Monday, April 24, 2006
Egypt explosion. posted by Richard Seymour
30 dead, 100 injured.Al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya have just this month had 900 of their prisoners released from prison, so one hesitates to pin this on them, unless of course they were asked to do this by the Egyptian regime as a trade off - freed prisoners in exchange for something to scare an insurgent public into complicity. The Egyptian state has a history of using the right-wing of Islamism against the Left.
However. There are plenty of groups in Egypt which claim an association with 'Al Qaeda' (they claim a local franchise on the brand name, in other words). The series of explosions in Sharm el-Sheikh back in July last year was claimed by three, count 'em, three, groups, including the Abdullah Azzam Brigades, a reference to an Islamist ideologue, Palestinian from Jenin, devotee of Sayyid Qutb, fighter in Afghanistan, and teacher (a lot of these guys are teachers for some reason) who was killed along with his two sons in 1989 in Peshawar. One of the suspects in the killing was the faction around bin Laden - others included the CIA, ISI and Mossad. The other two groups claiming responsibility were the Tawhid wal Jihad group in Egypt and Holy Warriors of Egypt. No one had ever heard of these latter groups before, but the Abdullah Azzam Brigades do seem to have been active in the Levant and Egypt before.
The strategy of targeting tourist resorts is very familiar (these attacks took place in Dahab, a resort town in the Sinai peninsula) and they are presumably much as explicated by al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya's former deputy chief Tal'at Fu'ad Qasim: 1) it costs the state a great deal, since tourism constitutes a huge amount of state revenues in Egypt, approximately $6bn in 2004 alone; 2) ideologically, tourists are designated AIDS-carriers, drug-takers, spies, Jews and what have you. (See 'What does Gama'a al-Islamiyya Want?' in Political Islam, Joel Beinin and Joe Stork eds, 1997). This, incidentally, would probably go toward explaining the targeting of tourist destinations in Indonesia, such as Bali.
Just as Gama'a al-Islamiyya was one of the groups that broke from the Muslim Brotherhood when it renounced violent means in the 1970s, so one assumes there are others operating now that the Gama'a has publicly renounced its use of violence after the attack in Luxor.