NEW YORK: Britain is to provide military advice to the Egyptian government to help it crack down on militants in the Sinai Peninsula who are destabilising relations with neighbouring Israel.

In his first meeting with the Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi in New York, David Cameron will announce that Britain’s most senior military figure will travel to Cairo. General Sir David Richards, the chief of the defence staff, will lead a British effort that will also see a stabilisation team despatched to Egypt. The team, which will mainly consist of field experts from the Department for International Development, will advise on how to wean Bedouin tribes in Sinai away from smuggling.

The prime minister believes that Morsi has made an “interesting and quite impressive start” as Egypt’s first democratically elected president. In one of his first moves Morsi sanctioned a crack down on militants in Sinai.

Cameron will reach out to Morsi by announcing that Britain will press its European partners to relax stringent EU sanctions on Egypt to allow up to 100 million British pounds in frozen assets to be repatriated to the government. A taskforce will be established to ensure that assets belonging to the family of the ousted president Hosni Mubarak are returned to Egypt. Cameron wants to show Britain’s support for the first democratically elected president of the largest Arab country.

Morsi’s move against militants in Sinai was seen as a particularly positive signal because Israel was acutely nervous about the election of an Islamist president in Egypt. Morsi was the Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate in the election, and Egypt shares a border with the Gaza Strip which is run by Hamas, the Islamist Palestinian party, that has roots in the Muslim Brotherhood.

The UN, EU, US and Russia, which oversee the Middle East peace process, fear that instability in the Sinai Peninsula could disrupt the Camp David accords which led to demilitarisation of the area after the 1973 Yom Kippur war. Israel withdrew its forces from the peninsula on the understanding that it would be a non-military zone.

By arrangement with the Guardian