Sinai massacre calls for a tough response

▶ Grieving Egyptians can take heart from the president’s vow to restore regional security

The shocking death toll of 305, with another 128 injured, in the aftermath of the devastating attack on a mosque in a Sinai neighbourhood has left an entire country reeling. Egyptians have witnessed gut-wrenching spectacles of bloodshed in the past – many of them directed at the country’s Coptic Christian minority – but none as gruesome or as callously orchestrated as the one on Friday.

The attack, which bears all the hallmarks of ISIL and is being linked to the affiliated Sinai Province, shows no one is safe from the ruthless group, whose fighters keep forming pockets of insurgency and reappearing across the region, targeting people of all faiths. The Sinai Peninsula has long been listed by ISIL as a potential target because of the number of Sufis living there.

ISIL has in the past expressed its hatred for Sufism and its practices. Egypt’s Sinai region has encountered its hate-filled doctrine before. Just a year ago, the organisation beheaded a centenarian Sufi cleric in public. In November last year, ISIL claimed responsibility for the bombing of a Sufi shrine in Pakistan’s Balochistan province, in which more than 50 people were killed. The terrorist group must be driven out of its remote hiding places once and for all. Since those attacks, ISIL has suffered defeat after defeat, before being driven out in recent months from its strongholds in Iraq and Syria.

But as these pages have warned in the past, defeating ISIL is not the same thing as destroying its hideous ideology.

Its fighters can simply move on to other terrorist outfits or reconstitute themselves as guerrilla forces. President Abdel Fattah El Sisi was swift to act by launching military airstrikes on “terrorist outposts” within hours of the Sinai attack.

He has vowed to deploy “brute force” if necessary to deal with insurgents in the Sinai region who have posed a threat to Egypt’s security for years.

“The army and police will avenge our martyrs and return security and stability with force in the coming short period,” the president announced shortly after an emergency meeting with his top security team on the same day of the attack. It will take a sustained campaign to restore law and order, but the culprits behind Friday’s cold-blooded attack deserve nothing less than the full might of Egypt’s justice system.