In Sinai, security is like a house built upon the sand
GRAEME SMITH .. From Friday's Globe and Mail Published Thursday, Aug. 18, 2011 8:39PM EDT Last updated Thursday, Aug. 18, 2011 9:00PM EDT
Gunmen snuck across Egypt’s border and killed seven people in southern Israel, provoking quick strikes in response that left at least 13 others dead. The attack highlights the increasing lawlessness in Egypt’s border region after the fall of president Hosni Mubarak.
The flurry of violence started on Thursday afternoon near the quiet resort town of Eilat, a place so far removed from conflict that onlookers initially did not recognize the distinctive sound of Kalashnikov fire when attackers sprayed bullets at a bus carrying Israeli soldiers.
The hours that followed saw at least three other locations inside Israel hit with automatic rifles, mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and even an anti-tank missile in a series of co-ordinated attacks.
Israel’s military responded with air raids and ground assaults and said that those responsible for the incursion had been killed. News agencies reported that medics listed a two-year-old boy among those who died in the Israeli strikes. Two Egyptian border police were also killed in the crossfire.
Israel said its intelligence services had specific information showing that the attackers had come from Gaza. What remained mysterious, however, was how the militants travelled at least 250 kilometres across the Sinai Peninsula to their objective, a desert highway near the Egyptian border.
Such a journey by heavily armed militants would have been more difficult in the days when Mr. Mubarak’s regime controlled the borderlands with brute force, analysts say. The Egyptian revolution may have brought hope for democracy, but it has also undermined the police state that kept watch over the smugglers, bandits and restive Bedouin tribesmen along a frontier that could become a flashpoint between wary neighbours.
“The whole police force in Egypt was taken apart and decimated,” said David Schenker, director of the Arab politics program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “This is just the latest symptom of rising lawlessness.”
The Sinai Peninsula, a dry spearhead of territory, changed hands several times during three decades of intermittent war between Israel and Egypt. It finally remained under Egyptian control after Israeli forces withdrew under the terms of a peace treaty in 1982, but Cairo’s rule over the local nomads has always been tenuous. While the Sinai’s population is now estimated at perhaps 500,000, including maybe 200,000 Bedouin, nobody knows precisely how people inhabit the arid landscape of mountains and sand dunes because they are notoriously unwilling to deal with the government.
Nor has the government endeared itself to the people in Sinai. Even as tourism brought jobs to the region, bureaucrats in Cairo ensured that their friends reaped the benefits. Bedouin pitched camps near the major resort projects, looking for work, but only managed to find the most menial positions. They were often forbidden from dealing with tourists and kept out of jobs in the government and security forces.
This gave rise to what one analyst called a “mercenary culture,” a series of illegal industries in the Sinai: drug trafficking, human smuggling and arms dealing. It became a transit point for European prostitutes headed to Arab clients and guns destined for Palestinian militants.
The degree of co-operation between Islamist extremists and the profiteering outlaws in the Sinai has become a topic of speculation among experts; some say al-Qaeda and related groups have infiltrated local tribes, while others say the locals are simply willing to deal with whomever pays them.
When bombings killed about 100 people at Sinai resorts in 2004 and 2005, police rounded up hundreds of Bedouin, suspecting them of involvement with Islamist groups. Such sweeping arrests became commonplace, analysts say, as the Mubarak regime tried to impose order with heavy-handed tactics.
“Egypt never really had control of the peninsula,” said Dina Samak, editor of an online political journal in Cairo. “Mubarak was capable of hiding the problems in the Sinai, and now everything that used to happen underground is bubbling up to the surface.”
Crime has surged since the beginning of the Arab Spring uprisings. After a pipeline bombing in February, Israel made an exception to the terms of its 1982 withdrawal and agreed to the deployment of Egyptian army battalions along the border to maintain security. The extra troops did not have the desired effect, however; more pipeline attacks followed, along with brazen jailbreaks.
In a prescient article, published little more than a week before the latest attacks, Alex Joffe at the Institute for Jewish and Community Research warned that a “security vacuum” allowed more freedom for Islamists operating in the region.
Such complaints became louder in the hours after the cross-border incursion on Thursday.
“The incident underscores the weak Egyptian hold on Sinai and the broadening of the activities of terrorists,” Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak said.
Mr. Joffe now says the only solution will be for Egypt to re-establish the security apparatus that fell apart during the revolution.
“The pharaohs had the same problem in that region, and they would give you the same answer,” Mr. Joffe said. “The only thing they understand is somebody smacking them on the head.”
Such opinions are sharply opposed by people such as Ms. Samak, however; as somebody involved in the Egyptian uprising, she says her country should strive to include the disenfranchised rather than beating them down.
