U.S. plans to test ICBM interceptor
Dressed in military CAIRO — fatigues, the gunmen waved down a bus filled with Christian pilgrims as it wended its way down a dusty sideroad in the desert of western Egypt, headed toward a monastery.
Claiming to be security officers, the gunmen ordered the passengers to get out. They separated the men from women and children, and ordered them to surrender their mobile phones. They instructed the men to say the shahada, the Islamic declaration of faith.
When the men refused, the gunmen started to shoot. At least 28 people were killed, several with a single shot to the head, according to Egyptian authorities and relatives of the victims.
The attack in Minya governorate, 120 miles south of Cairo on Friday, was a coldblooded escalation of a campaign of sectarian violence targeting minority Christians that has left more than 100 people dead since December and shaken the country’s government.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility in the latest assault, many of whose victims the Egyptian Health Ministry said were children. Yet it bore all the hallmarks of the Islamic State, which in the past six months has dispatched suicide bomb- ers into crowded Sunday services in three cities and caused an entire community of Christians in north- ern Sinai to flee their homes in panic.
The Egyptian response to the attack came hours later. Tamer Mohamed, a spokesman for the Egyptian military, said Egyptian fighter jets had carried out airstrikes on six militant camps in eastern Libya.
News of the airstrikes came as President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi delivered a speech warning that the attack on Christians “will not go unan- swered.”
Egypt “will never hesitate to launch strikes against terrorist camps anywhere,” he said, calling on President Donald Trump and the international community to act against states that finance terrorism.
The attack in Minya, a governorate straddling the Nile where about one-third of the population is Christian, signaled the widening geographic reach of extremist militants in Egypt, and the failure of el-Sissi’s intelli- gence services to penetrate their ranks and prevent further attacks.
“It shows a new focus on a soft targets for maximum carnage,” said Mokhtar Awad, an expert on Egyptian militancy at George Washing- ton University.
At least seven armed assail- ants, some masked, lay in wait for the victims on a sandy road leading from a busy highway to the Monas- tery of St. Samuel the Confes- sor, which is home to about 100 monks. They attacked three vehicles traveling in convoy — two buses carrying worshipers from the nearby governorate of Beni Suef, and a pickup truck carrying laborers, all headed to the monastery.
“Everyone is trying to identify the dead and wounded,” said Bishop Makarios, the leader of the Copts in Minya and a critic of Egyptian secu- rity lapses. “There is no time for anger yet.”
Preparing WASHINGTON — for North Korea’s growing threat, the Pentagon will try to shoot down an inter- continental-range missile for the first time in a test next week. The goal is to simulate a North Korean ICBM aimed at the U.S. homeland, officials said Friday
The American interceptor has a spotty track record, succeeding in nine of 17 attempts against missiles of less-then-intercontinental range since 1999. The most recent test, in June 2014, was a success, but followed three straight failures.
The system has evolved from the multibillion-dollar effort triggered by President Ronald Reagan’s 1983 push for a “Star Wars” solution to ballistic missile threats during the Cold War, when the Soviet Union was the major worry.
North Korea is now the focus of U.S. efforts because its leader, Kim Jong Un, has vowed to field a nucle- ar-armed missile capable of reaching American territory. He has yet to test an intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM, but Pentagon offi- cials believe he is speeding in that direction.
Marine Lt. Gen. Vincent Stewart, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, said this week that “left unchecked,” Kim will eventually succeed.
The Pentagon has a variety of missile defense systems, but the one designed with a potential North Korean ICBM in mind is perhaps the most technologically challenging. Critics say it also is the least reliable.
The basic idea is to fire a rocket into space upon warning of a hostile missile launch. The rocket releases a 5-footlong device called a “kill vehicle” that uses internal guidance systems to steer into the path of the oncoming missile’s warhead, destroying it by force of impact. Officially known as the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system, the Pentagon likens it to hitting a bullet with a bullet.
The Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency, which is responsible for developing and testing the system, has scheduled the intercept test for Tuesday.
An interceptor is to be launched from an underground silo at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California and soar toward the target, which will be fired from a test range on Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific. If all goes as planned, the “kill vehicle” will slam into the ICBM-like target’s mock warhead high over the Pacific Ocean.
The target will be a custom-made missile meant to simulate an ICBM, meaning it willflyfaster than missiles used in previous intercept tests, according to Christopher Johnson, spokesman for the Missile Defense Agency.
“We conduct increasingly complex test scenarios as the program matures and advances,” Johnson said Friday. “Testing against an ICBM-type threat is the next step in that process.”
The interceptor system has been in place since 2004, but it has never been used in combat or fully tested. There currently are 32 interceptors in silos at Fort Greely in Alaska and four at Vandenberg, north of Los Angeles. The Pentagon says it will have eight more, for a total of 44, by the end of this year.