Six soldiers killed in North Sinai attack

Six soldiers were killed in a militant attack on a security checkpoint in the northern Sinai Peninsula, the Egyptian army announced today.

“Unidentified gunmen attacked a security installation in the city of Al-Arish with grenades and small arms,” army spokesman Tamer al-Rifai said in a press statement.

“Security personnel engaged the attackers and eventually forced them to retreat carrying several of their dead and injured,” he added, without providing the number of militants killed in the melee.

According to al-Rifai, six soldiers were killed in the attack, for which no group has yet claimed responsibility.

Friday’s attack comes only one day after Egypt announced the extension of a countrywide state of emergency by another three months.

Read: 23 Egyptian soldiers killed in car bombs

Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula has remained the epicentre of a deadly militant insurgency since mid-2013, when Mohamed Morsi, the country’s first freely-elected president, was ousted and imprisoned in a bloody military coup.

Since then, hundreds of Egyptian security personnel have been killed in attacks across Sinai, especially in the peninsula’s volatile northeastern quadrant, which shares borders with both Israel and the Hamas-run Gaza Strip.