyptian border. This has led to fears that Israel may seek to drive the entire population of Gaza across the border into Egyptian Sinai. Consistent with this, on October 18, President al-Sisi remarked that beyond Israel’s “direct military action” against Hamas, there was “an attempt to push the civilian population to seek refuge” in Egypt (Daily News Egypt, October 18). In a meeting with the British PM, al-Sisi declared: “We must not allow a civilian exodus from Gaza to Sinai because it would be a very dangerous matter…” The Egyptian president further warned that the consequences of failing to contain a growing spiral of violence “go beyond the right to defend oneself” (Ahram Online [Cairo], October 20). Desperate to avoid this wave of Gazan refugees, al-Sisi suggested they could instead be funnelled into Israel’s sparsely populated Negev Desert (Egypt Independent, October 18; Middle East Monitor, October 19).

Western suggestions that Egypt take in over a million Gazan refugees have angered the Egyptian government, with one senior official reportedly telling a European envoy: “You want us to take one million people? Well, I am going to send them to Europe. You care about human rights so much—well, you take them” (Middle East Monitor, October 19).

The Nakba of 1948

PA leader Mahmud Abbas also fears the permanent displacement of the Gazans, suggesting this would constitute “a second Nakba,” referring to the 1948 expulsion of some 750,000 Palestinians from lands that would form the state of Israel (Al Jazeera, October 13). Ariel Kallner, a Knesset member from Israel’s ruling Likud Party, issued a call for another expulsion: “Right now, one goal: Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 48!” (al-Arabiya, October 8). Another Likud member, Revital Gotliv, has called for the use of nuclear weapons to destroy Gaza and render it uninhabitable: “It’s time to kiss doomsday!” (Middle East Eye, October 22; Middle East Monitor, October 10). These remarks were echoed by Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu of the Otzma Yehudit Party (a Likud coalition partner), who suggested that a nuclear strike on Gaza was “one of the options” (though he later claimed he was speaking “metaphorically”) (Jerusalem Post, November 6). He further suggested that Gazans could “go to Ireland” (Dublin has been critical of the Israeli offensive in Gaza) (Times of Israel, November 5). Such calls for the depopulation of Gaza and the permanent dislocation of its people do not encourage evacuation from targeted areas nor cooperation with the IDF. [1]

Ariel Kallner (Times of Israel)

A leaked document from Israel’s Intelligence Ministry (described as a “concept paper”) suggested “large-scale migration from war zones … is a natural and sought-after outcome…” Among the countries mentioned as possible destinations for a mass exodus of Gazans are Greece, Spain, and Canada. The latter is singled out as a prime choice due to its “permissive immigration policy” (+972 Magazine [Tel Aviv], October 30).

Scenario 6: Establishment of a UN Mandate

One possible direction for a post-Hamas Gaza involves the revival of mandated territories, such as were common in the Middle East and Africa in the interval between the first and second world wars. Gaza itself was under the British Mandate for Palestine from 1923 to 1948. Under the auspices of the League of Nations, these mandates typically involved the transfer of former European colonies or parts of the Ottoman Empire to the control of other European nations with an eye toward guiding these territories into a state of self-determination and independence. In practice, the mandates simply maintained colonial status under new masters who were in no hurry to establish self-governance.

Assuming such a mandate is approved by the UN Security Council, which is not necessarily likely, a return of Gaza to European control under a UN mandate is simply a non-starter. Broad international participation would be required, including a massive operation involving peacekeepers, reconstruction assistance, medical and development aid, and infrastructure repair. It would be difficult to secure support for such a program from all the badly-divided members of the permanent UN Security Council. With the UN already overstretched and underfunded (especially with regard to humanitarian aid), approval of a UN mandate would only be the first step in a long and difficult process. Yisrael Beitenu Party leader Avigdor Liberman (a former defense minister, foreign minister, and deputy prime minister) has suggested that the UN forgo providing any aid to Gaza in favor of sending assistance to Libya, Sudan, and Syria instead (Jerusalem Post, October 18).

Scenario 7: Arab League Occupation

It has been suggested that some Arab nations friendly to Israel (specifically Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates) could be handed a mandate over a disarmed Gaza (Israel Hayom, October 16). Israel would determine “how the international force can operate, what weapons it is allowed to have, and anything else that effects the Jewish state’s security needs,” effectively making such a force little more than an Israeli proxy (Israel Hayom, October 19). However, there is no lineup of Arab nations ready and willing to assume responsibility for struggling Gazans living in ruins.

Some of these formerly friendly Arab states may also be growing less friendly by the day. For example, nine nations, including at least seven that might be called friendly to Israel, issued a statement on October 26 assailing Israel’s conduct of the conflict: “The right to self-defense by the United Nations Charter does not justify blatant violations of humanitarian and international law.” They further rejected any attempt “to displace the Palestinian people from their land in any way, considering it a serious violation of international humanitarian law and tantamount to a war crime” (Asharq al-Awsat, October 26). [2] The Arab League, which has no joint military mechanism, has not yet expressed any interest in assuming control of Gaza.

Scenario 8: Survival/Revival of Hamas

In a policy born of anger rather than feasibility, Israel has set itself the impossible task of eliminating every trace of Hamas, which has both political and armed wings. Short of killing or expelling every resident of Gaza, this will prove impossible. Part of the problem is the success Hamas has had in eliminating internal threats to its rule, leaving Gazans with few political alternatives. With deep roots in Gaza, there is a strong chance that Hamas will survive the current round of fighting, even if it does so in a slightly different form or under a different name.

Conclusion

Israel has regarded Gaza as an independent Palestinian state since its withdrawal in 2005 and is thus likely to repudiate responsibility for the territory when military operations are complete. As two veteran Israeli intelligence authorities recently stated: “It needs to be clear that neither Gaza reconstruction nor care for the health, sanitation, or displacement of residents is Israel’s responsibility” (Times of Israel, October 21). Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant likewise insists that the final phase of Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza will involve “the removal of Israel’s responsibility for day-to-day life in the Gaza Strip” (Times of Israel, October 20).

There will inevitably be calls from so-called “progressive” factions in the West to allow mass migration of Gazans to Western nations, which could receive support from some Israeli leaders anxious to be done with the Palestinians. There are, however, already demands from Republican presidential hopefuls and others to ban Palestinian entry to the United States (Times of Israel, October 19).

With so many variables in play, one thing about the future of Gaza is still clear—the people who will not have a say in it are the Gazan people themselves.

Notes:

[1] Israeli government documents from 1948 were declassified in 2021 and confirm long-standing reports of massacres and forcible evictions, as well as the shocked responses of some Israeli cabinet members to the violence. The documents were examined in a report by Israeli daily Haaretz and the Akevot Institute for Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Research entitled “Classified Docs Reveal Massacres of Palestinians in ’48 – and What Israeli Leaders Knew” (Haaretz, December 9, 2021).

[2] The document was signed by the foreign ministers of Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, and Morocco.

Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood Leader Mahmud Ezzat Arrested: Where Do the Ikhwan Go from Here?

Andrew McGregor

AIS Special Report

September 25, 2020

Dr. Mahmud Ezzat (al-Jazeera)

Agents of Egypt’s National Security Agency (NSA) working with Cairo police arrested acting general guide of the Muslim Brotherhood Mahmud Ezzat on August 28, 2020. The arrest was carried out during a raid on an apartment in New Cairo’s Fifth Settlement, southeast of the capital. Encrypted computers and telephones were seized, as well as documents alleged to relate to sabotage plans (Egypt Independent, August 28, 2020). Ezzat has been a fugitive for seven years; while he and his supporters spread rumors he was hiding in a foreign country to throw off his pursuers, Ezzat appears to have remained in Egypt the whole time, as is required for the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) according to the movement’s by-laws. It is also possible that Ezzat had difficulty escaping through Egypt’s tightened border controls. The regime of President ‘Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi regards the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization and is determined to eliminate its influence and presence in Egypt. In the meantime, the groups suffers from organizational upheaval and internal divisions.

The Brothers (Ikhwan) are struggling to maintain a foothold in Egypt’s political process four years after its members were slaughtered in the streets of Cairo by security forces following the 2013 overthrow of Egyptian president and Brotherhood member Muhammad al-Mursi by General ‘Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi and the Egyptian military. With most of the movement’s leadership serving long prison sentences or awaiting execution, the work of keeping the Brotherhood alive fell into the hands of fugitive leaders such as Mahmud Ezzat.

At the time of his arrest, Egypt’s Interior Ministry accused Ezzat of overseeing the car bomb assassination of Public Prosecutor Hisham Barakat (2015), the assassination at his home of Brigadier General Wael Tahoun (2015), the attempted assassination by car bomb of Assistant Public Prosecutor Zakaria ‘Abd al-Aziz (2016) and the car bombing outside the National Cancer Institute that killed 20 people and injured 47 (2019)  (Egypt Independent, August 28, 2020).

Ibrahim Munir (The Times)

With Ezzat’s arrest, only two members of the Brotherhood’s Guidance Bureau remain at large. Of these, Ibrahim Munir became the Brotherhood’s new Acting General Guide, while Mahmud Hussein remains the movement’s secretary-general. Both, however, are currently in Turkey and unable to exert much influence within Egypt, especially among the movement’s younger members, most of whom have a strong dislike for the new Acting General Guide (Al-Ahram Weekly [Cairo], September 7, 2020). A number of imprisoned young members of the Brotherhood have now made a break from the movement’s Old Guard, issuing important ideological revisions designed to create conditions conducive to a reconciliation with the al-Sisi regime, which has succeeded in consolidating its control over most of the country. Munir has roundly denounced the revisions and remains unapologetic for any actions of the Old Guard that may have contributed to the existential crisis faced by the movement today.

Ezzat was wanted by Egyptian authorities in connection with the death of anti-MB protesters outside the movement’s headquarters in the Muquttam district of Cairo on June 30, 2013 (Al-Monitor, August 21, 2013). His current location is unknown, though speculation has placed him in Gaza, Turkey or even inside Egypt.

Ezzat was among five Egyptians added in November 2017 to the terrorist list of the Arab Quartet (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates) (Egypt Today, November 26, 2017). Known as a “hardliner,” Ezzat’s long membership at senior levels of the MB has given him an insider’s knowledge of the movement’s organization and finances, much of which is directed by him. Narrow, sharp features and a reputation for organizational skills have led Ezzat to be known as “the Brotherhood Fox” (Al-Monitor, August 21, 2013).

In various trials carried out since 2013, Ezzat has already received, in absentia, two life sentences and two death sentences on other charges. Ezzat will face retrial in these cases, as well as a case of alleged espionage to begin in December.

Ezzat’s arrest came only days after the death in prison of leading Muslim Brother Essam al-Erian, former secretary-general of the Brotherhood’s political wing, the Freedom and Justice Party, at the age of 66. Al-Erian was reported to have died from a heart attack in the maximum-security wing of Liman al-Turra Prison south of Cairo. The Islamist complained a number of times of “medical negligence” during his stay in al-Turra, including a refusal to treat the Hepatitis C he contracted while in detention (al-Jazeera, August 13, 2020).

Perhaps in light of this, as well as Muhammad al-Mursi’s death in al-Turra Prison in 2019, allegedly as a result of lack of medical care, the Brotherhood’s general office declared that the Egyptian military bore responsibility for Ezzat’s life, warning that he suffered from chronic illnesses and that illegal detention and torture would represent an “attempt at murder” (Middle East Monitor, August 29, 2020).

Background

Formed in Isma’iliya by Hassan al-Banna in 1928, the MB is a religious organization intended to advance political Islamism through social work and political agitation. Much disrupted by events since the 2013 coup, the MB’s leadership structure includes a majlis al-shura (consultative council) below a powerful 15-member Guidance Bureau (maktab al-irshad) with a Supreme Guide (murshid al-‘amm) and his deputies at its head.

The movement has had a difficult relationship with the state since a young MB member tried to assassinate the Egyptian prime minister in 1948. Thousands were jailed and al-Banna himself assassinated by unknown assailants shortly afterward. The movement was banned by President Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasser in 1954. When another Brother tried to kill Nasser in October 1954, a massive crackdown followed that put thousands of Ikhwan behind bars, including revolutionary ideologue Sayyid Qutb, whose works deeply influenced the young Ezzat.

Imprisonment

Ezzzat was arrested in 1965 and imprisoned alongside Sayyid Qutb and Dr. Muhammed Badi’e, who later became the movement’s Supreme Guide (2010 to present – Ezzat and now Munir are only Acting Supreme Guides during 77-year-old Badi’e’s incarceration). Qutb had already endured torture during nine years in prison; his re-arrest would lead to his execution the next year on charges of conspiring to assassinate the president and overthrow the government. Qutb believed that an Islamic administration could only be imposed by a vanguard of believers (tali’a mu’mina) who would lead the masses to Islam through revolutionary activity.

Dr. Muhammad Badi’e (Mohamed Abd El Ghany/Reuters)

Ezzat became a pupil of fellow prisoner Shukri Mustafa, who took Qutbism to extremes after his release in 1971 with the formation of Jama’at al-Muslimin, better known as Takfir wa’l-Hijra (Excommunication and Flight) (Al-Monitor, August 21, 2013). Mustafa was also an adherent of the works of extremist icon Shaykh ibn Taymiya (1263-1328), but rejected most other Islamic scholarship, pulling his followers out of Egyptian society to live in caves (after the Prophet’s model, the concept of withdrawal from non-Islamic communities is known as hijra).  Mustafa’s jihad ended with his capture and execution in 1978.

Qutbist ideology was influential among the movement’s leaders serving long prison terms, a group that included Ezzat and Badi’e. Nonetheless, the efficiency of President Hosni Mubarak’s security machine forced Ezzat and other Qutbists to acknowledge the temporary futility of a direct challenge to the state, and the movement shifted back to emphasizing religious education and social assistance as the means of expanding the MB’s influence. Ezzat explained the movement’s outreach efforts by saying Islam provided “a religion for Muslims and a civilization for non-Muslims.” [2]

After nine years in notorious prisons like Liman al-Turra and Abu Za’bal, Ezzat was released in 1974. Ezzat has noted that the cycle of arrests, torture and imprisonment of MB leaders in pre-revolution Egypt always increased membership and public support: “Regime repression is the glue that binds us together and reflects that we are on the right path.” [3]

After his release, Ezzat became a member of the all-important MB Guidance Bureau in 1981 before fleeing President Anwar Sadat’s crackdown on the MB in 1981. Ezzat traveled to Yemen, where he taught at the University of Sana’a, before moving on to England for several years of post-graduate studies (Egypt Today, November 26, 2017; al-Arabiya, November 23, 2017). [4]

By the mid-1980s, a conservative trend within the movement led by Ezzat and other figures who had emerged from prison or returned from exile drove many leading reformers from roles of influence. The ascendancy of the conservatives continued until the early 2000s, by which time Ezzat and conservative businessman Khayrat al-Shater dominated the ideological direction of the movement. [5] Ezzat was responsible for student recruitment and organizing movement cells across Egypt while working as a professor at the University of Zaqaziq’s faculty of medicine.

In 1992 Ezzat was arrested in connection with the “Salsabil Case,” in which security services claimed to have discovered documents detailing plans to overthrow the Mubarak regime in the offices of the Salsabil software company established by Khayrat al-Shater with Ezzat’s assistance. Two years later Ezzat was detained again alongside 153 other Ikhwan charged with plotting to depose the regime.

