Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, a wilderness of deserts and raw
mountains about the size of West Virginia, is famed for its Biblical
history, Bedouin tribal life, and Red Sea resorts. But, now that the
Islamic State’s caliphate in Iraq and Syria has been destroyed, the
Peninsula linking Africa and Asia is also gaining notoriety as the
Middle East’s hottest frontline against jihadist groups, including ISIS, an Al
Qaeda franchise, and smaller cells.

Since 2013, terrorism has increasingly disrupted life in Egypt,
especially in the Sinai. The Egyptian hinterland has witnessed more than
seventeen hundred attacks over the past four
years, according to
a tally by the Washington-based Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy.
The Sinai Province, the local ISIS affiliate, has claimed credit for
some eight hundred of them. Lately, the attacks have been creeping
closer to Cairo and targeting more civilians.

On Friday, the Muslim day of prayer, more than two dozen extremists
carried out the deadliest terrorist attack in modern Egyptian history.
The sophisticated raid—which involved unleashing bombs inside a Sufi
mosque, then shooting from outside at worshippers as they fled—killed
more than three hundred and injured dozens more in the remote northern town of Bir al-Abed. The toll of casualties surpassed that of the 2015 bombing of a
Russian Metrojet plane, which disintegrated after flying out of a resort in southern
Sinai, killing two hundred and twenty-four people.

The mosque attack is the latest of many challenges facing President Abdel Fattah
El-Sisi,
a former field marshal, as Egypt heads toward elections next year. For
all his military acumen, Sisi has been unable to protect his own
people—or even his security forces. Almost a thousand police officers
and soldiers have
been killed while
fighting extremists and insurgents in the past four years. And,
despite his cult-like status—his face is on candy wrappers,
T-shirts, and billboards—Sisi has solved few of the problems that
sparked Egypt’s chapter of the Arab Spring uprising, in 2011.

Last year, Adel Abdel Ghafar
warned in a Brookings Institution report that, “in a classic authoritarian
bargain,” Sisi came to power “promising security, stability, and
economic prosperity in exchange for near-total political control. Now,
that bargain is in the process of breaking down, since he’s failed to
deliver on all three fronts.” Unemployment among Egyptian youth, who
have been the jihadi foot soldiers, is above thirty per cent—“a ticking
time bomb,” Ghafar said.

Politically, Sisi’s regime has become increasingly autocratic. Although
President Donald Trump is a close ally, the State Department’s latest
human-rights report nonetheless
criticized the Egyptian government for “excessive use of force by security forces,
deficiencies in due process, and the suppression of civil liberties.
Excessive use of force included unlawful killings and torture.”

Cairo has effectively banned anti-government protests, tortured
detainees, repressed freedom of expression, and discriminated against
Egypt’s minority Christians, Human Rights
Watch reported this
year. “Prosecutions, travel bans and asset freezes against human rights
defenders, in addition to repressive new legislation, threaten to
effectively eradicate independent civil society. The government denies
workers the right to organize independent unions and prosecutes those
who participate in strikes,” the organization
said.

Internal tensions have played out most visibly in the Sinai, where
tribes have long felt marginalized politically, economically, and
socially from the central government in Cairo and its Nile culture. Some
in the Sinai are reportedly even nostalgic about Israel’s occupation,
between the 1967 war and the return of the Sinai to Egypt, in 1982, as
part of the Camp David peace process. A campaign for greater tribal
autonomy has now turned into an insurgency. In the first quarter of
2017, the Tahrir Institute recorded more than a hundred and thirty
attacks in northern Sinai. Many areas are now closed military zones,
where the residents live under curfew.

Sisi’s strategy echoes the West’s approach to extremism—jail, shoot,
bomb, or kill its adherents, and hope that their ideology is obliterated
or discredited in the process. Like the military leaders who preceded
him in the Egyptian Presidency, Sisi has channelled much of the foreign
assistance he receives—including large chunks of U.S. aid—into his
security apparatus. Egypt has also bought submarines and fighter jets,
which are of limited use against bands of extremists. The remedy to
extremism is rarely brute force alone.

In 2014, Egypt declared a state of emergency in the Sinai. (It was
extended to the entire country last April.) In a crackdown criticized by
local and international human-rights groups, border areas have been
cleared. Houses, and sometimes entire villages, have been razed. Tunnels,
which support the commercial smuggling for which the Sinai is famous,
have been destroyed.

“In North Sinai, the military has committed serious abuses, likely
including extrajudicial killings, in its campaign against an affiliate
of the extremist group Islamic State, whose fighters have targeted
suspected civilian collaborators and Christians for death,” Human Rights
Watch said. The Egyptian military claims to have killed some three
thousand jihadis in the Sinai.

Yet the violence only escalates. The Sinai jihadis have become ever more
brazen and aggressive in terrorizing the local population. The attack on
the Sufi mosque is an example. Over the past five years, extremists in
the Sinai largely targeted security forces. Now jihadists are attacking
Sufis, whom fanatic Sunnis consider heretics.

What started as a local insurgency over autonomy has escalated into a
challenge to the Egyptian state and its leader, with implications for
neighboring Israel and the Palestinian Authority, to the east; chaotic
Libya, to the west; and Europe, to the north. A report on ISIS’s Sinai
Province by the Woodrow Wilson Center claims that “foreign
fighters—largely from Libya, the Maghreb and Europe—have migrated to the
Sinai, where they constituted as much as eighty percent of the Sinai
Province’s fighting force by mid-2017.”

On Monday, Charles Lister, an expert on jihadism at the Middle East
Institute, wrote that
Egypt’s heavy firepower may have prevented ISIS from controlling
territory, “but this scorched earth strategy has also caused widespread
civilian displacement and a further deterioration of living conditions
in the Sinai.” Lister continued, “ISIS may not exist because of such
misplaced military tactics, but it certainly will not cease to exist
because of them either.”

Egypt’s situation is reminiscent of the U.S. experience in Iraq and
Afghanistan. Egyptian forces hold military bases, operate checkpoints,
and carry out periodic patrols in armored convoys—but they can’t control
much of the countryside. Sisi may reign as the most powerful strongman
among the rulers of the more than twenty Arab countries. But his strategy in
Sinai, so far, is not working.