Sinai slaughter

Massacre of Sufi Muslims shows Egypt insecure

Friday’s brutal attack on a mosque in the Sinai Peninsula — in principle governed by Egypt — killed more than 300 worshipers and wounded 130. The massacre is evidence, first, that Islamic extremism is by no means dead, notwithstanding its military defeats in Mosul, Iraq and Raqqa, Syria. Second, the regime of Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah elSissi is by no means secure in its rule.

The attack — the deadliest in modern Egyptian history — has not been formally claimed by a terror group, but was carried out by more than two dozen gunmen, arriving in vehicles that flew an Islamic State flag. The carnage was part of two ongoing phenomena in Egypt. The first is that it is part of a continuing series of attacks on religious minorities. The victims were previously mostly Christian, members of Egypt’s Coptic minority. Now, Friday’s attack on the predominantly Sufi Muslim mosque in Bir alAbed, in northern Sinai Peninsula has added Sufis to the list. Sufis, who include the so-called whirling dervishes, are considered heretics by the Salafi, Saudi Arabia-oriented Sunni Muslims who form the majority of both the Islamic State and alQaida groups.

The second unfortunate aspect of the Bir al-Abed mosque attack is that it illustrates again the fact that Egypt’s armed forces — in spite of ostensibly being in control in Egypt since 2013 when the military overthrew elected president Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood — has not been successful in its efforts either to defeat Islamic extremist forces in the Sinai, or to assure security in the rest of the country.

Mr. Sissi, a general and armed forces commander at the time, overthrew the elected Morsi government in 2013. Mr. Sissi then promoted himself to field marshal, ran for president and won cooked elections in 2014 with 97 percent of the vote. The United States under President Barack Obama, in spite of laws denying military aid to governments taking power through coups d’etat, refrained from calling Mr. Sissi’s advent to power a coup and maintained U.S. military assistance to his government.

There were three reasons for that action. The first was that annual U.S. aid to Egypt pays the costs of the military equipment, including tanks and aircraft, that U.S. firms sell to Egypt’s armed forces. The second reason was that the United States didn’t much like the Morsi government, even though it had been chosen in relatively free and fair elections after the fall of the previous military president, Hosni Mubarak. The third reason is that Mr. Sissi early on made it clear that he would continue Mr. Mubarak’s policy of maintaining good relations with Israel.

The problem now is that Mr. Sissi has shown clearly that he lacks support among the Egyptian people, not only the minorities such as the Copts and now the Sufis who are being battered by the Sunni extremists in attacks like that Friday at Bir al-Abed. His only recourse now is to beef up military activity against the extremists in the Sinai. But that hasn’t worked before.

Sensible U.S. policy at this point would be to urge Mr. Sissi to hold free and fair elections in an attempt to broaden the base of his support among the Egyptian people, or to result in the election of a leader capable of mobilizing the population, including the minorities behind him.