HUNDREDS KILLED IN ATTACK AT EGYPT MOSQUE.

Bomb, gun attack deadliest ever strike in Egypt

EL-ARISH, EGYPT • As worshippers ran from the bombs that exploded inside the mosque, the Islamic jihadists were waiting for them.

The gunmen opened fire from four off-road vehicles on the hundreds of worshippers who were fleeing in terror. They also blocked off escape routes from the area by blowing up cars and leaving the burning wrecks blocking the roads.

And when the ambulances arrived to cart away the dead and wounded, the snipers kept on firing.

At least 235 people were killed and more than a hundred injured in the deadliest ever attack by Islamic extremists in Egypt.

The attack targeted the al Rawdah mosque frequented by Sufis, members of Islam’s mystical movement, in the northern Sinai. Islamic extremists, including the local affiliate of the Islamic State group, consider Sufis heretics because of their less literal interpretations of the faith.

The startling bloodshed was the latest sign of how more than three years of fighting in Sinai has been unable to crush an insurgency waged by the ISIL affiliate. Seeking to spread the violence, the militants the past year have carried out deadly bombings on churches in the capital, Cairo, and other cities, killing dozens of Christians. The affiliate also is believed to have been behind the 2016 downing of a Russian passenger jet that killed 226 people.

But this was the first major militant attack on a Muslim mosque, and it eclipsed any past attacks of its kind, even dating back to a previous Islamic militant insurgency in the 1990s.

Dozens of bloodied bodies wrapped up in sheets were laid across the mosque floor, according to images circulating on social media. Relatives queued up outside the hospital as ambulances raced back and forth. The state news agency MENA put the death toll at 235.

Resident Ashraf el-Hefny said many of the victims were workers at a nearby salt factory who had come for Friday services at the mosque.

“Local people brought the wounded to hospital on their own cars and trucks,” he said by telephone.

The village is home to around 2,500 people, all members of the Sawarka tribe. In conservative rural areas of Egypt it is usually only men who attend Friday prayers. With an attack so large it is believed that a significant portion of all the men in the village were either killed or wounded.

Abdel Qader Mubarak, who is originally from the village, said his entire family had been killed. “I can’t talk, all my family are gone,” he told The Daily Telegraph.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack. But ISIL has targeted Sufis several times in the area in the past, notably beheading a leading Sufi religious figure, the blind sheik Suleiman Abu Heraz, last year and posting photos of the killing online.

Egypt’s president, Abdel Fattah el-Sissi, declared a three-day mourning period and convened a high-level meeting of security officials.