The Revolution

Ezzat served as MB secretary general from 2001 to 2010. During that time, he became a prominent supporter of Khayrat al-Shater. Ezzat and other conservatives skilfully squeezed out or tamed the movement’s leading reformers in 2009-2010 and elected Muhammad Badi’e as the new supreme guide, replacing Mahdi ‘Akif, who was persuaded to step down. [6] Also forced out was ‘Akif’s first deputy, Muhammad Habib, who accused Ezzat of mounting a coup against him. [7]

By the time of the 2011 revolution, the movement was firmly in the hands of a conservative trend embodied by Ezzzat, al-Shater and MB spokesman Mahmud Ghuzlan.  Reformers began to flow out of the movement, a process accelerated by the events of the revolution and the uncertain response of the Brotherhood’s leadership.

Khayrat al-Shater (al-Arabiya)

Mubarak’s overthrow allowed the MB to form a political party for the first time in June 2011, the Ḥizb al-Ḥurriya wa’l-’Adala (Freedom and Justice Party – FJP). Ezzat’s ally Khayrat al-Shater became the FJP’s post-revolution candidate for president until his disqualification and replacement by Muhammad al-Mursi, who won the presidential election.

As al-Mursi was not the head of the Brotherhood, it remained unclear whether the Egyptian president was still answerable to the movement’s supreme guide. Despite efforts to portray the FJP as an autonomous political party, the Guidance Bureau’s importance became clear when Mursi and two other FJP leaders began to meet weekly with MB deputy supreme guides Ezzat, al-Shater, Ghuzlan and secretary general Mahmud al-Hussein to “coordinate” political activities. [8]

One consequence of the 2011 revolution was that the MB’s shura council was able to meet for the first time since 1995 without fear of arrest. During that time the Brotherhood’s Guidance Bureau (including Ezzat) made all the movement’s major decisions without input from the broader leadership. Yet even as the Brotherhood’s new political wing tried to convince Egyptians of their commitment to democracy and tolerance of different perspectives, Ezzat shocked many Egyptians by making remarks endorsing the implementation of hudud punishments such as stoning, amputation and crucifixion for certain offenses under Shari’a. [9]

The Military Targets the Brotherhood

Following days of public protest, the July 3, 2013 military coup d’état brought an end to Mursi’s administration and yet another wave of anti-Ikhwan repression.  The Brothers’ insistence that the FJP was the legitimate and democratically elected government of Egypt was largely ignored by the international community.

Attempts by the Brotherhood to apply pressure on the military through public protests and sit-ins were met with a savage response by government security forces who killed hundreds and arrested thousands to make it clear to the movement and its supporters that the Brotherhood was no longer part of Egypt’s political process.

With supreme guide Muhammad Badi’e and deputy guides al-Shater and Rashad al-Bayumi in prison, Ezzat became the movement’s acting supreme guide in August 2013 (al-Arabiya, August 20, 2013). Kamal Helbawy, a former MB guidance bureau member who resigned in 2012 over the movement’s decision to run a presidential candidate, noted Ezzat’s affinity for “radical Qutbism” and questioned Ezzat’s appointment as the movement’s supreme guide: “Ezzat is a well-mannered, decent man; he is not a great public speaker and prefers to work in secret more than in public. … Given these characteristics, I don’t think that he is a suitable leader for the Muslim Brotherhood at this stage” (Al-Monitor, August 21, 2013).

Leadership in Exile

Ezzat evaded arrest, unlike his comrades Badi’e, Mursi and al-Shater, all of whom were sentenced to serve a variety of life sentences based on convictions for terrorism, armed opposition to the state and espionage on behalf of foreign countries (Arab News, November 15, 2017; Daily News Egypt, September 16, 2017; Ahram Online, December 30, 2017).

Egyptian media reports in August 2015 maintained that Ezzat had been replaced as acting supreme guide by his UK-based 80-year-old Guidance Bureau colleague, Ibrahim Munir Mustafa. Munir denied the report and insisted “Dr. Mahmud Ezzat is still the deputy supreme guide and acting supreme guide” (Middle East Monitor, August 10, 2015). After rumors regarding Ezzat’s alleged ill health, the claim resurfaced a year later (Youm7 [Cairo], September 22, 2016). However, there was no formal announcement, and Ezzat remained the acting supreme guide. [10]

Still insisting on the legitimacy of Mursi’s FJP government, Ezzat released a public letter from his place of concealment in August 2017 urging an escalation of violence against the al-Sisi regime. Admitting that the organization was “in pain,” Ezzat called for “victory and sovereignty or death and joy” (Egypt Today, August 14, 2017). The letter may have been designed to undercut the appeal to Ikhwan youth of the more militant Kamal faction of the Brotherhood that emerged after the military coup.

Muhammad Kamal (Middle East Monitor)

Muhammad Kamal, a member of the Guidance Bureau, led “special operations committees” engaged in violence intended to force out the new Egyptian regime. Kamal and another MB leader were both killed by shots to the head during a police raid in northern Cairo in October 2016 (Reuters, October 3, 2016). Nonetheless, Kamal’s followers (sometimes termed “the new guard”) attempted to take over the movement in December 2016 when they “dismissed” the existing guidance bureau and established their own “revolutionary” version, creating competing administrations within the movement (Mada Masr, March 22, 2017).

In early 2017 the Kamal faction announced that it would begin publishing internal assessments of the mistakes made by the movement’s leadership. Though this initiative of the MB’s youth wing was supported by Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the movement’s Qatari-based spiritual leader, the Brotherhood’s old guard was alarmed by the announcement.  Ibrahim Munir reminded members that documents lacking the approval of Mahmud Ezzat did not represent the movement’s opinion (al-Masry al-Youm [Cairo], March 27, 2017).

The Kamal faction followed up with a report in March 2017 that was highly critical of the reaction of Ezzat and the movement’s old guard to the 2011 revolution, accusing the Brotherhood’s senior leaders of adopting a cautious and conservative stance rather than adhering to the revolutionary principles of MB founder Hassan al-Banna (Mada Masr, March 22, 2017).

In May 2017, the Kamal faction published a document they claimed would reveal that the Munir/Ezzat faction of the Brotherhood was recommending a pragmatic and conciliatory approach to the movement’s political isolation, both in Egypt and internationally. It was an apparent recognition that continued insistence on the legitimacy of the FJP government and the return of Mursi as president was preventing political re-integration. The Munir/Ezzat faction was urging ideological flexibility at a time of weakness in order to allow the movement to survive and avoid international condemnation as a terrorist organization (al-Arabiya, May 8, 2017).

The Egyptian government has rejected all Ikhwan attempts to restore the group, even in a diminished fashion. In August 2017, a Cairo court placed 296 Ikhwan on the national terrorist list and claimed Ezzat was forming a military wing for the movement that would focus on toppling the state and working alongside other extremists to target Coptic Christians (al-Arabiya, November 23, 2017). The charges were at odds with Ezzat’s protestations of MB peacefulness, in which Ezzat quoted Dr. Badi’e: “Our motto remains ‘Our non-violence is more powerful than bullets’” (Ikhwanweb.com, September 13, 2016).

Conclusion

Up until the time of his arrest, Ezzat insisted that there was still a future for the MB, which has now survived 90 years of confrontation with Egypt’s governments, though its fortunes have rarely been lower.

The disaster ushered in by the Brotherhood’s full-scale entry into national politics was met with confusion and dissension within the movement. The detention or dispersal of many Ikhwan prevents the movement from gathering to develop strategies to move forward. In the meantime, an aging and fugitive leadership has spent much of its time fending off internal challenges from younger members urging defiance rather than the gradualism of the old guard leadership, which still cherishes values like discipline and obedience.

After replacing Ezzat, Munir quickly announced that sweeping changes to the Brotherhood’s organization were imminent, though he added these changes had already been planned before Ezzat’s detention and they were only being announced now to galvanize the membership and  “to let the regime know that the movement has not died” (Middle East Monitor, September 21, 2020).

In a TV appearance shortly after Ezzat’s arrest, Munir claimed that President al-Sisi had extended an offer of reconciliation through Field Marshal Muhammad Hussein Tantawi three or four years ago that would permit the release of imprisoned Muslim Brothers and allow fugitive Brothers to return to Egypt in exchange for recognition of the Sisi regime’s legitimacy. Munir said such recognition would be “a betrayal of the country” (Middle East Monitor, September 21, 2020).

Munir also has experience with Egypt’s notorious prison system, serving 10 years after a 1965 death sentence was commuted, followed by a five-year sentence issued in absentia in 2009, though the sentence was lifted in 2012 under an amnesty issued by former President Muhammad al-Mursi (Al-Ahram Weekly [Cairo], September 10, 2020). Munir was granted asylum in England in the early 1980s and has directed the International wing of the Brotherhood from an office in London since then, a position that gave him control of a significant part of the movement’s financing. With the Brotherhood at a crossroads, the 83-year-old Munir seems an unlikely candidate to electrify the movement’s remaining membership in a way that would enable the Brotherhood to resist and overcome opposition from the Egyptian regime, the international community, and even within the movement itself. Without further changes to the leadership, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood appears ready to enter a period of significant and inevitable decline.

Notes

  1. Hesham al-Adawi, “Islamists in Power: The Case of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt,” in Khair El-Din Haseeb (ed.): State and Religion in the Arab World, Routledge, 2017, pp. 193-94.
  2. Eric Trager, Arab Fall: How the Muslim Brotherhood Won and Lost Egypt in 891 Days, Georgetown University Press, 2016, p. 94.
  3. Khalil al-Anani, Inside the Muslim Brotherhood: Religion, Identity, and Politics, Oxford University Press, 2016, pp. 142-43.
  4. Ibid, p. 151.
  5. Ezzat knew al-Shater from his days in al-Sana’a and London.
  6. Hazem Kandil: Inside the Brotherhood, Cambridge, 2015, pp. 136-37; Carrie Rosefsky Wickham, The Muslim Brotherhood: Evolution of an Islamist Movement, Princeton University Press, 2013, pp. 139-40.
  7. Khalil al-Anani, op cit, pp. 153-54.
  8. Eric Trager, op cit, p. 111.
  9. Carrie Rosefsky Wickham, The Muslim Brotherhood: Evolution of an Islamist Movement, Princeton University Press, 2013, p.186.
  10. Nearly a year after this last alleged transfer of authority, Munir signed a statement regarding the Manchester terrorist attack as “Deputy Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood” (Middle East Monitor, May 23, 2017).

Terrorism Will Justify Egypt’s Political Repression

Andrew McGregor

Oxford Analytica Daily Brief, August 6, 2019

Significance

Egypt recently extended its national state of emergency for an additional three months, the ninth time it has done so since April 2017. The state of emergency provides the president with extraordinary powers over all Egyptian media and the exercise of individual rights to movement and assembly.

Egypt is the Arab world’s largest and most influential state; attacks there on democratic norms and institutions whether by terrorist groups or the state have a direct impact on the direction of other Arab nations. How Egypt deals with extremist fighters returning from campaigns in Iraq, Syria and Libyan as well as its ongoing campaign against the MB will have repercussions throughout the Middle East.

Analysis

Six years after Egypt’s military overthrew the democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood government, the nation faces a three-pronged terrorist threat from the Islamic State (IS), al-Qaeda (whose leader, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, is Egyptian) and militant offshoots of the banned Muslim Brotherhood. The terrorists have multiple targets, including Christians, Sufi Muslims, politicians, civil servants and security personnel of all types.

President ‘Abd al-Fatah al-Sisi used a July 23 speech to declare victory over the terrorists, stating their infrastructure and bases had been destroyed (Al-Sharq al-Awsat, July 23, 2019). The president’s announcement came only days after the Interior Ministry claimed it had broken up a major plot by the Muslim Brotherhood to incite riots and other violence in a campaign orchestrated through social media and satellite television channels.

Egyptian Immigration Minister Nabila Makram (CBC)

The Sisi regime has broadened its definition of terrorism to include most forms of political opposition. Independent reporting of terrorism issues in Egypt can bring about charges of supporting terrorism, with severe penalties. In an alarming statement, Egyptian Immigration Minister Nabila Makram used a July 23 speech in Toronto to casually suggest that anyone criticizing Egypt should be killed (Al-Jazeera, July 25, 2019).

Political dissent now equals terrorism, turning a significant and non-violent portion of the population into terrorists. As the number of individuals identified as “terrorists” by the state swells, it becomes harder to ever triumph over “terrorism.” Low-level insurgencies are common in authoritarian states and serve to provide justification for repressive measures. Hundreds of suspects at a time are processed through the justice system in mass trials. In the meantime, detainees are exposed to real terrorists in prison.

According to a 2018 report from the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy (TIMEP), over 27,000 arrests have been made in al-Sisi’s war on terror, with half belonging to the MB and more than 11,500 detainees having no known affiliation to a terrorist group. This is in addition to more than 7,000 deaths in counter-terrorism operations, 95% of these being residents of North Sinai, where the MB has little influence (TIMEP, 2018, p.11).

Most Sinai Egyptians are Bedouin who are distrusted by the government, kept out of the security services and largely excluded from any but the most minor economic activity and development. Profitable tourist facilities in south Sinai that prohibit employment of local Bedouin have been built on land seized from Bedouin owners. Many of North Sinai’s 450,000 people have roots in Palestinian Gaza, just across the border, and see little reason to integrate with Egyptian society at large.

Demolition of Rafah by the Egyptian Army

Egyptian authorities have tried but failed to isolate the terrorist threat in northern Sinai by turning the region into an open-air prison where arbitrary measures prevail. Demolition crews have been hard at work demolishing buildings and homes and productive farms are razed. The city of Rafah (70,000 residents) no longer exists except as a memory in a new “buffer zone” established on the border with Israel. Services are nearly non-existent and departure from this armed quarantine can only be made by obtaining a special permit. These are hardly steps designed to encourage greater engagement by the local population in the anti-terrorism struggle.

IS has carried out a steady stream of ambushes, bombings and assassinations targeting security forces, Sufis and Christians. IS preachers have accused the Sufis of heresy, sorcery and cooperation with security forces to justify their mass murder. This includes a 2017 attack on the Rawda Sufi mosque that left over 300 dead after security forces ignored intelligence warning of the attack and were slow to respond once it had started (ICG, January 31, 2018).

Cairo claims to have killed some 3,000 terrorists in Sinai since the beginning of the insurgency, though this number is either inflated or includes innocent victims of security rampages and extrajudicial executions. An additional 9,000 residents have been arrested on suspicion of being members of the Islamic State or other terrorist groups.

The Egyptian Army has empowered local drug addicts and criminals by enrolling them as so-called manadeeb (“delegates”). Usually wearing masks and dressed in army camouflage, the manadeeb identify terrorist suspects (an easy way to take revenge on otherwise innocent residents) and participate in their interrogation and even summary executions (HRW, May 28, 2019).

IS targeting has forced nearly the entire Christian population of Sinai to depart for refuge in the Nile Valley, though they are still under threat from IS Wilayet Sinai terrorists who have expanded their operations to other parts of Egypt through attacks on tourists, diplomatic facilities and churches.

