Skip to main content

EGYPTIAN VILLAGE WHERE MOSQUE WAS BOMBED HAD BEEN WARNED.



CAIRO (AP) :
Elders of a village in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula where militants killed 305 people in a mosque had been warned by Islamic State operatives to stop collaborating with security forces and to suspend rituals associated with Islam’s mystical Sufi movement, security officials and residents said.

The latest warning came as recently as a week ago, telling villagers in Al-Rawdah not to hold Sufi rituals on Nov. 29-30 to commemorate the birth of the Prophet Muhammad, according to residents and the officials who work for security and military intelligence agencies operating in Sinai.

Local operatives of the Islamic State group’s affiliate in Sinai consider Sufis to be heretics who should be killed. Ahmed Saqr, an expert on the Sinai insurgency, said militants had publicly identified the mosque, which also serves as a Sufi center, as a target months ago.

He wrote on Saturday in a Facebook post that the selection of the Al-Rawdah mosque as a target “raises questions about those who read, analyze and prepare in our security agencies” and whether anything could have been done to prevent the “untold horrors.”


Mohammed Ibrahim, a university student from the village, said militants had warned residents a few days before Friday’s attack not to collaborate with security forces. The warning, he told The Associated Press by telephone Sunday from the nearby town of Bir al-Abd, followed the detention three weeks ago by villagers of three suspected militants who were handed over to security forces.


The militants also distributed leaflets several times ordering villagers not to cooperate with security forces and to abandon Sufism, he said.


Another Al-Rawdah resident, Mohammed Darwish, 30, said militants stormed the home of village tribal leader Sheikh Hussein al-Jerirr twice this year.
“They threatened him not to hold Sufi gatherings, and last week, they came on motorbikes and asked residents not to participate in Sufi rituals,” Darwish said.


Egypt’s military and security forces have been waging a tough and costly campaign against militants in the towns, villages and desert mountains of northern Sinai. Across the country, thousands have been arrested in a crackdown on suspected Islamists and other dissenters and government critics.


In the past year, militants have bombed churches in the capital of Cairo and other cities, killing dozens of Christians. The IS affiliate is also believed to be behind the 2016 downing of a Russian passenger jet that killed all 224 people on board, decimating Egypt’s vital tourism sector.


The bloodshed at the Al-Rawdah mosque was the first major militant attack on a Muslim congregation, and it eclipsed violence in the country dating back to an Islamic militant insurgency in the 1990s.
The mosque is frequented by Sufis and is the local headquarters of the prominent Sufi sect, or tareeqah, founded by the local al-Jerir clan, a branch of the powerful Al-Sawarkah tribe.


The deadliest attack by Muslim extremists in Egypt’s modern history came less than a week before the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday on Thursday. Celebrations climax on Wednesday and Thursday, when millions of the Sufi movement’s followers are expected to gather for rituals in mosques, shrines and squares across much of this majority Muslim country.


Militants from the IS affiliate have targeted Sufis before. Last year, they beheaded a leading Sufi religious figure, Sheikh Suleiman Abu Heraz, who was believed to be over 90 years old. They posted photos of the killing online.


Islamic State propaganda often denounces Sufis. In the January edition of an IS online magazine, a figure purporting to be a high-level official in the group’s Sinai affiliate vowed to target Sufis, accusing them of idolatry and heretical “innovation” in religion, warning that the group will “not permit (their) presence” in Sinai or Egypt.
Perhaps as many as 15 million Egyptians belong to Sufi orders, which hold sessions with chanting, poetry readings and ritual dancing meant to draw the faithful closer to God. Sufis also revere the tombs of holy men.


Islamic hard-liners view such practices as improper, even heretical, and militants in the region often destroy Sufi shrines, saying they encourage idolatry because people pray to those buried there.
The austere, one-story Al-Rawdah mosque sits on a main road. Its Friday prayers routinely attract villagers, travelers and workers from a nearby salt factory. About 500 men and boys were thought to have been in the mosque and an adjacent plaza at the time of the attack.


According to official figures, 305 people, including 27 children, were killed, with 128 wounded.

Security officials say IS militants infiltrated the area of Bir al-Abd and Al-Rawdah several months ago, opening a new front in the mostly desert region away from the main theater of operations in el-Arish and the towns of Rafah and Sheikh Zuwail to the east.