2010 .. Why can't the two sides finish the conflict that began in 1948?
When you talk to people in Ramallah and Ramle, in Jericho and Jerusalem, there is an overwhelming agreement on the shape of an agreement:
•The West Bank and Gaza go to the Palestinians;
•Large Israeli settlements adjacent to Israel go to Israel in exchange for an equal slice of land;
•The Old City of Jerusalem is open to all faiths and nationalities, under international supervision;
•Arab refugees from 1948 and 1967 get monetary restitution but resettlement limited to the West Bank;
• Palestinians recognize Israel and agree to halt all attacks against it;
•Cooperation is pledged between both sides on patrolling Jordan Valley and Gaza borders.
But despite near-universal agreement on these issues, peace has remained elusive. The missing element on both sides has been humility, and (ironically for two nations whose religions seek mercy and compassion) mercy and compassion. http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=54033462
2007 .. Seven journalists have been given prison sentences in recent weeks; more than a thousand activists of the Muslim Brotherhood, the country's most popular political opposition, languish in jail; and labor organizers involved in a wave of strikes at government-owned factories have been detained.
On Sunday, fighting between rival Bedouin clans in the Sinai Peninsula quickly spiraled into a riot targeting the police and President Mubarak's National Democratic Party (NDP). While local grievances sparked the fight, regular reports of widespread police brutality and torture fed anger in the Sinai, where locals called for the police chief's resignation, and are fueling public outrage around the country. As the government cracks down hard in both the Sinai and on opposition activists, such as members of the Muslim Brotherhood, it is increasingly being charged with the use of torture on detainees. http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=23952565
2010 .. The Christianistas keep trying to claim the “Ten Commandments” are the basis of American Law, and keep trying to use this claim as the as the reason to place the “Ten Commandments” onto American Public Spaces, and into Public Law.
These Laws were written and establised throughout the region, including in Egypt, long before the Dynasties of Egypt were even born; and even longer than that before “Moses brought the Commandments down from Mt. Sinai.” Hammurabi's Codes were the first Laws ever written unto Mankind... So, we compare and contrast: .. http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=51795126
“Sinai is an attractive destination for Al-Qaida refugees who came from Iraq and made their way to the peninsula via Jordan,” Diskin added. “All kinds of terrorist collaborators from the Gaza Strip, as well as from Hezbollah, also go to Sinai, which is a huge landmass that is difficult to control. It’s also hard to regulate entry visas into Sinai.” .. http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=51340059
Hamas announces end of ceasefire with Israel Jerusalem, August 20, 2011 .. 7 minutes ago ..
AP Palestinian Hamas police officers stand at the site of an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City on Friday.
Amid spiralling violence that claimed 22 lives in two days, Palestinian Gaza Strip ruler Hamas on Saturday announced an end to the informal ceasefire with Israel.
Hamas’ military wing, Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, announced that it is no longer committed to the Gaza region ceasefire with Israel.
“There is no longer a lull vis-is Israel, in the face of the ongoing massacre that it commits against the Palestinian people without any justification,” the armed faction’s spokesman Abu Obeida said in a statement. Hamas also urged all Gaza factions to “respond to Israel’s crimes.”
Israeli warplanes killed three Palestinians in an airstrike in central Gaza City on Friday, medics said, raising the death toll to 14 in the coastal enclave since a deadly attack in southern Israel on Thursday left 8 Israelis dead.
The latest strike hit a civilian car killing three people from the same family, including a 5-year-old boy and a doctor, Gaza medical official Adham Abu Salmiya said, adding that three others were wounded.
Israel has carried out more than a dozen airstrikes across the Gaza Strip following Thursday’s attack for which it has blamed Gaza-based militant group, the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC), an umbrella organisation of militant factions, although the PRC has denied any involvement.
Gaza based militants have fired a barrage of grad and Qassam rockets on Israel injuring at least eight persons, two critically.
The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) deployed the Iron Dome anti-missile defence system last evening to intercept rockets bound for the port city of Ashdod and Ashkelon.
However, three Qassam rockets were shot at the western Negev communities overnight. Emergency sirens were sounded, but no injuries or damage was reported.
Large contingents of Israeli police forces arrived at the scene of the rocket attacks and are on alert for additional missiles.
Residents were told to remain in close proximity to bomb shelters.
The IDF spokesman’s office said in a statement that Israeli planes targeted weapon manufacturing centers in central Gaza Strip and two more sites in the north and south in response.
“The IDF will not tolerate any attempt to harm Israeli citizens and IDF soldiers,” the statement said, adding that the army “will continue to operate resolutely against anyone who terrorises Israel”.
“The Hamas terrorist organisation is the address, and it bears the responsibility,” it further added.
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