Terrorist cells have a very different composition elsewhere in Egypt. Many of the cells operating in the Nile Valley region are composed of well-educated middle class Muslim Brotherhood members or sympathizers. These members are not unemployed social outcasts or alienated from Egyptian society at large, a status that should alarm Egyptian authorities. The MB is highly resilient – it has endured persecution before, but is organized to survive these episodes.

Egyptian M1 Abrams Main Battle Tank

While Egypt’s militants are largely restricted to weapons such as firearms, explosives, IEDs and suicide attackers, Egypt’s security apparatus has brought a wide variety of sophisticated weapons and equipment to bear, including advanced surveillance aircraft, Apache attack helicopters, F-16 fighters, Rafale multi-role fighters, mortars, M1 Abrams main battle tanks, artillery, missiles and a variety of infantry fighting vehicles and armored personnel carriers.

There is no improving economy to offer alternatives to terrorism. To the contrary, Egypt’s economy is struggling across the board, with major declines in foreign currency reserves, rampant unemployment, an industrial sector distorted by military involvement and a precipitous drop in investor confidence. The tourist industry, one of the nation’s largest employers, has been devastated by the impact of terrorism.

What Next

Al-Sisi’s supporters in parliament have introduced amendments to the constitution that will allow al-Sisi to remain in power until 2034. Egyptian political development is static, unable to break free from a cycle of generals turned politicians, from Nasser through Sadat and Mubarak to al-Sisi. This political stagnation will continue to foment opposition that can now find no legal form of expression other than violent means.

The majority of terrorist attacks in Egypt have targeted security forces rather than civilians, though there is a progression to more indiscriminate killings such as attacks on churches and mosques.

Impacts

  • Al-Sisi exploits his role as a front-line opponent of terrorism to gain Western tolerance for his rule, if not outright support.
  • Authorities insist the political violence within Egypt is supported by Egypt’s “enemies,” Qatar and Turkey in particular.
  • Egypt’s increasingly secret war on terrorism fails to engage the larger population.
  • Ayman al-Zawahiri has used the overthrow of Muhammad Mursi as proof that only violence can root out and destroy Egypt’s “deep state.”

American Civil War Veterans and the Egyptian Empire in Africa

Dr. Andrew McGregor

A talk given to the Civil War Roundtable at the Royal Canadian Military Institute, Toronto, March 28, 2018.

The Intention of this talk is to discuss the little known role of American Civil War veterans in the expansion of the 19th century Egyptian Empire into Africa. As those here tonight are primarily interested in the US Civil War rather than 19th century African history, the talk will begin with a summary of how the Americans came to be in Egypt as mercenaries and their part in Egypt’s failed invasion of Abyssinia (modern Ethiopia). It proceeds in Part Two with profiles of some of the most prominent Civil War veterans serving in Egypt.

American military involvement in Egypt, whether official or unofficial, dates back much further than many might expect. In an early American attempt at regime change in the Middle East, the young republic’s consul in Alexandria, William Eaton, led a motley army composed of a handful of US Marines, and hundreds of Greek, Arab and Turkish mercenaries recruited in Egypt to put Thomas Jefferson’s preferred candidate on the throne of the neighboring Karamanli state of Tripoli in 1805. Following a five hundred mile forced march from Alexandria to Tripoli, Eaton’s frequently mutinous army took the Libyan city of Derna in America’s first overseas land battle.

At the same time, an ambitious Albanian, Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha, was emerging as the victor in a power struggle for control of Egypt, still an Ottoman domain. By force and intrigue, Muhammad ‘Ali became the Sultan’s khedive (viceroy) in Egypt, though the Albanian’s real plan was to eventually replace the Ottoman Empire and establish his own hereditary dynasty. In 1811, he slaughtered most of the powerful Mamluk military-slave caste (his last opposition) in an act of treachery. In 1821, the viceroy sent an army south to conquer the Sudan. Three Americans who converted to Islam joined the expedition, though it has never been confirmed whether they were acting as mercenaries or spies.

Egypt and Circassia

Egypt’s ruling class was a combination of Turks and Circassians who typically spoke Turkish and French, but rarely the Arabic of the people they ruled. Circassians from the North Caucasus had been brought to Egypt for centuries as slaves to receive military training and Circassian women, famous for their beauty, filled the harems of the Middle East’s rulers.  Though the Mamluk system had been broken in 1811, Circassians and their descendants continued to play major roles in the Egyptian military until the revolt of the Arab officers overthrew the dynasty of Muhammad ‘Ali in 1952.

Ismail Pasha and Thaddeus Mott Pasha

Muhammad ‘Ali’s grandson Ismail became the fourth Khedive in the dynasty’s line in 1863. It was a good time to take over; Egypt’s cotton industry had filled the government coffers as Egypt profited from the Civil War blockade around the cotton-producing southern states.

Ismail Pasha

Ismail was determined to consolidate Egyptian power over the entire Nile Basin as well as the Red Sea coast. Though Egypt had a large degree of independence, the Khedive was still the servant of the Ottoman Sultan and Egypt was expected to contribute militarily to Ottoman wars if called upon.

To build his empire Ismail required soldiers from a nation with no strategic or colonial interest in Africa. The sudden availability of many experienced officers after the American Civil War fit the bill perfectly.

Unfortunately, Ismail’s combination of ambition, extravagance and enthusiasm for borrowing cash on the international money markets would ultimately bring about his downfall and an end to the American military presence in Egypt.

Major General Thaddeus Phelps Mott Pasha

To recruit these officers, Ismail turned to Thaddeus Phelps Mott, an American serving as a major-general in the Ottoman Army.

When the New York City-born Thaddeus Mott enlisted in the Union Army as a 30-year-old in 1861, he was already a veteran of Garibaldi’s Redshirts in Italy and the Mexican Army. He had also spent several years at sea as a mate on clipper ships. Fluent in a number of languages, Mott was an excellent swordsman and dead shot with pistols who enjoyed duelling.

As a Union artillery commander, Mott saw heavy action in the battles of the Seven Days, but some of his most desperate moments came in his native New York as a lieutenant colonel of cavalry during the 1863 Draft Riots. Facing thousands of furious rioters, Mott killed one man with his saber who was trying to pull him from his horse.  Mott then ordered the guns under his command to sweep the streets with grape and canister shot.

Three years after the war Mott joined the Ottoman Army’s general staff and was stationed in Egypt. Seeking Western military experts who did not need to clear all the Khedive’s orders with their embassy (as did Ismail’s French advisors), Ismail turned to Mott to recruit American civil war veterans who were free of colonial baggage.

Mott in turn contacted General William Tecumseh Sherman, who agreed to recommend a number of veteran officers from both sides of the Civil War. Sherman had visited Egypt in 1869 and was well treated by the Khedive.

Battle of the Shipka Pass, 1877

Mott became aide-de-camp to Ismail Pasha in 1870, but declined to renew his contract in 1874. He instead returned to Turkey to take part in the Ottoman wars in the Balkans, distinguishing himself against the Russians at the Battle of Shipka Pass in 1877. Mott died in Paris in 1894.

Many of Sherman’s recommendations appear to have been made with the goal of sending discontented Union officers on half-pay and Confederates of suspect loyalty out of the country. A number of key Civil War figures, including former Confederate Generals Joseph Johnston, P.G.T. Beauregard and George Pickett, considered the proposal but declined for various reasons. However, service in Egypt was considered respectable employment and many of the officers who accepted came from some of the most distinguished families in America.

The Americans Arrive

On their arrival in Egypt, the Americans found an army suffering from illiteracy, no command structure, no intelligence apparatus, no signals corps, antique artillery and persistent ammunition shortages. The entire Egyptian army possessed only three maps.

The Citadel in Cairo: Headquarters of the Egyptian Army and Home of the American Staff

Some of the Americans were put to good use in exploration, training and engineering projects, while others had little to do and killed the boredom with drinking and dueling over petty disputes, some of them dating back to the Civil War. Many of these latter officers made early returns to the United States.

There was no pay department in the Egyptian Army, which at times forced the Americans to collect their salaries at gunpoint when it was months in arrears. Otherwise they accumulated debt which they had little hope of repaying, making the avoidance of creditors their main occupation.

As Muslims, the ladies of the Egyptian aristocracy were strictly off limits to the Christian Americans. There were Syrian, Greek and Armenian Christian women in Egypt, but they tended to live the same veiled and secluded life as their Muslim counterparts. The Americans instead turned for female companionship to the European ladies performing at the Cairo theaters and opera. While some French officers of Napoleon’s occupation army (1798-1801) had converted to Islam to marry Muslim women, it does not appear that any of the Americans did the same.

On a professional level, there were difficulties from the start in relations with the existing officers of the Egyptian Army, who resented the American presence and no doubt endured a certain amount of arrogance from the Civil War veterans. Egypt was a culture shock for many Americans; one officer described his surprise that eunuchs in the royal court were “beings of great importance” and was warned that they were not to be offended on any account as they had the ability to inflict serious harm on anyone who did so, including Americans.

The Invasion of Abyssinia

Ismail’s expansion into the Horn of Africa brought his troops into conflict with those of the Abyssinian emperor, Yohannes IV. After an Egyptian detachment was massacred, it was decided to send a massive invasion force under Ismail’s son, Prince Hassan Pasha, to punish the Abyssinians.

Emperor Yohannes had actually sent a letter to the US Secretary of State in 1872 requesting US help in preventing Egyptian moves on Christian Abyssinia. He also proposed a bilateral commercial treaty. No response was sent from Washington, and when Americans did arrive, they were part of the Egyptian invasion force.

Language was a problem throughout the campaign. The command language of the army was Turkish, spoken by officers who refused to learn Arabic, deriding it as the language of Egypt’s fellahin peasantry. Translators were thus needed to communicate with the Arabic-speaking rank and file. Some French-speaking Americans could communicate with the Turko-Circassian officer corps, but the rest required translators to speak to both officers and men, making the transmission of orders slow and complicated.

The Americans were also in the strange position of fighting their fellow Christians on behalf of a Muslim nation, but they tended to regard Abyssinian Orthodoxy as a barbaric form of the Christian faith. The Americans were also astonished that the Egyptians insisted on including a regiment of Sudanese blacks in the expeditionary force. Their own prejudices made them overlook the fact that the Sudanese troops were the finest and most experienced in the Egyptian Army. Many in the regiment had distinguished themselves fighting on behalf of Maximillian in Mexico at the same time the Civil War was raging north of the border.

Abyssinian Warriors

Once in Abyssinia, both Americans and Egyptians alike were shocked by the extreme form of psychological warfare used by the Abyssinians. Prisoners were subjected to horrible genital mutilations and then released naked and bleeding to find their way back to Egyptian lines. The impact on the Egyptian troops was devastating.

During a massive battle at Gura that lasted two days in March 1876, the Egyptian Army was badly defeated by native troops armed with far inferior weapons. American officers complained that the Egyptians failed to attack, preferring instead to “stand still and be killed like sheep.” The Americans attributed this fatalism to the work of the Islamic Imams attached to the expedition and the failure of the Turko-Circassian officers to adopt an aggressive attitude.

While the rest of the Egyptian officer corps returned home to acclaim and decorations, the Americans were ordered to remain at the Red Sea port of Massawa through the brutal summer heat. When they were finally allowed to return to Cairo, they found the Turko-Circassian officers had prepared the way with humiliating accusations of American incompetence.

Prince Hassan Ismail Pasha

In 1877, Prince Hassan led an Egyptian expeditionary force to assist the Ottoman Turks in their war against Russia. The remaining American officers, still blamed for the defeat in Abyssinia, were not welcome.

By 1878, most of the American mercenaries had been decommissioned and sent back to the United States. Because of a spiraling national debt fueled by Ismail’s financial extravagance and growing political pressure from his main creditors, the British and French, Ismail was forced to abdicate his throne in 1879 in favor of his son, Tawfiq. Ismail died in debauched exile in Constantinople, the final straw being an attempt to guzzle two bottles of champagne in one go.

It did not take long for the achievements of the Americans in Africa to be forgotten. Their service as Christian mercenaries in a Muslim state was eventually regarded as something of an embarrassment in both Egypt and their home country.

End of Part One.

See Part Two at: https://www.aberfoylesecurity.com/?p=4270 

American Civil War Veterans and the Egyptian Empire in Africa

Andrew McGregor

A talk given to the Civil War Roundtable at the Royal Canadian Military Institute, Toronto, March 28, 2018.

See Part One at: https://www.aberfoylesecurity.com/?p=4253

Part Two – Biographies of the Civil War Veterans in Egypt

Charles Pomeroy Stone Pasha

Charles Pomeroy Stone fought in most of the major battles in the Mexican-American War and was twice promoted during the campaign for outstanding performance on the battlefield.

When the Civil War broke out, General Winfield Scott put Stone in charge of Washington’s defenses, to which Stone applied himself with great energy. However, a few months later Stone ran afoul of abolitionist Republicans when he followed the government’s own policy by returning runaway slaves to Maryland. Shortly after that, Stone ordered a reconnaissance in force across the Potomac at Ball’s Bluff. Waiting Confederates killed over a thousand Union troops, including their commander, a Republican senator. Stone, a Democrat, was the scapegoat for this disaster. He was denied a court-martial and was instead sent to prison without charges at Fort Lafayette in New York harbor for 200 days. He was released through the intervention of General Ulysses S. Grant, but remained under suspicion as a potential traitor for the rest of the war.

Stone’s military talents were better recognized in Egypt than in his homeland, and he served for eight years as army chief-of-staff and aide-de-camp to Ismail Pasha. He organized a much-needed general staff and created schools for Egyptian soldiers and their children at a time when the army was plagued by illiteracy and thus unable to modernize. A number of the American officers were aware of Stone’s reputation and formed a cabal against him, but Stone handled them perfectly and soon, as one officer put it, had them “eating out of his hand.”

Stone Pasha remained loyal to the dynasty even after nearly all the other Americans had gone home and most notably protected Ismail’s successor Tawfiq during the British bombardment of Alexandria in 1882.

After Stone returned to the United States he continued working as a civil engineer. In 1884 he was the chief engineer on the Statue of Liberty project but fell ill after attending the dedication on a cold blustery day. He died several months later and was buried at West Point.

William Wing Loring Pasha

William W. Loring never attended a military school. Instead, he learned soldiering in the field, beginning as a 14-year-old volunteer with the Florida state militia.

Eventually he was commissioned in the pre-Civil War US Army, in which he participated in the 1857-58 Utah expedition (also known as the Mormon Rebellion) and the Indian Wars in the west. Loring lost his arm during the storming of Chapultepec Castle in Mexico. Legend has it that he smoked a cigar during the amputation.

Loring’s Civil War service was infused with controversy; after feuding with his superior Stonewall Jackson, the Confederate general had Loring charged with “neglect of duty” and “conduct subversive of good order and military discipline.” Fortunately for Loring, the War Department did not pursue the charges and wisely sent Loring far away from Jackson. At the Siege of Vicksburg, Loring repulsed an advance by General Grant but his command later became separated from the Confederate garrison inside the city. The Vicksburg commander, John C. Pemberton, blamed Loring for the fall of the city.

