Mosque attack village had been warned
Persistent threats raise doubts about security agencies.
Elders of a village in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula where militants killed 305 people in a mosque had been warned by Islamic State operatives to stop collaborating with security forces and to suspend rituals associated with Islam’s mystical Sufi movement, security officials and residents said Sunday.
The latest warning came as recently as a week ago, telling villagers in Al-Rawdah not to hold Sufi rituals on Nov. 29-30 to commemorate the birth of the Prophet Muhammad, according to residents and the officials who work for security and military intelligence agencies operating in Sinai.
Local operatives of the Islamic State affiliate in Sinai consider Sufis to be heretics who should be killed. Ahmed Saqr, an expert on the Sinai insurgency, said militants had publicly identified the mosque, which also serves as a Sufi center, as a target months ago.
He wrote Saturday in a Facebook post that the selection of the Al-Rawdah mosque as a target “raises questions about those who read, analyze and prepare in our security agencies,” and whether anything could have been done to prevent the “untold horrors.”
Mohammed Ibrahim, a university student from the village, said militants had warned residents a few days before Friday’s attack not to collaborate with secu- rity forces. The warning, he told The Associated Press by telephone Sunday from the nearby town of Bir al-Abd, followed the detention three weeks ago by villagers of three suspected militants who were handed over to security forces.
The militants also distributed leaflets several times ordering villagers not to cooperate with security forces and to abandon Sufism, he said.
Another Al-Rawdah resident, Mohammed Darwish, 30, said militants stormed the home of village tribal leader Sheikh Hussein al-Jerirr twice this year.
“They threatened him not to hold Sufi gatherings, and last week, they came on motorbikes and asked residents not to participate in Sufi rituals,” Darwish said.
Egypt’s military and security forces have been waging a tough and costly campaign against militants in the towns, villages and desert mountains of northern Sinai. Across the country, thousands have been arrested in a crackdown on suspected Islamists and other dissenters and government critics.
In the past year, militants have bombed churches in the capital of Cairo and other cities, killing dozens of Christians. The IS affiliate is also believed to be behind the 2016 downing of a Russian jetliner that killed all 224 people on board, decimating the vital tourism sector.
The bloodshed at the AlRawdah mosque was the first major militant attack on a Muslim congregation, and it eclipsed violence dating back to an Islamic militant insurgency in the 1990s.
The mosque is frequented by Sufis and is the local headquarters of the prominent Sufi sect, or tareeqah, founded by the local al-Jerir clan, a branch of the powerful Al-Sawarkah tribe.
The deadliest attack by Muslim extremists in Egypt’s modern history came less than a week before the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday Thursday. Celebrations climax on Wednesday and Thursday, when millions of the Sufi movement’s followers are expected to gather for rituals in mosques, shrines and squares across much of the country.
Militants from t he IS affiliate have targeted Sufis before. Last year, they beheaded a leading Sufi religious figure, Sheikh Suleiman Abu Heraz, believed to be over 90 years old.
Perhaps as many as 15 million Egyptians belong to Sufi orders, which hold sessions with chanting, poetry readings and ritual dancing meant to draw the faithful closer to God.
Islamic hard-liners view such practices as improper, even heretical, and militants in the region often destroy Sufi shrines, saying they encourage idolatry because people pray to those buried there.
The austere, one-story Al-Rawd ah mosque sits on a main road. Its Friday prayers routinely attract villagers, travelers and workers from a nearby salt factory. About 500 men and boys were thought to have been in the mosque and an adjacent plaza at the time of the attack.