Pressed in Iraq and Syria, Daesh lashes out in Egypt

CAIRO: The twin bombings of churches in Egypt suggest that Daesh militants are lashing out as they find themselves coming under increasing pressure in Iraq and Syria, analysts say.

The group’s Egyptian affiliate which claimed Sunday’s attacks in the Nile Delta cities of Tanta and Alexandria has been centered in the Sinai Peninsula, where it has killed hundreds of policemen and soldiers.

But Daesh has been unable to seize population centers there, unlike its early gains in Iraq and Syria, and it has also lost top militants to Egyptian military strikes in recent months.

The militants have attacked Egyptian Coptic Christians before, but their campaign against the minority picked up in December with a Cairo church bombing that killed 29 people.

In Sinai, Daesh militants killed seven Copts in January and February, forcing dozens of Christian families to flee the peninsula that borders Israel and the Palestinian Gaza Strip.

Daesh and its supporters online have been “methodically introducing more radical sectarian concepts” to Egyptian militants since the December bombing, said Mokhtar Awad, a research fellow with George Washington University’s Program on Extremism.

The December bombing in a church adjacent to the Coptic papal seat marked a shift in Daesh tactics.

It was not until December 2016 when Daesh began a systematic campaign to target Coptic Christians in Egypt,” said Jantzen Garnett, an expert on the militants with the Navanti Group analytics company.

As Daesh is “squeezed in Iraq and Syria it often conducts spectacular attacks elsewhere in an attempt to regain the narrative, boost morale and win recruits,” he said. In Iraq and Syria, where the group swept across northern Iraq, Daesh has faced consecutive defeats over the past year and is on the verge of losing control of Iraq’s second city Mosul.

In a video released in February, Daesh attacked Christians as “polytheists” and promised there would be further attacks.

After Sunday’s bombings in Tanta and Alexandria, the group said it had deployed two Egyptian suicide bombers against the “crusaders.”

A defiant President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi reacted by declaring a threemonth state of emergency.

The Copts, who make up about 10 percent of Egypt’s 90 million people, have been attacked by militants for years, more so after the military overthrew President Muhammad Mursi in 2013.

The Coptic Church was accused by the militants of supporting Mursi’s overthrow which led to a bloody crackdown on militants, although Muslim clerics and politicians also backed his ouster.

Even before Mursi was toppled, militants had targeted the Christians, most notably in a 2011 New Year bombing of a church in Alexandria which police blamed on a group linked to Al-Qaeda.

The Daesh group’s “sectarian attacks fuel those ideologically inclined to support the group, while showing it’s still ‘expanding’ despite battlefield setbacks,” said Zack Gold, a non-resident fellow with the Atlantic Center’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East.

The three church attacks in December and now April also suggest an expanded presence of militant cells west of the Suez Canal separating the Sinai proper from the rest of Egypt.

Following the December bombing, Sissi said members of the jihadist cell who carried it out had been caught, but others remained on the run.

Daesh “has struggled, with constant setbacks, to establish a sizable presence on the Egyptian mainland over the preceding years. These church bombings indicate they have a growing presence on the mainland,” said Garnett.

Daesh affiliate’s predecessor in Egypt, Ansar Beit Al-Maqdis, had carried out several attacks targeting the police on the mainland before pledging allegiance to Daesh in November 2014.

And several Daesh bombings and shootings took place in Cairo, also targeting policemen, before the December church bombing.

Police arrested several cells and in November 2015 announced they had killed a top Daesh militant, Ashraf Al-Gharably, in a Cairo shootout.