Loring would serve ten years in Egypt, beginning as Inspector General of the Army. At one point he escorted his old Vicksburg rival President Ulysses S Grant during his visit to Egypt.

In 1875 Ismail placed Loring in charge of the expedition to punish Abyssinia for its interference in Egypt’s expansion along the coasts of the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. Ismail implored Loring and Ratib, the Circasssian commander of the Egyptian Army, to work hand in hand. Once in the field, however, Ratib and his fellow Turko-Circassian officers created a parallel command structure using verbal commands, a custom in the Egyptian army where even many officers were illiterate. Furious disagreements between Loring and Ratib over the conduct and purposes of the war were a major factor in the disaster at Gura. Using an Eastern conception of war as a demonstration of strength that preceded negotiations, Ratib insisted on building forts in the Gura Valley. Loring, a fresh graduate of the “total war” philosophy that had destroyed the Confederacy, wanted to continue marching into the Abyssinian interior to destroy armed resistance.

After his return to the United States, Loring wrote his memoir, A Confederate Soldier in Egypt. Loring was buried in St. Augustine, Florida, in 1897 in one of the largest public events in the city’s history. By 2018, local social justice warriors wanted to tear down his grave monument and expel his remains from Loring Park. A statue of Loring commissioned in 1911 still stands at Vicksburg and does not yet appear to be threatened.

Ratib Pasha

Loring’s antagonist, Ratib Pasha, was one of the last Circassians to be brought to Egypt as a military slave in the 19th century. Unlike the earlier Mamluks, who tended to be powerful men with expertise in all the arms of the day, Ratib was only five foot four and roughly one hundred pounds. He had little military training and had served as a royal equerry during the reign of Khedive Abbas Pasha. At some point Ratib angered the Khedive, who struck him. The mortified Ratib attempted to shoot himself but only succeeded in blowing off part of his nose. To make amends, Abbas appointed the small man commander-in-chief of the Egyptian Army.

Unsurprisingly, many of the American professional soldiers had little respect for Ratib and presented him with a series of small humiliations, none of which Ratib was likely to forget. One of the Americans described Ratib as being “as shriveled with lechery as the mummy is with age.” Another officer cited Ratib’s “insane jealousy and intolerance of foreigners,” which compelled him to ignore all military advice from American sources.

The nominal command of the Abyssinian expedition was entrusted to the Khedive’s son, Prince Hassan Pasha. Unfortunately, much of the expedition’s Egyptian command viewed their primary role as protecting the Prince from all harm rather than pursuing the expedition’s political and military goals.

Charles Chaillé-Long Bey

A descendant of French Huguenots who fled to America in 1685, Charles Chaillé-Long joined the pro-Union Maryland Infantry in 1862, achieving the rank of Captain and seeing action at Gettysburg and Harper’s Ferry.

Chaillé-Long was commissioned as a Lieutenant-Colonel in the Egyptian Army. His fluency in French was a major asset, as French was commonly spoken by the royal and military elites in Egypt, while English speakers continually required interpreters. He was one of the few American officers to learn Arabic.

Chaillé-Long served on Colonel Charles George Gordon’s staff in Equatoria Province, the southern-most region of the Sudan. His public criticism of Gordon, who had been seconded to Egyptian service, would eventually damage his reputation after Gordon achieved a type of Victorian sainthood following his death at the hands of Egyptian Mahdists in Khartoum (1885).

In 1874, Chaillé-Long led a small party south on a secret mission to expand Ismail’s empire into tropical Africa. He succeeded in securing a treaty with the most powerful king in northern Uganda that made the latter a vassal of Egypt. On the return trip, Chaillé-Long was wounded in a two-hour battle with a rival king. When he reached Gordon’s headquarters in Equatoria he was a fearful sight; one eye closed and blackened, a gunshot wound to his nose, bearded, filthy and half-starved. It took some time for Chaillé-Long to convince Gordon it was really him. For his efforts he was eventually decorated and made a full colonel with the Turkish title of “Bey” (an honorific one step below “Pasha”).

Further expeditions followed to the northeast Congo and Somalia. These took a serious toll on his health, leading to Chaillé-Long’s resignation in 1877.

Chaillé-Long studied law after his US homecoming. He returned to Egypt in 1882 to practice law in the international courts in Alexandria. After US diplomats abandoned the Alexandria Consulate during the British bombardment later that year, Chaillé-Long took over as a temporary, unpaid consul and saved hundreds of Europeans from angry mobs of Egyptians who were massacring Europeans in the streets. He led 160 US sailors and marines as part of an effort to restore order in the city.

In 1887, Chaillé-Long was appointed US consul general in Korea. In his later years he became bitter over what he saw as disproportionate attention given to British explorers in Africa over his own efforts. He was buried in Arlington National Cemetery in 1917.

Alexander Macomb Mason Bey

Alexander Macomb Mason Bey began his career in the US Navy before joining the Virginia Navy when the Civil War broke out in 1861. He was captured and sent to the Johnson’s Island prison camp in Ohio for the duration of the war. His relative James Murray Mason was one of the principals in the infamous Trent Affair that nearly brought the Union and Great Britain to blows.

After his release, Mason saw action as a mercenary with the Chilean Navy against Spain in the Chincha Islands War.  He joined the Egyptian army in 1870, where he worked as a military trainer and surveyor. He also explored western Uganda on behalf of the Khedive, being the first Westerner to visit the Semliki River, a tributary of the Nile.

Unlike most of the Americans who left after the Abyssinian debacle, Mason stayed on in Egypt, becoming the governor of Massawa on the Red Sea coast and Egypt’s unofficial ambassador to Abyssinia. In 1883 he was the Egyptian representative on a British diplomatic mission to Emperor Yohannes to negotiate a peaceful withdrawal of all Egyptian garrisons on the Red Sea coast, though these bases were quickly taken over by the Italians, who had their own designs on Abyssinia.

He stayed on in Cairo until he died in 1897 during a rare visit to his homeland.

Raleigh Colston Bey

Born in Paris, Raleigh Colston seemed to live life under a black cloud. He did not arrive in his adoptive father’s native Virginia until he was 17. He managed to avoid an uncle’s determination that he should become a Presbyterian minister and enrolled at Virginia Military Institute (VMI). He taught there alongside Stonewall Jackson after graduation and commanded a guard of VMI cadets at the execution of abolitionist John Brown. When the war came, he was quickly made a Brigadier in the Confederate Army despite a lack of combat experience. He was strongly criticized for his performance at the Battle of Seven Pines, which was followed by a six-month illness. Nonetheless, with Jackson’s sponsorship, he was made a divisional commander until his performance at the Battle of Chancellorsville led to being relieved of his command by General Robert E. Lee, commander of the Army of Northern Virginia. Later in the war, Colston served under General PGT Beauregard at the Siege of Petersburg.

After the war, Colston joined the Egyptian Army when his attempts to establish a pair of military schools came to naught and his wife was confined to an insane asylum. In 1873, Ismail sent him on a camel-borne expedition to the ancient city of Baranis on the Red Sea to investigate the possibility of linking the Nile to the Red Sea by railroad.

In 1874, Colston fell seriously ill during an expedition to the western Sudanese territory of Kordofan. Rather than return, he insisted on carrying on. Eventually he had to be carried on a camel litter, expecting death at any moment. He was eventually nursed back to health by the wife of a Sudanese soldier for whom he had once done a favor. Partially paralyzed as a result of his illness, he did not return to Cairo until two years after his departure.

On his return to the US, Colston found limited work as a clerk and translator. Having used his Egyptian pay to support his wife and two children, he eventually found himself a penniless invalid living at the Confederate Soldiers’ Home in Richmond, where he died in 1896.

William McEntyre Dye Bey

A graduate of West Point, William McEntyre Dye led a Union brigade at the Battle of Prairie Grove, Arkansas and then participated in the Siege of Vicksburg. He commanded a brigade at the Battle of Brownsville in Texas, close to where Sudanese troops he would later command were fighting south of the border in Mexico. He distinguished himself while leading his regiment in an attack on Fort Morgan during the Battle of Mobile Bay.

After the war, Dye joined the Egyptian Army as a colonel and served as assistant chief-of-staff to General Loring during the Abyssinian campaign. Dye was wounded at the Battle of Gura and returned to the US after being court-martialed for striking an Egyptian officer. He then served 11 years as chief military advisor to King Gojong of Korea. Dye learned Korean and wrote a military handbook in that language.

Charles W. Field Bey

Born on a Kentucky plantation, Charles W. Field graduated West Point and served in the American West under Colonel Albert Sidney Johnston in the 2nd US Cavalry. Joining the Confederate forces as a major in 1861, Field fought in Stonewall Jackson’s Valley Campaign and the Peninsula Campaign. His leg was badly damaged at Second Bull Run and never fully recovered. When he returned to the field as a major-general he suffered two more wounds in the Battle of the Wilderness. He led his division at Cold Harbor and the Siege of Petersburg before surrendering his command at Appomattox Court House.

Field joined the Egyptian Army as a colonel of engineers, and later served as the Inspector General of the Army during its Abyssinian campaign.

Field appears to have been one of the few Americans in the Egyptian Army to experience citizenship issues on his return as a consequence of having served in a foreign army. These were overcome when it was pointed out he had served on a private contract and had never pledged allegiance to a foreign head-of-state.

Erasmus Sparrow Purdy Pasha

An expert surveyor, Erasmus Sparrow Purdy worked with General Stone in surveying the Sonora and Baja regions of the American west before the war. He served during the Civil War as an officer in a New York infantry regiment.

After joining the Egyptian army, Ismail sent Purdy on various missions to explore the far reaches of his expanding empire, including Darfur, northern Uganda and the Red Sea coast.

Re-dedication of Purdy Pasha’s Grave Monument in Old Cairo

Like many of the American officers, Purdy fell into debt and was harassed by his creditors. He died bankrupt in Egypt in 1881. Egypt’s Khedivial Geographical Society raised funds for a tombstone in the Protestant cemetery in Old Cairo. With time and neglect Purdy’s grave fell into disrepair until the year 2000, when some long-term American residents of Cairo raised the funds for a new 10-foot tall memorial. A ceremony was held, attended by a US Marine honor guard and US Major General Robert Wilson, who said “We regard Major Purdy as a pioneer in building American-Egyptian military relations,” a significant nod to the role of the forgotten American mercenaries.

James Morris Morgan Bey

When the Civil War started, 15-year-old James Morris Morgan resigned from Annapolis and served as a midshipman in the Confederate flotilla on the Mississippi.

He then helped work the naval batteries at Drewry’s Bluff in Virginia during the Peninsula campaign in 1862. He returned to sea with the Confederate gunboat Patrick Henry in the James River squadron. Morgan then served on the CSS McRae (a former pirate steamer converted to Confederate warship) until its destruction in the Battle for New Orleans.

Morgan then joined the crew of the commerce raider CSS Georgia, which at one point became involved in a battle with Moroccan tribesmen while anchored off the Moroccan coast. Morgan described it as a “most narrow and fortunate escape for us slaveholders,” as they could expect to be murdered or sold into slavery themselves if captured. During the war Morgan’s two older brothers died while serving as officers under Stonewall Jackson.

Morgan did not participate in any significant campaigns in Egypt and seems to have spent most of his time dueling and chasing actresses. A forbidden flirtation with a Circassian princess nearly cost him his life.

After returning to the US, Morgan was hired by General Stone as an engineer on the Statue of Liberty project. He later became the US Consul for Australasia. He described his life in a highly entertaining account, Recollections of a Rebel Reefer, published in 1917. By the time of his death in 1928 Morgan was the last remaining American veteran of the Egyptian Army.

Henry Hopkins Sibley

Henry Hopkins Sibley was a graduate of West Point and was decorated for bravery in the Mexican-American War. When the Civil War began, Sibley was fighting the Navajo in New Mexico. He resigned his commission to join the Confederate forces and organized a brigade of Texans. Sibley’s greatest moment came when he led this brigade west in an attempt to capture the Colorado gold mines and reach the Pacific coast to establish a Confederate port in California.

Following a string of victories, the climactic battle of the campaign was fought in 1862 at the Glorieta Pass in the New Mexico territory. Sibley’s men won a tactical victory by driving the Federal forces back through the pass but lost all their supply train in the process, forcing a withdrawal into Texas. This brought an end to Confederate hopes of extending their territory to the Pacific.

Taking command of the Arizona Brigade in Louisiana, Sibley developed an unfortunate reputation for failing to follow orders and alcohol abuse that led to his court-martial in 1863.

Sibley was recruited by Mott after the war and served as the commander of the Egyptian artillery for three years. Sibley helped supervise the construction of Egypt’s coastal fortifications until problems with alcohol returned and he was dismissed from Egyptian service in 1873. The man who almost seized California for the Confederacy died in poverty and was buried in Fredericksburg Confederate Cemetery.

Though largely forgotten by history, Sibley’s character made a brief appearance in the spaghetti western The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, which is set in the midst of Sibley’s New Mexico campaign.

Beverley Kennon Jr. Bey

Beverley Kennon Junior’s father, Commodore Beverley Kennon, fought in the War of 1812 and the Second Barbary War.

The Governor Moore was an expropriated commercial paddle-wheeler turned into a warship by the addition of guns, iron rails fitted as a ram and cotton bales to protect its boilers. Kennon took command of this hybrid ship without pay and fought it in the furious April 1862 battle just south of New Orleans. At one point the Governor Moore was too close to the USS Varuna to use its bow gun, so Kennon ordered the gun to fire twice through the Governor Moore’s bow to sink the Union ship. By the end of the battle, most of Kennon’s ship was destroyed and 64 of her crew were dead or dying. The ship was run aground and set on fire, but Kennon was captured and endured three years of brutal captivity in the north.

After joining the Egyptian Army, Kennon devised a brilliant system of coastal defense. Instead of constructing large forts to defend Alexandria, Kennon proposed hiding single gun emplacements along the coast with interlocking fields of fire. The guns would be hidden in the sand hills, raised by a hydraulic system of Kennon’s own invention before taking a shot and disappearing again into the sand bank for reloading. Part of Kennon’s defensive works involved a modern wire-guided torpedo designed by Buffalo New York native John Lay, who began designing torpedoes in the Civil War.

The Bombardment of Alexandria, 1882

In 1882 the Arab officers and men of the Egyptian Army led by Colonel Ahmad ‘Urabi revolted against the Turko-Circassian aristocracy. The ensuing chaos put control of the newly-built Suez Canal in jeopardy and European lives at risk from murderous mobs in Alexandria. British and French warships soon arrived off Alexandria, where they began a bombardment of the city.

Despite putting up a good fight, the Egyptian coastal batteries were quickly destroyed by British firepower and British troops were soon investing Egypt. Kennon had finished a working prototype of the defensive system before being told the Khedive’s finances could not afford the completion of the system.  Implementation of Kennon’s plan could have easily changed the course of Egyptian history (and that of the Mid-East) by giving Colonel ‘Urabi’s forces the means of fending off the British invaders, who would remain for 76 years.

When the British troops reached the Citadel in Cairo, they destroyed all the maps and charts so painfully prepared by the American officers. The legacy of the American military presence in Egypt was thus eliminated in Egypt while the triumphs and errors of the Civil War veterans in Ismail’s African empire were fated to be forgotten in their US homeland.

 

How Does Russia Fit into Egypt’s Strategic Plan?

