ISIS silent on Egypt massacre decried even by supporters
Cairo: The gunmen who massacred more than 300 worshippers in an Egyptian mosque made no effort to conceal their identity — they showed up raising the black banner of the self- styled “Islamic State”, authorities and witnesses said.
The group’s militants had previously warned the North Sinai mosque associated with Sufis to end the mystical practices ISIS calls heretical, even visiting the mosque in person a few weeks before the attack, a Sufi sheikh said.
But almost a week after the Friday massacre, ISIS has yet to claim the attack in a sign, officials and analysts say, that their gunmen might have gone too far even by the extremists’ standards.
For all the indiscriminate carnage ISIS has perpetrated on almost every continent, never before has an attack shocked even its supporters who now insist the group is innocent.
As the scale of the attack percolated in jihadist social media channels, pro- ISIS users denied the group’s involvement.
Every militant group known to operate in Egypt, including the Al Qaeda- linked Jund al- Islam in Sinai that opposes ISIS, condemned the massacre.
ISIS supporters on social media were livid when a purported audio recording of wireless communications between an ISIS member boasting about the ISIS
had targeted mosques before — usually Shia — and Sufis. The jihadists bombed a Manchester concert on May 22 in which they were certain to kill children who had come to watch pop star Ariane Grande perform.
At the time, British jihadist Omar Hussein told AFP killing “disbeliever” children rested comfortably on his conscience.
“As for the killing of little girls then it is permissible 2 kill the kuffaar as they kill us,” he wrote in response to an AFP query.
But the attack on the Egyptian mosque, packed during communal Friday prayers with hundreds of worshippers, Sufis and nonSufis, appears to have been a step too far for ISIS supporters.
At least 27 children died in the massacre.
After the jihadist who
ISIS atrocities involvement.
“Not at all. Your analysis is wrong. You’ve been influenced by media reports,” he wrote in a message responding to an AFP query.
ISIS in Egypt, based in the north of the Sinai peninsula bordering Israel and the Gaza Strip, has killed hundreds of security personnel in attacks, and more than a hundred Christians in church bombings and shootings over the past year.
“It does appear to be in line with a gradual shift over the last four years,” said another Western official.
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al- Sisi has warned that ISIS foreign fighters will try to settle in his region as they lose ground in Iraq and Syria.
But
it may have been a local initiative by the increasingly pressed jihadists in Sinai that was badly received by IS’ leadership in Iraq and Syria, a third Western official said.
It is “possible that the attack was coordinated without central agreement. Hence the absence of a claim,” said the diplomat.
Another possibility is that it was an attack meant to send a message to Sufis and villagers seen as progovernment, without granting it the imprimatur of an official ISIS claim.
The Western officials agreed to speak to AFP on condition of anonymity.
Hassan Hassan, a leading expert on ISIS, said the jihadists had called the Sufis “taghuts” in a publication, a word used in the Quran to describe the devil and tyrants.
“Nothing is off limits when they call them taghut,” said Hassan, a senior fellow at the TIMEP think tank and author of the book ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror.
ISIS fighters, however, had gone too far in the past and been punished for it, he said.
After an attack on a military toll booth south of Cairo in June, ISIS issued a claim three weeks later — not through the usual statement on its Telegram accounts but in its weekly Nabaa newsletter.