Repeated movies!

As Eid Al-Fitr was being celebrated, there were mortar shells and gunfire fired at our officers and soldiers in Sinai and screams emanating from their throats, exhausted by yelling that their ammunition had run out and that they had nothing to defend themselves with. They were exhausted by their calls for the leadership to supply them with ammunition, but to no avail. These officers and soldiers suffered their fates at the hands of a few terrorists.

This scene is the 47th replay of the same scene in Sinai since the government announced its war on terror, which did not exist in the country until it staged a coup. The government created terrorism to remain in power and ensure its survival.

We are talking about an army with an arsenal of weapons and various types of aircrafts against so-called terrorists, the number of which we do not know exactly. It had been said before that they were no more than 3,000 individuals, while official statements issued by the Armed Forces regarding the number of terrorists killed over the years amounts to much more than 3,000. We do not know if the individuals they killed were actual terrorists or innocent residents of Sinai. Regardless of the number, we must ask how an armed group can defeat a large army armed with the latest weapons and equipment.

READ: HRW calls on Israel to clarify its role in Egypt’s Sinai

They are sending young people, from the salt of the Egyptian earth, from their villages and towns, who unfortunately fell under compulsory enlistment, to Sinai. They are not trained to fight and have nothing but rifles and some light weapons, and they are left out in the open to face their deaths alone.

The most absurd part about the most recent scene of this was that the very next day, the Interior Ministry announced that it avenged the death of 14 of its soldiers by killing 14 terrorists who carried out the checkpoint bombing operation, all of whom were gathered in an apartment in Arish. The question that arises here is that if they were able to reach the killers this quickly, why didn’t they arrest them before they carried out the terrorist operation and bombed the checkpoint? To make matters even more absurd, they announced, a day later, that they killed eight terrorists involved in the attack on the Batal 14 checkpoint. What about the 14 they killed in cold blood that they claimed were responsible for bombing the checkpoint?

Such extrajudicial killings have become a habit of the coup-led government. Why didn’t they arrest them in the apartment, question them, and give them a fair public trial in accordance with the law? Egypt has become a quasi-state, as the current president who led the coup once said in one of his speeches!

What is strange and causes us to wonder is the fact that in all of the past terrorist attacks, we find that all of the terrorists escape and none are caught, killed, or wounded at the site of the operation. Therefore, none are interrogated to find out the details of the operation, who they work for, who funds them, etc. With regards to the tragedy of the martyrdom of the officers and soldiers in the Arish checkpoint, the question arises again, where are the state and its security and intelligence agencies?

READ: Egypt family face ‘severe breakdown’ at son’s impending execution 

It is bitterly ironic that at the same time these soldiers were killed, Al-Sisi was celebrating Eid with children of martyrs at a luxurious hotel. He carried two children on his shoulders in the pictures in an attempt to express false humanity, which only the foolish would believe.

He sends the parents to death and holds clichéd parties for them, making them wear military uniforms and pretends to fight terrorists with them. He is instilling in them evil, savagery and vengeance, and ingraining in them the values of evil and criminality. In other words, he wants to create a violent generation that hates their own people and wants to seek revenge against them due to the lies and fabrications in the media which say that the people of Sinai are murderers.

They no longer suspect that Israel is involved in the terrorist operations occurring in Sinai and instead hold the “terrorist” people of Sinai responsible for them. They demolish their homes while their owners are inside, set fire to their farms and displace them despite the fact that Israel is benefitting from all that is happening in Sinai and is the only party interested in matters remaining heated and turbulent in Sinai. They have their agents in Sinai, as well as Mohammed Dahlan’s group, who settled in Sinai after fleeing from Gaza in 2006. Israel is interested in turning the Egyptians against Sinai, even if Egyptians reach the level of wanting to eliminate Sinai in order to stop the terrorist operations and rid them of this chronic crisis. Israel wants us to reach this level and unfortunately, several senior journalists demanded this, moreover, a strategic expert who regularly appears on television claimed that Sinai was not within Egypt’s borders during the rule of the Ottoman Empire, ignoring the fact that there were no borders in the Islamic state!

We must keep in mind the so-called “deal of the century” when we analyse the terrorist operations taking place in the Sinai and the alternative homeland called for by the Zionists.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.