EGYPT: Sinai Bombings Could Become a Trend

By Adam Morrow Reprint | | Print |

Adam Morrow

CAIRO, Apr 28 2006 (IPS) - Bomb attacks in the Red Sea resort town of Dahab earlier this week have again raised the spectre of domestic terrorism, and devastation of the tourism industry.

“This is a new generation of localised terrorism,” Mohamed Said, deputy director of the state-run al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies told IPS. “By terrorising major tourist attractions, they think they can undermine the government economically.”

The seaside resort, popular among lower-budget travellers and backpackers, was rocked by three near-simultaneous bombings Monday this week at two cafeterias and a supermarket. Eighteen people – including five foreign tourists – were killed and 85 injured, according to the tourism ministry.

“I was about 100 metres from the supermarket when I heard all three explosions – so I ran in the opposite direction,” tourist Serge Loussararian told IPS. “Later, after we saw the ambulances carrying away bodies. My friends and I decided to leave Dahab immediately.”

The police have detained a number of suspects for questioning, but the identity of the perpetrators is not known.

Hoteliers, especially in Sinai, are bracing for a fallout. “It’s a crisis, and we don’t know the extent of the cancellations from one day to the next,” said a local manager. “So far, there haven’t been any cancellations in Sharm, but we’ll certainly see some in the next two weeks.”

Tourism ministry spokesperson Hala Khatib said it was “too early to tell” what effect the incident would have on local tourism. But she pointed out that some 72 hours after the attacks hotels had received few cancellations. “As yet we have no cancellations except for a small group of Germans that had been heading to Dahab,” she told IPS.

“The safety and security of our visitors is our number one concern right now,” Khatib added. “Security efforts are certainly being escalated.”

Tourism has been a target for terrorist attacks in this area. In October 2004, the resort towns of Taba and Nuweiba in the Sinai peninsula were similarly hit by a string of explosions that killed at least 30 people. Tour operators and hoteliers braced themselves for ruin then, but the impact on tourism proved relatively light. “The incident affected only Taba, where occupancy rates fell in the two months after the attacks,” said Mohamed Fawzi, director of sales at the Egyptian branch of Paris-based hotelier Accor.

The tourism industry – Egypt’s biggest foreign currency earner – received another blow last July when a second spate of bomb attacks hit the resort city of Sharm el-Sheikh in the southern Sinai peninsula, killing more than 80 people. About 18,000 tourists left the country in the first two days after the blasts.

The bombings were followed by mass arrest of suspects, most of them local residents of Bedouin origin. An estimated 3,000 Sinai residents were arrested after the Taba incident alone. Many were reportedly subject to harsh interrogation.

According to Said, revenge is the most likely reason for Monday’s Dahab bombings. “It was retaliation for the very oppressive police policies used against the people of Sinai and for the torture of their friends and families.”

Two days after the Dahab attacks, further reports of attempted terrorism emerged from Sinai. On Apr. 26, two suicide bombers reportedly attacked members of a multinational peacekeeping force based in the north of the peninsula in separate attacks. The relatively small blasts killed only the attackers, according to media reports.

But these small attacks too have their antecedents. Last August, a number of policemen were killed by landmines in the area. In the same month, two Canadian peacekeepers were slightly injured when their vehicle was struck by a crude bomb. An 1,800-strong peacekeeping contingent, which consists of troops from 11 countries, has monitored the nearby demilitarised zone between Egypt and Israel since 1982.

An interior ministry official told IPS that the perpetrators of the two Apr. 26 bombings probably did not belong to an organised terrorist cell, given the relatively small scale of their attacks.

Said agreed with this assessment. “The attacks weren’t very sophisticated; the perpetrators seem to have very few resources available to them,” he said. The likely culprits were “a local network of extreme fanatics motivated by their own understanding of Islam, a hatred for the West, and revenge.”

There were similar motivations for the Dahab attacks, according to Said. The danger arose from a “new generation of localised terror networks, which grows in marginalised places like North Sinai,” he said. “Unlike the militant Islamist groups of the 1980s such as the Gama’a Islamiya and Islamic Jihad, these new groups aren’t aiming to take power. They have no purpose beyond spreading chaos in the country and maybe attracting new recruits to their cause.”

But Said expressed fears that the Dahab attacks could represent a trend, and that similar attacks could be expected in the not-too-distant future. “This will be a problem from now on, these smaller, localised groups,” he said. “Now there’s one organisation, maybe two, but I’m sure we’ll soon see the emergence of more.”