Andrew McGregor

February 15, 2018

As Russian-Egyptian military and economic cooperation increases, there have been many comparisons made with Egypt’s early post-independence era (1956-1971), when Cairo grew close to Moscow. Egypt’s current strategic position, however, bears closer similarities to the foreign policy of the first decades of rule by the founder of modern Egypt, Ottoman Viceroy Muhammad ‘Ali (1805-1848). Like Egypt’s post-independence leaders, Muhammad ‘Ali sought to simultaneously modernize Egypt with foreign assistance while increasing its political independence. This was no easy feat, as it involved balancing allegiance to his suzerain, the Ottoman Sultan, while using (unofficial) French military assistance and training to strengthen his own hand without falling under French control. Current Egyptian president Abd al-Fatah al-Sisi now uses Russian military aid in much the same way to gain leverage in a deteriorating relationship with the United States.

Building an Egyptian Empire: Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha with his new navy and army

Some of the objectives shared by Muhammad ‘Ali and President al-Sisi include:

  • Intensifying the purchase and manufacture of arms
  • Expanding naval capacity
  • Conducting military operations abroad to project Egyptian power
  • Consolidating Egypt’s control of the Red Sea region
  • Securing the supply of Nile waters from the south
  • Diversifying international military suppliers and trainers
  • Exterminating the previous regime, and
  • Repressing Islamic extremists

The question for Moscow is whether their objectives meld with those of Cairo. The Kremlin is seeking enhanced military and economic relations with Egypt but has no desire to be used merely as leverage against Washington. Moscow will seek to obtain their own regional objectives by exploiting differences between Washington and Cairo and filling any void left by diminishing American military aid and engagement with the Sisi regime. For their part, Egypt’s leaders remain wary of getting too close to the Russians – the last period of close cooperation ended badly. Nonetheless, Egypt may be seeking external military support in their failing campaign against Islamist extremists in Sinai and Russia’s military track record in Syria makes it an enticing partner. Whether this can be achieved without paying a high price (such as the establishment of permanent Russian bases in Egypt) is Cairo’s dilemma.

Egyptian and Russian Paratroopers on the 2016 “Defenders of Friendship” Exercise (Egypt Independent)

Russia and Egypt have now conducted two joint airborne exercises; one in Egypt in 2016, the second in Russia in 2017. The third “Defenders of Friendship” exercise will be held in Egypt later this year. Egypt has never conducted a combat air-drop, while Russia has not carried out a combat drop since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (1979-1989). However, the Russian Defense Ministry reported a successful drop of Syrian paratroopers behind Islamic State lines near the border of Raqqa and Homs governorates last August, with Syrian rocket fire directed by Russian Ka-52 combat helicopters (Sputnik, August 14, 2017). The ministry’s report could not be verified independently, but it could point to future Russian-assisted counter-terrorism para-drops in Egypt, possibly in Sinai or along Egypt’s remote western frontier.

Russia negotiated a deal last year that will allow Russian Air Force jets to use Egyptian airbases and airspace (Al-Monitor, December 18, 2017). The agreement could be the first step in allowing Russian airstrikes on terrorist targets in the Sinai or Libya. It would also preclude the necessity of further deployments of the Admiral Kuznetsov aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean; its performance in Syria was unimpressive and two Russian fighters were lost attempting to land on the ship’s deck.

In mid-January, Russian naval commander-in-chief Admiral Vladimir Korolyov declared that the Russian Navy would focus on improving its system of naval bases, particularly to accommodate “strategic non-nuclear deterrence groups” (TASS, January 16, 2018). Egypt has suitable ports on both its Mediterranean and Red Sea coasts, but Egyptian policy forbids the establishment of foreign military bases on its soil. Russia has engaged in talks with both Sudan and Libyan factional leader Khalifa Haftar regarding the construction of naval facilities in both those nations, but Egypt would provide a more stable long-term partner. However, a Russian base on Egypt’s Red Sea coast would conflict with Egyptian efforts to increase its own influence in the region, as seen in its establishment of a new Egyptian Red Sea squadron.

In furthering its own objectives, Cairo was able to take advantage of the cancellation of the French sale of two Mistral-class amphibious assault ships to Russia following Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. Egypt not only obtained the ships but was able to purchase Russian Kamov Ka-52K ship-based helicopters originally designed for the vessels (Tass, July 18, 2017). One ship, the Gamal Abdel Nasser, will be deployed with Egypt’s Alexandria-based Mediterranean fleet, while the Anwar El Sadat will join the Red Sea squadron.

(Southfront.org)

With the help of financing from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, Egypt has stepped up Russian arms purchases. Russia began delivery of 50 MiG-29 fighter jets last year, a process scheduled for completion in 2020 (Egypt Independent, September 17, 2017; TASS, September 11, 2017). Russia supplied the S300VM mobile long-range air defence system to Egypt in 2017 and 46 Russian-made Kamov Ka-52 “Alligator” reconnaissance and combat helicopters are in the process of being delivered.

However, Cairo has avoided over-reliance on Russian arms (as in the Sadat era) by turning to other suppliers, such as France.  Twenty-four Dassault Rafale twin-engine multi-role fighter aircraft were ordered in 2015, some of which have already flown combat missions over Libya. Egypt took delivery of one French-made Gowind 2500 corvette (the El Fateh) last year and is building another three at its Alexandria shipyard (Defence Web, November 7, 2017). It has also purchased a South Korean corvette (the Shabab Misr) and four German-made Type 209 diesel-electric attack submarines to replace its ancient Chinese and Soviet-made Romeo-class diesel-electric submarines.

Al-Sisi, like Muhammad ‘Ali, is eager to modernize and increase the capacity of Egypt’s military but appears determined to avoid reliance on either the U.S. or Russia. While Russian approaches will not be rebuffed outright, Cairo is making it clear that enhanced cooperation must be consistent with Egypt’s strategic objectives.

This article first appeared in the February 15, 2018 issue of the Jamestown Foundation’s Eurasia Daily Monitor.

Egypt Looks for Security Answers as Its War on Terrorism Moves to the Desert Oases

Andrew McGregor

January 15, 2018

The spread of the Islamist insurgency in the Sinai Peninsula to the heavily populated Nile Delta and Nile Valley regions of Egypt has been facilitated by the importation of arms from Muammar Qaddafi’s looted Libyan armories. Prior to Libya’s 2011 revolution, arms and explosives were difficult to obtain. Since then, the growth of new Egyptian militant groups such as Liwaa al-Thawra (Revolution Brigade) and Harikat Souad Masr (Hasm – Arms of Egypt Movement) have been enabled by the availability of arms smuggled over 370 miles through the vast wastes of Egypt’s Western Desert, the 263,000 square miles of which account for two-thirds of Egypt’s land mass. With the Libyan-Egyptian border stretching for more than 650 miles, uncontrolled entry points to Egypt are plentiful, allowing militants and smugglers to move back and forth.

The Oases of the Western Desert (Our Egypt)

The Oases

The only centers of population in the Western Desert are the ancient oases of Siwa, Dakhla, Farafra, Bahariya and Kharga. Over time, the oases have been occupied by Ancient Egyptians, Romans, Mamluks and Ottomans. Modern influences only began to enter the oases with the construction of a road connecting them to the Nile valley in the 1970s. The mostly Muslim peoples of the oases are a mix of their original ancient inhabitants, Berbers, Arab Bedouin from Libya and migrants from the Nile Valley.

Ruins of the Oracle of Amun Temple at Siwa Oasis

Despite their isolation, the recent battles fought in the oases between Islamist extremists and government forces are far from the first incidents of large-scale violence in these communities. The terrain of the Western Desert has been treacherous for military operations since the Persian King Cambyses lost an entire army to a sandstorm after it had been sent to destroy the Oracle of Amun in 55 BCE.

In the modern era, the oases only began to come under Egyptian government control in the 18th and 19th centuries. In 1819, the Egyptian Viceroy Muhammad ‘Ali succeeded where Cambyses had failed by bringing Siwa under Egyptian control in a ruthless conquest in which he deployed Bashi Bazouks (ill-disciplined Ottoman irregulars), Bedouin fighters and a battery of artillery.

Sayyid Ahmad al-Sharif al-Sanusi

Conflict returned to the region during the First World War, when an Ottoman-allied expeditionary force entered the Western Desert from Libya. Commanded by Libyan Sanusi leader Sayyid Ahmad al-Sharif and Egyptian defector and professional soldier Muhammad Salih al-Harb, the expedition was designed to sweep through the oases before inciting an anti-British rebellion in the Nile Valley. By March 1916, the Sanusis held all five major oases, but the rebellion failed to materialize. After a year of ever more difficult attempts to sustain an army in the desert, Ahmad al-Sharif returned to Libya with only 200 men, his reputation in tatters.

British officers in stripped-down Ford Model T’s began intensive exploration of the desert in the postwar years. When war again descended on the region in 1939, their work provided the basis for successful anti-Axis operations by the Commonwealth’s Long Range Desert Group (LRDG). In the years before the defeat of Germany’s Field Marshal Irwin Rommel and his Afrika Korps, LRDG vehicles ranged the desert, discovering the routes that are now used by smugglers and arms traffickers.

LRDG Patrol in Siwa Oasis (WWII Today)

Tensions rose in the region again after Qaddafi seized power in Libya in 1969. However, the colonel’s attempts to incite revolutionary activity amongst the cross-border Awlad ‘Ali Bedouin (with historic ties to Libya) were dashed by a four-day border war in 1977, in which Qaddafi discovered his small and amateurish army was no match for battle-tested Egyptian troops.

Egyptian Efforts to Control Arms Smuggling 

The movement of arms from Libya to Egypt began during the short tenure of Egypt’s President Muhammad al-Mursi, who was deposed by the army in July 2013. Security forces disrupted a major arms smuggling network, the so-called Madinat Nasr cell, in November 2012. The suspects claimed the arms were intended for Syria, but plans and documents found in their possession indicated the arms were to be used by the extremists to overthrow the government of President al-Mursi, whom they reviled for participating in democratic elections. [1] However, when an arms convoy was intercepted near Siwa Oasis in July 2013, it became clear that the problem was far from solved (Mada Masr [Cairo], October 22, 2017).

The Egypt-Libya border region is patrolled by the Egyptian Border Guards, a lightly armed paramilitary unit operating out of the western oases. The Egyptian armed forces do not have a counterpart to partner with on the Libyan side, although there are growing ties with Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, commander of a largely Cyrenaïcan (eastern Libyan) militia coalition known as the Libyan National Army (LNA). Restoring security in Libya is key to ending the cross-border arms shipments, and Egypt has agreed to reorganize the LNA with the intention of molding it into a true national force (Middle East Monitor, September 19, 2017).

Despite the efforts of the border guards and the Egyptian air force, shipments of Libyan arms (including advanced weapons) appeared to intensify in the last year:

  • May 8 2017 – The Egyptian Army announced the destruction of a convoy of 15 vehicles carrying arms and ammunition across the Libyan border into Egypt (Ahram Online, May 8, 2017).
  • June 27, 2017 – An Egyptian army spokesman claimed 12 vehicles loaded with arms, ammunition and explosives had been destroyed during 12 hours of airstrikes near the Libyan border (Reuters, June 27, 2017; AFP, June 27, 2017; New Arab, June 28, 2017).
  • July 16, 2017 – Fifteen vehicles carrying explosives, weapons and ammunition were reported destroyed by the Egyptian air force (Middle East Monitor, July 17, 2017).
  • October 23, 2017 – The Egyptian air force reported the destruction of eight vehicles in the Western Desert carrying arms and ammunition (Daily News Egypt, October 23, 2017).
  • October 27, 2017 – The Interior Ministry recovered 13 bodies as well as weapons and suicide bomb belts after a raid on a training camp for militants at a farm on the highway from Asyut to the oasis of Kharga (Reuters, October 27, 2017; Daily News Egypt, October 28, 2017).
  • October 31, 2017 – The Egyptian army reported the destruction of six 4×4 vehicles and the death of all their occupants. The vehicles were reportedly carrying arms and other illegal materials (Ahram Online [Cairo], October 31, 2017). Earlier that day, Egyptian airstrikes targeting facilities of the Shura Council of Mujahideen in Derna, Libya killed at least 20 civilians (Mada Masr [Cairo], October 31, 2017). [2]
  • November 11, 2017 – An army spokesman reported the destruction of ten vehicles carrying arms and ammunition in the Western Desert (Ahram Online, November 11, 2017; Libya Herald, November 12, 2017).

In all, President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi claims that Egypt has destroyed no less than 1,200 vehicles carrying arms, ammunition and fighters in the 30 months prior to November 2017 (Xinhua, November 11, 2017). Though the list above may seem to indicate Egyptian success in controlling the border, the influx of modern weapons to Sinai and the Nile Valley suggests many arms convoys continue to get through the Egyptian defenses.

Controlling the border from the air without intelligence from the ground can lead to undesirable outcomes, particularly in a region that has become increasingly popular with tourists, who can now enjoy relatively safe excursions into the inhospitable desert thanks to 4×4 vehicles, satellite phones and GPS navigational equipment. From the air, there is little to distinguish tourist convoys from convoys of arms traffickers, as the Egyptian military discovered when one of their Apache attack helicopters mistakenly slaughtered 12 guides and Mexican tourists in September 2015, despite their having a police escort. Authorities claimed the group of four vehicles was in an area near Bahariya oasis “off limits to foreign tourists,” although a permit with a full itinerary had been obtained for travel in the region (BBC, September 13, 2015; PanAm Post, September 15, 2015).

Battle at Farafra Oasis

One of the most dangerous militants operating in the Western Desert is Hisham ‘Ali al-Ashmawy Musa’ad Ibrahim  (a.k.a. Abu Omar al-Muhajir), a graduate of the Egyptian military academy and a former member of the elite Sa’iqa (Thunderbolt) commando unit. Al-Ashmawy is reported to have received advanced military training in the United States (Egypt Today, October 21, 2017).

Hisham al-Ashmawy

After 10 years’ service in Sinai, al-Ashmawy was dismissed from the Egyptian army for Islamist activities and promptly joined the Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis terrorist group in 2012, where he provided training in weapons and tactics.

In July 2014, al-Ashmawy led an attack on Egyptian border guards in the Western Desert’s Farafra oasis. The assault was carried out by uniformed militants in four-wheel drive vehicles and armed with rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) and other weapons (Egypt Today, November 28, 2017). The poor ground-air cooperation in the Egyptian military was again exposed when an injured officer was unable to call in air and ground support after the attackers broke off, allowing the militants to withdraw safely into the desert after killing 21 border guards (Egypt Today, October 21, 2017). Wounded during the operation, al-Ashmawy was taken for treatment in the Libyan city of Derna, an Islamist stronghold where he had strong connections with the now defunct Ansar al-Sharia group (Egypt Today, October 21, 2017).

Farafra Oasis

Soon after the Farafra assault, al-Ashmawy split from Bayt al-Maqdis over the group’s decision to pledge allegiance to Islamic State (IS). He appeared in a 2015 video under the name Abu Omar al-Muhajir to claim responsibility for the Farafra attack and to announce he was leading a new group, al-Murabitun (not to be confused with the Sahara/Sahel movement formerly led by Mokhar Belmokhtar).

