Militants Kill 235 in Attack on Sufi Mosque in Egypt

Story by NY Times
Written by DeClan Walsh and Nour Youssef

CAIRO — In the deadliest attack on civilians in Egypt’s modern history, Islamist militants detonated a bomb inside a crowded mosque on Friday and then sprayed gunfire on panicked worshipers as they fled the building, killing at least 235 people and wounding at least 109 others.

The scale and ruthlessness of the assault, which occurred in a small town in the insurgency-racked Sinai Peninsula, sent shock waves across the nation, not just for the number of deaths but also for the choice of target. Attacks on mosques are rare in Egypt, where the Islamic State has targeted Coptic Christian churches and pilgrims but avoided Muslim places of worship.

The attack injected a new element into Egypt’s volatile stew because most of the victims were Sufi Muslims, who practice a mystical form of Islam that some extremists deem heretical. And it underscored the failure of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who has insisted he needs to crush political opposition to combat the threat of Islamist militancy, to deliver on his promises of security to Egyptians.

“The scene was horrific,” said Ibrahim Sheteewi, a resident of Bir al-Abed, the north Sinai town where the attack took place. “The bodies were scattered on the ground outside the mosque. I hope God punishes them for this.”

A Sinai police officer said the dead included at least 15 children. A witness said he helped gather the bodies of 25 children.

"Guns are the problem""Religion is the problem"No. Actually humans have been killing each other every way they can for a long time. The Militants attack the military. Terrorists attack innocent people. These are innocent people. And these are terrorists.

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The Egyptian military, which has been battling a local affiliate of the Islamic State in northern Sinai for years, carried out several airstrikes in the area that targeted militants fleeing in four-wheel-drive vehicles, an Egyptian military official said.

The military declared a curfew in Bir al-Abed and in the main northern Sinai town of El Arish.

Violence in Sinai surged after 2013, when Mr. Sisi came to power in a military takeover that deposed the democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Even by recent standards in Egypt, where militants have blown up Christian worshipers as they knelt at church pews and gunned down pilgrims in buses, it was an unusually ruthless assault.

“I can’t believe they attacked a mosque,” a Muslim cleric in Bir al-Abed said by phone, requesting anonymity for fear he could also be attacked. In recent months, the Islamic State had threatened and killed a number of Sufis there but it had not attacked a place of worship, the cleric said.

The attack started midday during Friday Prayers when a bomb — mostly likely set off by a suicide bomber, according to security officials — ripped through Al Rawda mosque in Bir al-Abed, a small town 125 miles northeast of Cairo. As worshipers fled, they were confronted with group of gunmen who, witnesses said, had pulled up outside in a four-wheel-drive vehicles.
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Read More: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/24/world/middleeast/mosque-attack-egypt.html