(Cairo) Eleven soldiers were killed on Saturday in Egypt by thwarting a “terrorist” attack near the Suez Canal in the Sinai, a peninsula in the northeast of the country plagued by a jihadist insurgency, the army reported.
Posted at 11:09 a.m.
Updated at 2:12 p.m.
This toll is one of the highest recorded by Egyptian forces in years in Egypt.
“A group of Takfiri elements launched an attack against a military hydraulic pumping station,” a military statement said. The soldiers “repelled them and fighting ensued in which eleven soldiers were killed and five wounded”, according to the text.
The soldiers “continue to pursue the terrorists” to “an isolated region of Sinai”, according to the same source.
The term “takfiris” is generally used to refer to Sunni jihadist or radical Islamist groups.
President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi assured on Facebook that “these terrorist operations will not overcome the determination of the country and its army to cut the evil of terrorism at the root”.
In February 2018, the army and the police launched a vast “anti-terrorist” operation in the Sinai Peninsula, where radical cells are raging, some of which have pledged allegiance to the jihadist group Islamic State (IS). They are also fighting radical insurgents in the Western Desert, between the Nile Valley and the border with Libya.
In the Sinai, the attacks are particularly concentrated on one point: the oil and gas pipelines that supply Israel and Jordan.
Regularly, the army announces that it has killed jihadists in this area.
In all, more than a thousand jihadists and dozens of members of the security forces have been killed, according to official figures – but no independent report is available and North Sinai is off limits to journalists.
The last major bombing in Cairo dates back to May 2020, when an attack targeted the Giza pyramids in the southwest of the capital, injuring 17 a month before Egypt hosted the African Cup of Nations. Football nations.
In August 2019, also in Cairo, around 20 people were killed when a car loaded with explosives rammed three other vehicles at high speed, causing a huge explosion.
The following month, a police officer and seven members of a “terrorist cell” were killed in exchanges of fire in Cairo. These jihadists were preparing, according to the authorities, to attack Christians during the Easter celebrations.