IT is a measure of Egypt’s political instability that the completion of one year of President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi’s government coincided on Wednesday with one of the biggest attacks by Islamic State militants in the Sinai on the security forces, leading to over 100 deaths. The government declared that the area — Sheikh Zuweid town — was “100pc under control”, but the force used by the security apparatus — F-16 jets and Apache helicopters — only highlighted the militants’ fighting prowess. Moreover, the government’s ‘100pc’ claim appeared dubious when the army declared it would continue the operation until the area had been cleared of “terrorist concentrations”. Even though it was the Islamic State’s Egyptian affiliate which had launched the attack, the government said among those killed were Muslim Brotherhood members, a claim the Brotherhood denied, saying those “murdered” had been doing relief work.

While Egypt had often witnessed terrorist attacks on foreign tourists and the Coptic minority, organised militancy is a new phenomenon and is obviously a reaction to the regime’s unabashed persecution of the opposition, especially of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose government, headed by Mohammed Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically elected president, was removed by the military, followed by bogus trials and the sentencing to death of a number of Brotherhood leaders, including Mr Morsi. In silencing the media and crushing the opposition, Mr Sisi’s aim seems to be to give Egypt ‘political stability’. However, the ferocious clashes in the Sinai and the murder of the chief prosecutor the other day underline the military-led regime’s failure to give peace to the country. Obviously, Mr Sisi hasn’t learnt any lessons from the fate of dictators like Hosni Mubarak, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and Muammar Qadhafi whose systems based on patronage and tyranny collapsed like a house of cards at the first whiff of the Arab spring. However, the dictators mentioned above did give stability — no matter how superficial — for decades, but Mr Sisi appears to be having difficulty in consolidating his hold even in the very beginning.

Published in Dawn, July 3rd, 2015

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