Mosque massacre victims had fled from jihadists
EGYPT: Most of the worshippers killed in the Egyptian mosque massacre had fled fighting elsewhere in north Sinai and did not share in the Sufi practices that were the target of the attackers, it was reported yesterday.
Islamic State had repeatedly threatened to attack the al-rawdah mosque, which is overseen by a Sufi order, security officials said.
The jihadists say that Sufism, a mystical form of Islam, is heretical because prayers are offered to saints and at shrines, practices that are banned in hardline Salafi Islam. Most Sufis are Sunni Muslims.
However, residents interviewed by local reporters said that most of those worshipping when jihadists carrying the black Isis flag attacked the mosque were not even local, let alone necessarily Sufis.
‘‘These people think that they are fighting the Sufi order, but not everyone at the mosque followed the order,’’ one man, who asked to be called Abu Salma, told the Mada Masr news site. ‘‘Seventy per cent of the mosque doesn’t follow it, and 70 per cent of those injured are people displaced from [the areas of] Sheikh Zuwaid and Rafah.’’
Sheikh Zuwaid, in northeast Sinai, is at the heart of the Isis insurgency that grew from a local jihadist uprising after the coup that brought President Abdel Fatah al-sisi to power in 2013. The group declared its allegiance to Isis the following year.
Rafah is on the border crossing with the Gaza strip, and parts of the city have been levelled by the army to stop the smuggling of arms and other goods.
Magdy Rizk, who was shot in the legs and lost his eldest son in the attack, said: ‘‘These people ran away from death, were displaced, only to come and find death.’’
At least 305 people, including 27 children, were killed when about 30 jihadists arrived in the village of al-rawdah, surrounded the mosque, and started firing. They blocked roads before throwing grenades into the building, and fired for 30 minutes even as cars arrived to ferry the injured to hospital.
The population of al-rawdah is said to be about 800, meaning some families have lost all their men.
There has been displacement across northern Sinai because of the viciousness of Isis attacks and the ferocity of the government response.
As part of its assault on Sufism, which is common in Egypt and often is not practised separately from Sunni rites, Isis beheaded a cleric a year ago who was in his nineties. Two more clerics were murdered in March. The killings, which were filmed and posted online, were said to be a punishment for sorcery.
Sisi gave an angry speech after the mosque killings and ordered revenge attacks on what were said to be jihadist positions in the hills south of Bir al-abed.
There has been little word since of a more considered strategy to deal with the insurgency, which it is now thought to have killed more than 1000 soldiers, police and civilians.
Foreign news outlets are banned from north Sinai and independent journalists have said they were repeatedly stopped as they interviewed survivors. Reporters have witnessed the destruction of entire villages in the attempt to root out the insurgents, which has spread to other parts of the country.
Egypt has joined the Saudi-led Islamic Military Counterterror Coalition, formally launched in Riyadh on Sunday.
Apart from thanking other countries represented for their condolences, General Tawhed Tewfik, Egypt’s representative at the launch, made no reference to the attack or how the authorities intended to respond.
He did, however, say that efforts to combat terrorism should not focus solely on military methods and required a strategy to target the jihadists’ ideological and financial support. – The Times