In June 2016, militants struck again in Farafra, killing two officers and injuring three others (Daily News Egypt, October 23, 2017).

Disaster at Bahariya Oasis

Bahariya Oasis (Roderick Phillips)

The desert’s Islamist militants again displayed their military skills with the October 20, 2017 destruction of a column of Egyptian police. Working from air force intelligence that suggested a handful of militants were camped along the al-Wahat-al-Kharga-Assyut highway near the Bahariya oasis (85 miles southwest of Cairo), the Egyptian police sent to deal with them were working without air support and had only basic intelligence on the region (al-Arabiya, October 21, 2017).

Instead of a handful of terrorists, the police column ran into an ambush carried out by a larger than expected force. Egyptian security sources told multiple media outlets that over 50 security officers had been killed before the Interior Ministry issued a statement saying that only 16 had fallen with 15 militants killed (Mada Masr [Cairo], October 21, 2017). The ministry’s statement was followed by government criticism of all domestic and international media that published the numbers provided by security sources.

Abd al-Rahim al-Mismary (al-Hayat TV)

The only militant to survive the Egyptian pursuit that followed was a Libyan veteran of the Shura Council of Mujahideen in Derna, Abd al-Rahim Muhammad Abdullah al-Mismary. Al-Mismary stated that he belonged to a group led by Imad al-Din Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Hamid (better known as Shaykh Hatim), another graduate of Egypt’s military academy and a lieutenant of al-Ashmawy (Egypt Today, November 17, 2017; Libya Herald, November 17, 2017). Shaykh Hatim, whose Ansar al-Islam group claimed responsibility for the Bahariya attack, was killed in retaliatory Egyptian airstrikes shortly after the attack (Ahram Online, November 17, 2017; al-Arabiya, November 3, 2017). According to al-Mismary, Shaykh Hatim’s group had been present in Bahariya oasis without detection since January 2017 (Egypt Independent, November 17, 2017).

Military Shake-Up 

The fallout from the Bahariya massacre hit the highest levels of the armed forces command structure. Army chief-of-staff Mahmud Ibrahim Hegazi was replaced by Lieutenant General Muhammad Farid Hegazi (no relation), a member of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) that ruled Egypt after President Hosni Mubarak was deposed (The National [Abu Dhabi], October 29, 2017).

General Mahmoud Farid Hegazy

Also replaced were a number of high-ranking interior ministry officials, including the director of Egypt’s National Security Agency (NSA, responsible for domestic intelligence), General Mahmoud Sharawi,; Giza security director Hisham al-Iraqi; General Ibrahim al-Masri, chief of the Giza NSA; and head of special operations for the Central Security Forces General Magdy Abu al-Khair (MENA [Cairo], October 28, 2017; Daily News Egypt, October 29, 2017; Ahram Online, January 18, 2017).

The disaster at Bahariya made it clear that lightly armed interior ministry units cannot deal effectively with better-armed militant groups directed by leaders with advanced training in military tactics. Poor intelligence and unfamiliarity with the desert by security units drawn from the Delta or Nile Valley have hampered operations, while poor ground-to-air coordination has several times resulted in disaster. Nonetheless, Egypt’s military planners continue to neglect improvements in their capabilities in the Western Desert in favor of massive investments in prestigious, but likely useless, items such as French amphibious assault ships and German submarines.

Meanwhile, the instability in the Western Desert has pulled Cairo into the Libyan conflict at a time when it is struggling to control the Sinai and tensions with Sudan are increasing over the disputed Hala’ib Triangle region and Egypt’s alleged support for Darfuri rebels. Until improvements are made in Egypt’s operational capacity in the Western Desert, extremists and arms smugglers will continue to fuel militant and terrorist activities in the Sinai and Egypt’s main population centers.

NOTES

[1] See Andrew McGregor, “The Face of Egypt’s Next Revolution: The Madinat Nasr Cell,” Jamestown Foundation Hot Issue, November 20, 2012: https://jamestown.org/program/hot-issue-the-face-of-egypts-next-revolution-the-madinat-nasr-cell/

[2] The city of Derna, besieged by the LNA since 2015, appears to be the base for Egyptian extremists working out of Libya. Some of these have established bases in the vast Western Desert; according to Egypt’s interior ministry, Amr Sa’ad’s Jund al-Khilafah (Soldiers of the Caliphate), a militant group responsible for a series of attacks on Copts in the Delta and Nile Valley, was trained in the southern regions of the Western Desert, near the Upper Egyptian governorates (Mada Masr [Cairo], October 22, 2017).

This article first appeared in the January 15, 2018 issue of the Jamestown Foundation’s Terrorism Monitor.

Jabal ‘Uwaynat: Mysterious Desert Mountain Becomes a Three-Border Security Flashpoint

Andrew McGregor

AIS Special Report, June 13, 2017Before the advent of motorized desert exploration in the 1930s there were few areas as little known as the Libyan Desert, a vast and largely lifeless wasteland of sand and stone as large as India. In the midst of this forbidden wilderness stands a lonely sentinel, a massive mountain that covers some 600 square miles and rises to a height of 6345 feet, once possibly forming an island in the prehistoric sea that preceded the Saharan sands. Though its springs and rain-pools were known to the Ancient Egyptians, Jabal ‘Uwaynat was eventually forgotten for thousands of years by all but a handful of hardened desert dwellers who sought its fresh water and seasonal grazing. Since its “rediscovery” less than a hundred years ago, possession of this lonely massif has almost led to a war between Italy and Great Britain and is now at the heart of a security crisis involving Libya, Egypt and Sudan, whose borders meet at Jabal ‘Uwaynat.The Highway to Yam

The ancient importance of Jabal ‘Uwaynat is revealed in the rock art at the site depicting cattle, giraffes, lions and human beings, but no camels, which were only introduced into Egypt in roughly 500 BCE. The drawings suggest an occupation in the Neolithic period far earlier than the era of the Ancient Egyptians at a time when water was far more plentiful in the region. [1]

The Inscription of Mentuhotep II at Jabal ‘Uwaynat

Though ‘Uwaynat was long believed to lie beyond the regions explored by the Ancient Egyptians, the remarkable 2007 discovery of a depiction of the Egyptian Middle Kingdom king Mentuhotep II (11th Dynasty, 21st century BCE) promises to rewrite these perceptions. The portrayal of the seated king was accompanied by his name in a cartouche and an inscription mentioning the land of Yam, known as a destination for Egyptian trade caravans supplying exotic goods from the African interior from as early as the Old Kingdom reign of Merenre I (6th Dynasty, 23rd century BCE). [2] The exact location of Yam has never been determined, but the new evidence suggests it was somewhere south of ‘Uwaynat and further west into the African interior than previously thought by many scholars, possibly in Ennedi (modern Chad) or even Darfur (modern Sudan). The precise site of the inscription has been kept secret to avoid the ravages of “adventure tourism” that has led to the damage or destruction of many important Saharan monuments and rock art sites in recent years. [3]

Entering the Modern Era

The great mountain disappeared from the historical record until the early 19th century, when, according to English desert explorer Ralph Bagnold, an Arab from the Libyan oasis of Jalu and a resident at the court of Sultan Muhammad ‘Abd al-Karim Sabun of Wadai (1804-1815, modern eastern Chad), undertook to find a new trade route northwards through the Libyan Desert to Benghazi on the Mediterranean coast. The experienced Arab caravan leader, Shehaymah, headed northeast first to the remote springs at Jabal ‘Uwaynat, then worked northwest to Kufra and on through Jalu to Benghazi. [4] The fact that Shehaymah headed into this unknown wasteland suggested that he had some prior knowledge of ‘Uwaynat. Though this route was used by the Shehaymah and the Wadaians only once, this was the first known reference to the isolated mountain. From that time, caravan routes from Wadai bypassed ‘Uwaynat to the west on a more direct route north to the coast, while the famous Darb al-Arba’in caravan route from Darfur to Asyut in Egypt bypassed ‘Uwaynat far to the east, letting knowledge of ‘Uwaynat’s existence fade from all save the Tubu tribesmen of the eastern Sahara whose mastery of the desert and its mysteries was unparalleled.

Ahmad Muhammad Hassenein Bey

Nearly 3,000 years after its last known visit by the Egyptians, Jabal ‘Uwaynat was finally mapped by another Egyptian, the aristocrat Ahmad Muhammad Hassanein Bey, who “discovered” this “lost oasis” during an extraordinary 2200 mile trek by camel from the Mediterranean port of Sollum (near the Egyptian/Libyan border) to al-Fashir, the capital of Darfur. At the time of Hassanein Bey’s arrival, the mountain was the site of a settlement of some 150 Gura’an Tubu from Ennedi, relatively recent arrivals who did not wish to live under the rule of the French who had recently colonized the Chad region up to the Darfur border. Seven years later, only six remained; three years after that, the Gura’an settlement had disappeared forever. [5]

Two years after Hassanein Bey’s visit, Prince Kamal al-Din Hussein (son of Egypt’s Sultan Husayn Kamel, 1914-1917) visited ‘Uwaynat in a remarkable expedition using French Citröen Kegresse halftracks, supported by immense camel-borne supply convoys. This well-financed motorized journey by halftracks, as temperamental as camels in their own way, marked the beginning of the end of ‘Uwaynat’s ancient isolation.

The legendary English desert explorer Ralph Bagnold reached ‘Uwaynat by motorcar in 1930, inventing the techniques of desert-driving in the process. His atmospheric description of the place is still worth citing:

[‘Uwaynat] was by no means the flat-topped plateau it had looked from the plain; for the rock was hollowed out by a freak of erosion into spires and pinnacles over a hundred feet in height, separated by winding passages… Wandering through this labyrinth, we came out at unexpected places to the threshold, as it were, of a broken doorway high up in the battlements of some ruined castle, with nothing but a sheer thousand-foot drop beneath. From these openings the enormous yellow plain could be seen, featureless and glaring with reflected sunlight, reaching away and away in all directions (except to the south, where the peak of Kissu many miles distant rose like a lone cathedral) to a vague hazy horizon… With that little vision came a sudden overwhelming sense of the remoteness of the mountain – as if it included the whole world and was floating by itself, with Kissu peak as its satellite, in a timeless solitude. [6]

In 1931 an Italian expeditionary force under General Rodolfo Graziani crossed the desert to take the oasis of Kufra (northwest of ‘Uwaynat), where they defeated a desperate resistance put up by the Zuwaya Arabs. Unsatisfied with his conquest, Graziani (“the Butcher of Libya”) urged his men to pursue the survivors into the desert, attacking refugee families with armored vehicles and aircraft. Many of the refugees headed towards ‘Uwaynat, dropping dead daily in large numbers due to lack of food and water. Not knowing the region, some tried to follow the tracks of Prince Kamal’s halftracks, but when these became obliterated by sand and wind there was little hope left. Many of the refugees were rescued by British desert explorer Pat Clayton, who abandoned his survey work in the region to cover some 5,000 total miles of desert in his vehicles ferrying exhausted and dying refugees to safety. His efforts earned him a British medal and a ban from Italian-held Libya.

The British-Italian Struggle over ‘Uwaynat

The pursuit of the refugees brought Jabal ‘Uwaynat to the attention of the Italians, who sent expeditions to the mountain in 1931 and 1932 with an eye to claiming it for Italy, though it was already claimed by the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan Condominium government. Suddenly this desert massif known to the Europeans for only less than a decade became a site of strategic importance – a base there would bring Italian forces within striking distance of the Aswan Dam (550 miles away) using aircraft or motor vehicles. The Italians busied themselves with naming all the mountain’s prominent features for prominent Italian fascists, but were deeply disappointed to discover Bagnold’s cairn at the highest point of Jabal ‘Uwaynat.

In the meantime, both the Italians and the British in the region remained wary of encountering the deadly but phantom-like Gura’an raiders led by the notorious Aramaï Gongoï.  These Tubu raiders could cross hundreds of miles of trackless and apparently waterless deserts on their camels without benefit of any kind of navigational equipment before descending on unsuspecting oases or desert convoys. Mystified by these skills, their oasis-dwelling victims even claimed the Gura’an camels left no tracks in the sand.

The British and Italians began sending aircraft and patrols to ‘Uwaynat and by 1933 it seemed, incredibly, that Britain and Italy could go to war over possession of a remote place only a select few had ever seen or heard of until that point. Saner heads prevailed in 1934 as diplomats defined the border, giving Italy (and later independent Libya as a result) sovereignty over much of the mountain (including ‘Ain Dua, the most reliable spring) as well as the “Sarra Triangle” to the southwest of the formation in return for Italy abandoning its claims to a large portion of northwest Sudan.  These claims had been based on Italy’s view of itself as the sovereign successor to the Ottoman Empire in the region, the Ottomans having once made optimistic but largely unenforceable claims to large tracts of the Saharan interior in the late 19th century.

What the British Foreign Office had overlooked was that Italy had taken control of the remote but valuable Ma’tan al-Sarra well inside the so-called “Sarra Triangle.” The site for the well was chosen in 1898 by the leader of Cyrenaïca’s Sanussi religious order, Sayyid Muhammad al-Mahdi al-Sanussi. Al-Sannusi wished to open a new trade route to equatorial Africa from his headquarters in Kufra, but was hindered by the nearly waterless 400 mile stretch between Kufra and the next major well at Tekro (northern Chad). Al-Sanussi said a prayer at the site, roughly mid-way between Kufra and Tekro, and ordered his followers to dig. Months passed with camel convoys ferrying supplies to the workers until they finally found, at a depth of 192 feet, an apparently unlimited supply of water. [7]

Lying two hundred miles west of ‘Uwaynat, the strategic value of Ma’tan al-Sarra would be realized by Mu’ammar Qaddafi, who used it as a staging point for a group of Sudanese dissidents and followers of Sadiq al-Mahdi (great-grandson of Muhammad al-Mahdi and two-time prime minister of Sudan) to launch a 1976 attack on his enemy President Ja’afar Nimieri in Khartoum. The force passed south of ‘Uwaynat but the coup attempt failed after several days of bloody fighting in the Sudanese capital, followed by a wave of executions of captured dissidents and their supporters.

Qaddafi later used the Ma’tan al-Sarra as a forward airbase in his unsuccessful attempt to seize the Aouzou Strip during the Libya-Chad war of 1978-1987. Chad’s largely Tubu army under Hassan Djamous seized the airbase in a devastating lightning raid on September 5, 1987, bringing an effective end to the war with a humiliating Libyan defeat.

‘Uwaynat in the Second World War

As World War II broke out, possession of ‘Uwaynat was contested between the modified Fords and Chevrolets of the Commonwealth Long Range Desert Group (LRDG), invented and commanded by Major Ralph Bagnold, and their motorized Italian counterparts in the Compagnie Sahariane, a largely Libyan force with Italian officers and NCOs. As the war began, Italian forces established posts at the ‘Uwaynat springs of Ain Zwaya and one at ‘Ain Dua, both equipped with airstrips and garrisoned largely by Libyan colonial troops under Italian command.

