Egypt takes the battle to ISIL
BY REEM TAMO
The Egyptian military launched retaliatory air raids against Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) training facilities in the city of Derna in Libya last week.
The aerial bombardment killed 64 ISIL fighters, including three of its leadership, the Libyan army confirmed.
The attacks came in response to ISIL’s beheading of 21 Egyptian Copts – migrant workers who were seized in Libya in December and January. A video of the beheadings caused nationwide grief and worldwide outrage after ISIL released it as part of its
propaganda campaign. Egyptian and regional media said that Cairo was now on a war footing, but Ibrahim Elnur, chair of the Political Science Department, believes it is premature to call it that.
“I don’t believe the air strikes by Egypt are an invitation to war between the two countries because Libya is fragmented into many factions within it.”
In a televised address on Sunday night, President Abdel- Fattah El-Sisi said that Egypt reserves the right to respond “in the appropriate manner and timing, to exact retribution”.
Foreign Minister Sameh Shukri was dispatched to the UN Security Council in New York to seek international support for anti-ISIL action.
The air raids, however, raised fears questions that Egypt could be unwittingly dragged into a regional war which has been simmering since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.
TV political anchor Moataz El Demerdash told The Caravan that while he agrees with the military’s retaliatory strike, he is concerned that it exposes to danger thousands of other Egyptians who still live and work in Libya.
“What happened in Libya is barbaric and a result of the state of chaos in the country,” he said. “Egypt should evacuate its citizens from Libya.”
In the meantime, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, France, Jordan and Russia have expressed their support for Egypt and have promised to provide assistance.
Egypt’s air raids come a week after Jordan retaliated against ISIL positions in Syria following a video which showed one of their air force pilots burned alive by the extremist group.
ISIL – which was known as the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) in 2011 – started to take advantage of a political vacuum in post- invasion Iraq as early as 2004.
Believed to have been an Al-Qaeda affiliate (Al-Qaeda in Iraq) originating in Anbar Province, the group moved to the Nineveh province in 2007 and began a campaign of attacks, intimidation and fear.
When the Syrian civil war began in 2011, the extremist group moved its operations there to help bring down the government of President Bashar Al-Assad.
In June, ISIL seized the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, the country’s second largest, and began to move southward to the capital Baghdad. Since then, a number of extremist groups in Pakistan, Syria, Egypt and Libya have declared their allegiance to ISIL and its extremism.
