CAIRO — President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, wearing battle dress for the first time in over a year, said Saturday that Egypt had foiled an attempt by the Islamic State group to seize territory and set up an extremist state with its recent assault on the military in the troubled northeastern part of the Sinai Peninsula.
CAIRO — President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, wearing battle dress for the first time in over a year, said Saturday that Egypt had foiled an attempt by the Islamic State group to seize territory and set up an extremist state with its recent assault on the military in the troubled northeastern part of the Sinai Peninsula.
In combat fatigues he had said he hung up for good when he ran for president, the general-turned-politician met members of the army and delivered a televised speech to troops in Sinai, his first public comments on Wednesday’s unprecedented attack.
The group had tried to announce “an Islamic state, in their concept, an Islamic State in Sinai,” he said. “These are the messages, very simply, that they are putting out to us,” adding that the area was now under control.
El-Sissi praised the troops for “foiling a very big plan.”
The army said 17 soldiers and over 100 militants were killed in Wednesday’s brazen attack in Sinai, although before the release of its official statement, several senior security officials from multiple branches of Egypt’s forces in the area had said that scores more troops also died in the fighting.
The assault, which was claimed by an Islamic State group affiliate, lasted a whole day and was unprecedented in its size and coordination. The attack hit a string of army checkpoints and involved multiple suicide bombings and the siege of a main police station with heavy weapons.
It came in a week of bloodletting that saw Egypt’s prosecutor general assassinated outside his Cairo home by a massive car bomb, and a special forces raid on an apartment that killed nine members of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood responded by calling for a “rebellion,” raising the prospect of a further uptick in violence.
The Egyptian Foreign Ministry blamed all the past week’s violence on the Brotherhood, which it said was not only the main source of Islamic extremism, but also coordinated operations on the ground.
Also Saturday, the Islamic State affiliate in the Sinai said it had fired three Grad rockets at Israel a day earlier.
In a statement posted on its Twitter account, the group which calls itself the IS group’s Sinai Province said it fired the rockets because Israel was supporting the Egyptian regime. It also claimed Israeli aircraft had joined Egyptian warplanes in bombing its fighters.
Israel’s military said the rocket was fired into southern Israel on Friday afternoon, hitting an open field but causing no damage or injuries. Egyptian military and security officials in Sinai have denied any rockets were fired from the restive peninsula.
In combat operations late Friday, the Egyptian army said Apache attack helicopters fired missiles at groups of extremists, killing 10 of them.