After the Italians had been driven from the region by British and Free French offensives, the British-led Sudan Defence Force (SDF) used the route past ‘Uwaynat for regular convoys of arms and supplies to the Free French garrison in Kufra.  This oasis had been taken by General Phillippe Leclerc’s Free French forces with the assistance of the British Commonwealth’s Long-Range Desert Group (LRDG) on March 1, 1941. [8]

A Libyan SIAI-Marchetti SF-260

When a Libyan National Army-operated SIAI-Marchetti SF.260 light aircraft disappeared in the region in May 2017, it was a reminder that extreme heat and sudden sandstorms can make aerial surveillance of the border region around ‘Uwaynat a perilous undertaking. The aircraft left Kufra airbase to investigate reports of armed Sudanese crossing the border in vehicles. Its pilot and co-pilot were discovered dead the next day (Libya Observer, May 24, 2017).

It was not the first. In 1940, a Bristol Blenheim light bomber being used for reconnaissance by Free French forces was forced down near Jabal ‘Uwaynat. Its crew wandered in the desert for 12 days before being picked up by an Italian patrol and packed off to Italy as prisoners. A second Free French Blenheim went missing on February 5, 1942 after a bombing mission on the Italian-held al-Taj fort at Kufra. The plane and the remains of its crew were discovered by a French patrol in the Ennedi region of Chad in 1959. [9]

A French Patrol Discovers the Lost Blenheim in Ennedi, 1959

Less fortunate were the crews of three South African Air Force Blenheims that became lost in May 1942 and were forced to land in the desert between Kufra and ‘Uwaynat when their fuel ran out. Only one man survived to be rescued; the others perishing in agony from heat, thirst and misguided attempts to preserve themselves through drinking the alcohol in their compasses and spraying themselves with blister-inducing foam from their fire-extinguishers. [10]

There are some surprising peculiarities to aerial surveillance in the open desert. Stationary vehicles can be extremely difficult to spot from the air, as patrols from the LRDG discovered while operating in the Libyan Desert in World War II. It became common practice to simply stop when the approach of enemy aircraft was heard, a tactic that saved many patrols no matter how counter-intuitive it might have seemed.

Modern Gateway for Rebels, Traffickers and Mercenaries

In the Qadddafi-era, a trans-Saharan desert road connecting Kufra through ‘Uwaynat to Sudanese Darfur was promoted as a means of establishing trade between the two regions. The collapse of security in southern Libya after the 2011 anti-Qaddafi revolution brought the route to the attention of smugglers, human traffickers and members of Darfur’s multiple rebel movements who were being slowly squeezed out of Darfur under pressure from Sudan’s security forces.

A June 1, 2017 report of the UN Libyan Experts Panel described how Darfuri rebel movements received offers for their military services from both rival governments in the Libyan conflict, broadly the Bayda/Tobruk-based House of Representatives (HoR) and its military arm, Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan National Army (LNA), versus the Tripoli-based Presidency Council/Government of National Accord (GNA) and their allied Islamist militias. Due to a presence in Libya dating back to the Qaddafi-era (when the Libyan leader acted as a sponsor in their war against Khartoum), commanders such as Abdallah Banda, Abdallah Jana and Yahya Omda from Darfur’s largest rebel movement, the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), were able to access Libyan networks to their benefit.

Rebel fighters from the rival Sudan Liberation Army – Minni Minnawi (SLA-MM) began operations in Fezzan in 2015 before joining LNA operations in the northern “oil crescent” in 2016. Fighters from another major rebel faction, the Sudan Liberation Army – Abdul Wahid (SLM-AW), were cited as being aligned with the LNA (Libya Herald, June 11, 2017). Through 2014-2015, there were numerous accusations from Haftar and his supporters that Khartoum was using the desert passage past ‘Uwaynat to send arms and fighters to reinforce Islamist militias in Benghazi, Kufra and elsewhere, resulting in a short diplomatic crisis. [11] Haftar recently claimed Qatar was funding the entry of Chadian and Sudanese “mercenaries” into Libya through the southern border (al-Arabiya, May 29, 2017).

Some 30 members of JEM, allegedly supported by Tubu fighters, were reported killed in two days of fighting north of Kufra in February 2016 (Reuters, February 5, 2016; Libya Observer, February 4, 2016; Libya Prospect, February 7, 2016). Some of the fighting took place at Buzaymah Oasis, 130 km northwest of Kufra, where the Darfuri rebels had attempted to set up a base. The Darfuris were attacked by Kufra’s Subul al-Salam Brigade, a Salafist militia formed in October 2015 and composed largely of Zuwaya Arabs, the dominant group in the Kufra region. Led by Abd al-Rahman Hashim al-Kilani, the militia was allied with Khalifa Haftar, who is reported to have supplied the unit with 40 armored Toyota 4x4s in September 2016 (Libya Herald, October 20, 2016). After a number of kidnappings and highway robberies committed by the alleged JEM fighters, the Subul al-Salam group again engaged the Darfuris in October 2016, killing 13 fighters. An October 23, 2016 Sudanese government statement claimed the Darfuris were supporters of Khalifa Haftar. [12] Subul al-Salam also clashed with Chadian gunmen 400 km south of Kufra on February 2, 2017, killing four of the Chadians, possibly Tubu from the Ennedi mountain range south of the border (Libya Observer, February 2, 2017).

A May 2017 Sudanese intelligence report repeated nearly year-old claims that elements of the Darfuri Sudan Liberation Movement – Minni Minawi (SLM-MM) under local commander Jabir Ishag were active in the Libyan south around Rabaniyah and around the oil fields north of Kufra. The report also claimed the presence of SLM-Unity and SLM-Abd al-Wahid (SLM-AW) units northeast of Kufra and JEM forces under commander al-Tahir Arja in the north, near Tobruk, where they were alleged to be supporting Khalifa Haftar (Sudan Media Center, May 22, 2017; Libya Observer, October 10, 2016; GMS-Sudan, July 27, 2016).

Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces Deploy at ‘Uwaynat

Sudanese troops were reported to have moved up to the Jabal ‘Uwaynat region on June 2, 2017 (Libyan Express, June 3, 2017). Most of these were likely to belong to Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF – Quwat al-Da’m al-Seri), a 30,000 strong paramilitary that was integrated into the Sudanese Army in January 2017. Prior to that, the paramilitary had operated under the command of the National Intelligence and Security Services (NISS –Jiha’az al-Amn al-Watani wa’l-Mukhabarat ) and became notorious for the indiscipline and human rights abuses common to the infamous Janjaweed, from which much of the strength of the RSF was drawn at the time of its creation in 2013. The disorderly RSF has even been known to clash with units of the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF).

Besides recruitment from a variety of Arab and non-Arab tribes in Darfur, the RSF also employs many Arabs from Chad, former rebels against the Zaghawa-dominated regime of President Idriss Déby Itno. Designed for high mobility, the RSF claims it can reach the Libyan border within 24 hours of an order for deployment (Sudan Tribune, January 17, 2017). [13] The RSF leader is Lieutenant General Muhammad Hamdan Daglo (a.k.a. Hemeti), a member of the Mahariya branch of the Darfur Rizayqat. The RSF enjoys the patronage of Sudanese vice-president Hassabo Abd al-Rahman, who is, like Daglo, a member of the Mahariya branch of the Rizayqat. Hemeti is nonetheless despised by many SAF officers as an illiterate with nothing more than a Quran school education (Radio Dabanga, June 4, 2014).

A June-July 2016 deployment of the RSF in the ‘Uwaynat region led to the arrest of roughly 600 Eritrean and Ethiopian illegal migrants, most of whom were attempting to reach Europe or the United States. The RSF activity was in step with a European Union grant of €100 million to deal with illegal migration that followed a Sudanese pledge to help stop human trafficking to Europe (Sudan Tribune, July 31, 2016). The funds were intended to construct two detention camps for migrants and to provide Sudanese security services with electronic means of registering illegal migrants. The traffickers, however, do not always go quietly; in April 2017 the RSF engaged in “fierce clashes” with human traffickers, leading to the arrest of five of their leaders and the capture of six 4×4 vehicles. According to one smuggler of migrants, the presence of the RSF has changed the situation on the border:  “The road to Libya is still working, but it’s very dangerous” (The Economist, May 25, 2017).

The RSF commander has suggested Europe does not appreciate the RSF’s efforts in fighting illegal migration on their behalf, stating that despite a loss of 25 killed, 315 injured and 150 vehicles in the fight against illegal migration, “nobody even thanked us” (Sudan Tribune, August 31, 2016). Daglo went on to warn his troops could easily abandon their positions and allow the migrants and traffickers free passage. Whether Daglo was speaking for the government or on his own behalf is uncertain.

RSF commander Muhammad Hamdan Daglo “Hemeti”

Only days after Daglo’s complaints, Yasir Arman, secretary-general of the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army/Movement–North (SPLA/M-N), claimed to have received details of a European operation to directly supply the controversial RSF with funds and logistical support. Arman maintained that this “Satanic plan” was intended to cover up the RSF’s participation in atrocities and genocide. The EU issued a prompt denial (Sudan Tribune, September 7, 2016). [14]

Rising Tensions between Egypt and Sudan

Egypt’s army has been engaged in a constant effort to prevent Libyan arms crossing its 1000 km border with Libya, the preferred route being to cross the border through the Libyan Desert and then on to the Bahariya Oasis in Western Egypt, connected by road with the Nile Valley. In late May 2017, Egypt’s president Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi announced that Egypt’s military had destroyed some 300 vehicles carrying arms across the Libyan border in the last two months alone (Ahram Online, May 25, 2017).

Last October, LNA chief-of-staff and HoR-appointed military governor of the eastern region, Abd al-Raziq al-Nathory, announced that Egyptian forces guarding the border with Libya had in some cases established positions as far as 40 km inside Libya (Libyan Express, October 15, 2016).

The issue of Darfur rebel groups entering Sudan from Libya, the possible establishment of a buffer zone on the border triangle between Egypt, Libya and Sudan, and a Sudanese proposal to create a joint border patrol force were addressed in a meeting between the Sudanese and Egyptian foreign ministers in Cairo on June 3, 2017 (Sudan Tribune, June 3, 2017). Tensions between Egypt and Sudan have flared up in recent weeks with new friction over the disputed status of the Halayib Triangle west of the Red Sea coast, Khartoum’s support for Ethiopia’s Renaissance Dam construction (which Egypt claims will violate long-standing Nile Basin water-sharing agreements) and accusations from Khartoum of Egyptian material support for Darfuri rebels re-entering Sudan. Less than two weeks before the meeting, Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir announced that the RSF had seized Egyptian armored vehicles used by Darfuri rebels crossing the border near ‘Uwaynat from Libya, while Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) and NISS Facebook pages posted photos of captured or destroyed Egyptian vehicles allegedly used by the rebels (Sudan Tribune, May 24, 2017).

Conclusion: From Isolation to Insecurity

Jabal ‘Uwaynat’s magnificent isolation is quickly becoming a romantic memory. Today it has become a focal point for modern scourges such as human-trafficking, narcotics smuggling and militancy-for-hire. Its apparent future is one of more frequent clashes, greater surveillance and the introduction of more imposing barriers to movement. To some degree, this undesirable future can be averted if Libya’s political house can be put in order in the near future, thereby reducing the demand for foreign guns-for-hire, enabling the imposition of proper border controls to deter human-trafficking and allowing the introduction of more effective cooperative security efforts between Libyan, Sudanese and Egyptian security services.

Notes

  1. For the Rock Inscriptions at Jebel ‘Uwaynat, see: Francis L. Van Note, Rock Art of the Jebel Uweinat (Libyan Sahara), Akadem. Druck- u. Verlagsanst, Graz, Austria, 1978; András Zboray, Rock Art of the Libyan Desert, Fliegel Jezerniczky Expeditions, Newbury, 2005 (DVD); Maria Emilia Peroschi and Flavio Cambieri, “Jebel Uweinat (Sahra Orientale) et l’Arte Rupestre: Nuuove Prospettive di Studio Dalle Recente Scoperte,” XXIV Valcomonica Symposium, Art and Communication in Pre‐literate societies, Capo di Ponte, Italy, 2011, pp. 339-345, http://www.academia.edu/30404525/The_rock_art_of_Jebel_Uweinat_Eastern_Sahara._New_perspectives_from_the_latest_discoveries.pdf
  2. For the Jabal ‘Uwaynat inscription of Mentuhotep II and its implications, see: Joseph Clayton, Aloisia De Trafford and Mark Borda, “A Hieroglyphic Inscription found at Jebel Uweinat mentioning Yam and Tekhebet,” Sahara 19, July 2008, pp.129-134; Andrés Diego Espinel, “The Tribute from Tekhebeten (a brief note on the graffiti of Mentuhetep II at Jebel Uweinat),” Göttinger Miszellen 237, 2013, pp.15-19, http://www.academia.edu/8699848/2013_-_The_tribute_of_Tekhebeten ; Julien Cooper, “Reconsidering the Location of Yam,” Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt 48, 2012, pp.1-21,http://www.academia.edu/5646190/Reconsidering_the_Location_of_Yam_Journal_of_the_American_Research_Center_in_Egypt_48_2012_1-22 ; Thomas Schneider, “The West Beyond the West: The Mysterious “Wernes” of the Egyptian Underworld and the Chad Palaeolake,” Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections 2(4), 2010, pp. 1-14, https://journals.uair.arizona.edu/index.php/jaei/article/view/82/86 ; Thomas Schneider, “Egypt and the Chad: Some Additional Remarks,” Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections 3(4), 2011, pp.12-15, https://journals.uair.arizona.edu/index.php/jaei/article/view/12651/11932
  3. For example, the roughly 7,000 year-old Nabta Playa stone circle (northwest of Abu Simbel in Egypt’s Western Desert) has been subject to pointless damage, theft and even re-arrangement by unauthorized “New Age” tourists to better correspond to their own theories regarding its purpose. Rubbish dumps around the site attest to the thoughtlessness of these visitors and their unlicensed guides.
  4. Ralph A. Bagnold: Libyan Sands: Travel in a Dead World, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1941 edition (orig. 1935), pp.188-189.
  5. A.M. Hassanein Bey: The Lost Oases, Century Co., New York, 1925, pp. 219-234.
  6. Bagnold, op cit, p.173.
  7. Michael Crichton-Stuart, G Patrol, Wm Kinder and Co., London, 1958, pp.54-55.
  8. For the SDF convoys on this route in WWII, see “The Kufra Convoys,” http://www.fjexpeditions.com/frameset/convoys.htm
  9. See http://aviateurs.e-monsite.com/pages/de-1939-a-1945/morts-de-soif-dans-le-desert.html
  10. See http://www.fjexpeditions.com/frameset/convoys.htm
  11. “Are Sudanese Arms Reaching Libyan Islamists through Kufra Oasis?” Tips and Trends: The AIS African Security Report, April 30, 2015, https://www.aberfoylesecurity.com/?p=1482
  12. http://www.sudanembassy.org/index.php/news-events/1258-report-new-information-on-the-involvement-of-darfuri-rebels-in-the-conflict-in-libya
  13. For the RSF, see Andrew McGregor, “Khartoum Struggles to Control its Controversial ‘Rapid Support Forces’,” Terrorism Monitor, May 30, 2014, https://www.aberfoylesecurity.com/?tag=rapid-support-forces; Jérôme Tubiana, “Remote-Control Breakdown: Sudanese Paramilitary Forces and Pro-Government Militias,” Small Arms Survey, May 4, 2017, http://www.css.ethz.ch/en/services/digital-library/articles/article.html/571cdc5a-4b5b-417e-bd22-edb0e3050428
  14. For Yasir Arman, see Andrew McGregor, “The Pursuit of a ‘New Sudan’ in Blue Nile State: A Profile of the SPLA-N’s Yasir Arman,” Militant Leadership Monitor, June 30, 2016, https://www.aberfoylesecurity.com/?p=3652

Why are Egypt’s Counter-Terrorism Efforts Failing in the Sinai Peninsula?

