Truth as elusive as militants in Sinai
As the sun set over his desert village in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, Abu Asma sat down to break his Ramadan fast when he heard gunfire from the army outpost down the road. He ignored it, and then a bullet hit his little brick home.
The shooting was over in minutes. Neighbors went to the outpost near Israel’s border to investigate and found more than a dozen dead soldiers. Some had been shot in the head.
“Whoever did this was very well trained,” Abu Asma said.
The massacre on Sunday, as the neighbors describe it, sent shock waves across Egypt and prompted the army to launch an unprecedented operation to flush out militants from the lawless peninsula.
Helicopters crisscross the skies as military trucks haul tanks to the area near the borders with Israel and Gaza in preparation for what the military says will be a decisive confrontation with the militants.
The military and police have already boasted successes, claiming the killing of 20 militants in air strikes — the first in the Sinai for decades — and the arrest of six “terrorists.”
But the claims meet with skepticism from villagers who charge that the security forces missed their elusive quarry, who simply melted away into the vast mountainous desert.
Instead the security forces resorted to the arbitrary tactics of the ousted regime of Hosni Mubarak, fanning longstanding grievances against the central government, villagers say.
In Tumah, a small village of sparse brick homes where the airstrikes against the militants were reported to have taken place on Wednesday, residents said the military’s claims were pure propaganda. There was indeed a site, on the village’s outskirts, which the militants used as a training base, said one resident of the area, Eid Sawairka. The militants were long gone when armored personnel vehicles raided the village backed by helicopter gunships, he said.
An elderly man at the village mosque, who gave his name as Abu Mohammed, told a similar story. “There were 45 armored personnel carriers and police vehicles, and two helicopters. They fired two rockets but they didn’t hit anything.”
A few km away, in the village of El-Jura, residents showed AFP the site of a helicopter rocket strike on Wednesday morning. “I heard a whoosh, and then an explosion,” said Mohamed Yusef. The rocket punched a hole in a cinder block wall of a storehouse for dry wood meters from his home, he said, dangling the spent rocket in his hand. The other landed in the sand.
“It was completely random,” he said.
The close-knit Bedouin say they have not heard of a single tribesman killed in the security force campaign, and no dead or wounded were taken to hospital.
When asked to square the military and state media’s version of events with that of villagers, a military official insisted: “This account has been reported by all the official media.”
Ten km to the east, in the town of Sheikh Zuwayid, relatives of the men soldiers and police arrested scoffed at their description as “terrorists.”
One of those arrested, 72-year-old Eid Said Salama, was feeding his goats when masked security men stormed his house and took him away in handcuffs, his wife said.
They also raided his neighbor’s house, hauling off 68-year-old Selmi Salama Sweilam and his son. They ransacked the house, spilling barley and wheat onto the floor and emptying out closets and cupboards, she said.
Several of those arrested — who all appeared to be devout Muslims — had been detained without charge under Mubarak’s regime, after a series of bombings between 2004 and 2006 against tourist resorts on the South Sinai coast.
“They are using past security records from Mubarak’s time,” said Yusef, a friend. “You really think someone would go and do an attack, and then sleep in his bed?
“The people they are looking for have vanished.”
For years, the security forces have floundered in the strategic peninsula, where the army’s presence has been heavily restricted by the 1979 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, under which Israel pulled out its troops and settlers.
Since Mubarak’s overthrow in February last year, militants have exploited the upheaval to establish a launch pad for increasingly brazen attacks on security forces, a key gas export pipeline and on neighboring Israel.
In Sunday’s attack, the militants commandeered an armored vehicle from the outpost and forced a soldier to drive it into Israel, where they were killed in a helicopter strike.
“There must be reconciliation with the people of the Sinai. The police must apologize for killing our sons, and free those arrested without charge,” said Bedouin activist Mohammed Menei.