Andrew McGregor

December 15, 2016

In October 2011, Field Marshal Muhammad Hussein Tantawi declared “the military situation in Sinai is 100 percent secure” (Daily News Egypt, October 6, 2011). Four years later, Army spokesman Brigadier General Muhammad Samir assured Egyptians that the North Sinai was “100 percent under control” (al-Jazeera, July 2, 2015). Even Dr. Najih Ibrahim, a former jihadist and principal theorist of Egypt’s al-Gama’a al-Islamiya (GI – Islamic Group) declared as recently as last August that for Sinai’s branch of the Islamic State: “This is the beginning of the end for this organization…  It cannot undertake big operations, such as the bombing of government buildings, like the bombing of the military intelligence building previously … or massacre, or conduct operations outside Sinai. Instead, it has resorted to car bombs or suicide bombings, which are mostly handled well [by Egyptian security forces]” (Ahram Online, August 11; August 15).sinai-ea-map

Since then, Islamic State militants have carried out highly organized large-scale attacks on checkpoints in al-Arish, killing 12 conscripts on October 12 and another 12 soldiers on November 24. Together with a steady stream of almost daily IED attacks, mortar attacks and assassinations, it is clear that militancy in North Sinai is far from finished.

Since 2004 there have been a series of jihadist groups operating in the Sinai. The latest face of militancy in the region is the Wilayet Sayna (WS – “Sinai Province”), a name adopted by the Sinai’s Ansar Beit al-Maqdis (ABM – Supporters of Jerusalem) following its declaration of allegiance to the IS militant group in November 2014. The secretive WS has been estimated to include anywhere from several hundred to two thousand fighters. Despite operating for the most part in a small territory under 400 square miles in with a population of roughly 430,000 people, a series of offensives since 2013 by the Arab world’s most powerful army in North Sinai have produced not victory, but rather a war of attrition. The question therefore is what exceptional circumstances exist in the North Sinai that prevent Egypt’s security forces from ending a small but troubling insurgency that receives little outside support.

As in northern Mali in 2012, the conflict in Sinai has merged a localized ethnic insurgency with externally-inspired Salafi-Jihadism. The conflict persists despite the wide latitude granted by Israel in terms of violating the 1979 Camp David Accords’ restrictions on arms and troops deployed by Egypt in the Sinai. Unsettled by the cross-border activities of Gazan and Sinai terrorists, Israel has basically granted Cairo a free hand in military deployments there since July 2015.

At the core of the insurgency is Sinai’s Bedouin population, culturally and geographically separate from the Egyptian “mainland.” Traditionally, the Bedouin of the Sinai had closer relations with Gaza and Palestine to the northeast than the Egyptian nation to their west, though Egypt’s interest in the Sinai and its resources dates to the earliest dynasties of Ancient Egypt. The Israeli occupation of the region in 1967-1979 left many Egyptians suspicious of pro-Israeli sympathies amongst the Bedouin (generally without cause) and led to a ban on their recruitment by Egypt’s military or security services.

According to Egyptian MP Tamer al-Shahawy (a former major-general and military intelligence chief), social changes began in the Sinai after the 1973 war with Israel: “After the war a major rift in ‎tribal culture occurred — on one hand was the pull of the Sufi trend, on the other the pull of ‎money from illegal activities such as smuggling, drug trafficking and arms dealing… For a number of reasons the government was forced to prioritize a security over a socio-‎economic political response.”‎ (Ahram Online, August 15).

Lack of development, land ownership issues and Cairo’s general disinterest in the region for anything other than strategic purposes erupted in the terrorist bombings of Red Sea tourist resorts from 2004 to 2006. The deaths of at least 145 people led to a wave of mass arrests, torture and lengthy detentions that embittered the Bedouin and further defined the differences between “Egyptians” and the inhabitants of the Sinai Peninsula. With the local economy struggling due to neglect and insecurity, many young men turned to smuggling, a traditional occupation in the region. Like northern Mali, however, smuggling has proven a gateway to militancy.

In recent decades, Islamist ideology has been brought to the Sinai by “mainland” teachers and by students returning from studies in the Nile Valley. Inattention from government-approved religious bodies like al-Azhar and the Ministry of Religious Endowments left North Sinai’s mosques open to radical preachers denouncing the region’s traditional Sufi orders. Their calls for an aggressive and Islamic response to what was viewed as Cairo’s “oppression” and the support available from Islamist militants in neighboring Gaza led to a gradual convergence of “Bedouin issues” and Salafi-Jihadism. Support for groups like ABM and WS is far from universal amongst the tribes and armed clashes are frequent, but the widespread distaste for Egypt’s security forces and a campaign of brutal intimidation against those inclined to work with them have prevented Cairo from exploiting local differences in its favor. The army claims it could “instantaneously purge” Sinai of militants but has not done so out of concern for the safety of residents (Ahram Online, March 21).

Egypt’s Military Operations in the Sinai

Beginning with Operation Eagle’s deployment of two brigades of Sa’iqa (“Thunderbolt) Special Forces personnel in August 2011, Cairo has initiated a series of military operations designed to secure North Sinai, eradicate the insurgents in the Rafah, al-Arish and Shaykh al-Zuwayad districts of North Sinai, eliminate cross-border smuggling with Gaza and protect the Suez Canal. While meeting success in the latter two objectives, the use of fighter jets, artillery, armor, attack helicopters and elite troop formations have failed to terminate an insurgency that has intensified rather than diminished.

sinai-ea-al-saiqaAl-Sa’iqa (Special Forces) in Rafah

The ongoing Operation Martyr’s Right, launched in September 2015, is the largest military operation yet, involving Special Forces units, elements of the second and third field armies and police units with the aim of targeting terrorists and outlaws in central and northern Sinai to “pave the road for creating suitable conditions to start development projects in Sinai.” (Ahram Online, November 5, 2016). Each phase of Martyr’s Right and earlier operations in the region have resulted in government claims of hundreds of dead militants and scores of “hideouts,” houses, cars and motorcycles destroyed, all apparently with little more than temporary effect.

Military-Tribal Relations

Security forces have failed to connect with an alienated local population in North Sinai. Arbitrary mass arrests and imprisonments have degraded the relationship between tribal groups and state security services. Home demolitions, public utility cuts, travel restrictions, indiscriminate shelling, the destruction of farms and forced evacuations for security reasons have only reinforced the perception of the Egyptian Army as an occupying power.  Security services are unable to recruit from local Bedouin, while ABM and WS freely recruit military specialists from the Egyptian “mainland.” It was a Sa’aiqa veteran expelled from the army in 2007, Hisham al-Ashmawy, who provided highly useful training in weapons and tactics to ABM after he joined the movement in 2012 (Reuters, October 18, 2015). Others have followed.

The role of local shaykhs as interlocutors with tribal groups has been steeply devalued by the central role now played by state security services in appointing tribal leaders. In 2012, a shaykh of the powerful Sawarka tribe was shot and killed when it became widely believed he was identifying jihadists to state security services (Egypt Independent, June 11, 2012)

The use of collective punishment encourages retaliation, dissuades the local population from cooperation with security forces and diminishes the reputation of moderate tribal leaders who are seen as unable to wield influence with the government. Egypt’s prime minister, Sherif Ismail, has blamed terrorism in North Sinai on the familiar “external and internal forces,” but also noted that under Egypt’s new constitution, the president could not use counter-terrorism measures as “an excuse for violating public freedoms” (Ahram Online, May 10).

Operational Weaknesses

The government’s media blackout of the Sinai makes it difficult to verify information or properly evaluate operations.  Restrictions on coverage effectively prevent public discussion of the issues behind the insurgency, reducing opportunities for reconciliation. Nonetheless, a number of weaknesses in Cairo’s military approach are apparent:

  • Operations are generally reactive rather than proactive
  • A military culture exists that discourages initiative in junior officers. This is coupled with an unwillingness in senior staff to admit failure and change tactics compared to the tactical flexibility of insurgents, who are ready to revise their procedures whenever necessary
  • An over-reliance on airpower to provide high fatality rates readily reported in the state-owned media to give the impression of battlefield success. The suppression of media reporting on military operations in Sinai turns Egyptians to the militants’ social media to obtain news and information
  • The widespread use of poorly-trained conscripts. Most of the active fighting is done by Special Forces units who reportedly inflict serious losses in their actions against WS. As a result, WS focuses on what might be termed “softer” military targets for their own attacks; checkpoints manned by conscripts and conscript transports on local roads. There are reports of poorly paid conscripts leaking information to Sinai-based terrorists for money (Ahram Online, October 21).
  • A failure to prevent radicalization by separating detained Sinai smugglers or militants with local motivations from radical jihadists in Egyptian prisons
  • An inability to stop arms flows to the region. Though effective naval patrols and the new 5 km buffer zone with Gaza have discouraged arms trafficking from the north, arms continue to reach the insurgents from the Sharqiya, Ismailiya and Beni Suef governorates

Islamist Tactics in Sinai

The Islamist insurgents have several advantages, including intimate knowledge of the local terrain and a demonstrated ability to rejuvenate their numbers and leadership. Possession of small arms is also extremely common in Sinai despite disarmament efforts by the state. The WS armory includes Kornet anti-tank guided missiles, RPGs and mortars. Many weapons have been captured from Egyptian forces operating in the Sinai.

According to WS’ own “Harvest of Military Operations” reports, IEDs are used in about 60% of WS attacks, guerrilla-style attacks account for some 20%, while the remainder is roughly split between sniper attacks and close-quarter assassinations. Since 2013, over 90% of the targets have been military or police personnel as well as suspected informants (al-Jazeera, May 1). In 2016, IED attacks have numbered roughly one per day. The bombs are commonly disguised as rocks or bags of garbage.

sinai-ea-checkpointEgyptian Army Checkpoint, al-Arish

Well-organized assaults on security checkpoints display a sophistication that has worried military leaders. Checkpoint attacks since October 2014 often involve the preliminary use of suicide bomb trucks to smash the way through fixed defenses, followed by assaults by gunmen, often in 4×4 vehicles which have been banned in military operational zones since July 2015. Car bombs and mortars have been used to launch as many as 15 simultaneous attacks, demonstrating advanced skills in operational planning. Snipers are frequently used to keep security forces on edge and the ambush or hijacking of vehicles on the road complicates the movement of security personnel.

Military intelligence has not been able to overcome WS security measures. WS is notoriously difficult to infiltrate – recruits are closely vetted and often assume new identities. Trackable communications devices are discouraged and the group’s cell structure makes it difficult to obtain a broader picture of its organization and membership. At times it is not even clear who the group’s leader is. Sinai Bedouin chiefs have complained that when they do give warnings to the military of militant activity, their warnings are ignored (Egypt Independent, August 7, 2012)

There is intense intimidation of residents not sympathetic to WS and its aims. The group has even warned ambulance drivers not to transport wounded security personnel to hospitals (Shorouk News, December 21, 2015). Suspected informants are shot, though the WS tries to remain on good terms with locals by providing financial aid and social assistance. Sympathetic residents are able to provide a steady flow of intelligence on Egyptian troop movements and patterns.

sinai-ea-brigadier-mahmoudBrigadier General Hisham Mahmoud (Daily News Egypt)

WS focuses on state institutions as targets and rarely carries out the type of mass-casualty terrorist attacks on civilians common to other theaters of jihad. However, public, security and religious figures are all subject to assassination. In November, WS beheaded a respected 100-year-old Sufi shaykh of the Sawarka tribe for “practicing witchcraft” (Ahram Online, November 21). Even senior officers are targeted; in November Air Force Brigadier General Hisham Mahmoud was killed in al-Arish; a month earlier Brigadier Adel Rajaei (commander of the 9th Armored Division and a veteran of North Sinai) was killed in Cairo. Both men were shot in front of their own homes (Ahram Online, November 4). In July, a Coptic priest in al-Arish was murdered by Islamic State militants for “fighting Islam” (Ahram Online, July 1). Religious sites inconsistent with Salafist beliefs and values are also targeted for destruction. The shrine of Shaykh Zuwayad, who came to Egypt with the conquering Muslim army of ‘Amr ibn al-‘As in 640 C.E., has been attacked multiple times in the city that bears his name.

When Egyptian military pressure becomes too intense, insurgents are able to take refuge in Jabal Halal, a mountainous cave-riddled region south of al-Arish that acts as a main insurgent stronghold and hideout for fugitives. The area is home to many old Israeli minefields that discourage ground operations, though Egypt’s Air Force claims to have killed scores of militants there in airstrikes (Egypt Independent, August 20, 2012).

Conclusion

Egypt’s large scale counter-insurgency operations have been disappointing for Cairo. Such operations do not have the general support of the local population and are regarded by many as suppression by outsiders. The army and police are not regarded as guarantors of security, but as the violent extension of state policies that discriminate against communities in the North Sinai. So long as these conditions remain unchanged, Egypt’s security forces will remain unable to deny safe havens or financial support to militant groups.  Air-strikes on settled areas, with their inevitable indiscriminate and collateral damage, are especially unsuited for rallying government support.

Excluding the Bedouin from Interior Ministry forces foregoes immediate benefits in intelligence terms, leaving security forces without detailed knowledge of the terrain, groups, tribes and individuals necessary to successful counter-terrorism and counter-smuggling operations. However, simply opening up recruitment is not enough to guarantee interest from young Bedouin men; in the current environment they would risk ostracization at best or assassination at worst. With few economic options, smuggling (and consequent association with arms dealers and drug traffickers) remains the preferred alternative for many.

Seeking perhaps to tap into the Russian experience in Syria, Egypt conducted a joint counter-insurgency exercise near al-Alamein on the Mediterranean coast in October. The exercise focused on the use of paratroopers against insurgents in a desert setting (Ahram Online, October 12, 2016). Russia is currently pursuing an agreement that would permit Russian use of military bases across Egypt 10 October 2016 (Middle East Eye, October 10; PressTV [Tehran], October 10). If Cairo is determined to pursue a military solution to the Islamist insurgency in Sinai, it may decide more material military assistance and guidance from Russia will be part of the price.

A greater commitment to development is commonly cited as a long-term solution to Bedouin unrest, though its impact would be smaller on ideologically and religiously motivated groups such as WS. Development efforts are under way; last year President Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi committed £E10 billion (US$ 560 million) to new industrial, agricultural, transport and housing projects (al-Masry al-Youm, March 8). Unfortunately, many of these projects are in the Canal Zone region and will have little impact on the economy of North Sinai. More will be needed, but with Egypt currently experiencing currency devaluation, inflation, food shortages and shrinking foreign currency reserves, the central government will have difficulty in implementing a development-based solution in Sinai.

This article first appeared in the December 15 2016 issue of the Jamestown Foundation’s Terrorism Monitor.