They have since waged deadly attacks on police and military forces, although the region has yet to attract the kind of heavy security seen elsewhere in the trouble spots of northern Sinai, according to the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media.
“The expansion of the militants to Bir al-Abd shows that they can go anywhere,” said Hassan Khalaf, a tribal leader in the Suez Canal city of Ismailia, where some of the wounded from Friday’s attack were taken.
“There are security flaws. ... We need to wage an all-out offensive to crush them.”
___
Associated Press writers Samy Magdy in Cairo and Maggie Michael in Ismailia, Egypt, contributed to this report.



SOURCE:

Comments

POPULAR NEWS FROM THIS SITE:

CUBA CLAIMS CANADIAN PRIME MINISTER IS FIDEL CASTRO'S SON.

The suicide note left by Fidel Castro’s eldest son has rocked the Cuban nation this week, with the most astonishing revelation being the claim that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was his half-brother and the son of the late Fidel Castro. The handwritten note left by Fidel Castro Diaz-Balart, 68, the eldest of Fidel Castro’s children, appears to confirm the longstanding rumor in Cuba that Fidel Castro fathered Justin Trudeau after a public tryst with Margaret Trudeau in 1970. “ Castro Diaz-Balart, who had been attended by a group of doctors for several months due to a state of profound depression, committed suicide this morning ,”  Cubadebate website reported. The death of the high-profile government nuclear scientist, also known as “Fidelito”, or Little Fidel, because of how much he looked like his father, stunned the nation, however it is his “ explosive ” suicide note that has set tongues wagging in Havana. Amid a wide-ranging barrage of complaint

MINERS IN NAMIBIA DISCOVER SHIPWRECK LOADED $13 MILLION WORTH OF GOLD.

Image: Dieter Noli. Diamond miners working off the coast of Africa were beyond surprised when they discovered a 500-year-old shipwreck teeming with gold worth $13 million and other treasures. The ship, aptly named ‘Bom Jesus’ or ‘Good Jesus,’ was like a miracle to the miners. Bom Jesus was first identified and discovered by geologists working for the mining company De Beers in 2008. It was found off the coast of Namibia near Oranjemund. Image: Dieter Noli. According to experts, Bom Jesus is from the Golden era of Portuguese explorers who set sail in all directions in search of new lands to colonize. The ship left Lisbon in 1533 under the supervision of Sir Francisco de Noronha. But on its way to India, it mysteriously vanished. Before the discovery, the miners were draining an artificial salt lake. As the lake dried out, many lost ships were found at the bottom of the lake. Bom Jesus was among them, and it is considered the oldest of all the shipw

LETHOTO'S PRIME MINISTER FACES IMPEACHMENT MOTION OVER HIS WIFE'S ACT.

Lethoto Prime Minister Tom Thabane & The first Lady   Maesaiah Thabane. Maseru, LETHOTO: Lesotho's Prime Minister Thomas Thabane is facing a motion of no confidence for allegedly allowing his wife to meddle in government affairs, as political in-fighting rocks his ruling party and threatens the breakdown of his coalition government.  The motion was filed in parliament this week by a member of Thabane's own ruling All Basotho Convention (ABC), raising the possibility he will call snap elections in the tiny mountainous southern African kingdom.  "We hereby move a motion that this honourable house has no confidence in a government of Lesotho led by the Prime Minister Thomas Motsoahe Thabane,"  read a motion filed by ABC's Motebang Koma and seconded by the main opposition Democratic Congress deputy leader, Motlalentoa Letsosa. Parliament was adjourned on Monday with no date fixed for it to sit again. While the motion did not outline reasons fo

BEES 'ARRESTS' SUSPECTED THIEVES IN UGANDA.

Bees 'handcuffed' one of the suspects around the wrist, while another had the TV set reportedly stuck on his hands.  Image: Daily Monitor. Kampala, UGANDA: Two burglars who are suspected to have stolen a television set in Sofiia village, Busia Town in eastern Uganda are in police custody after they were attacked by a swarm of bees. Like police would handcuff a suspect, a swarm of bees mobbed the hands of one of the suspects, while another reportedly had the TV set stuck on his hands as they returned the stolen items to where they had been picked from. Ms Rashida Jowelia, the owner of the property, said her TV set was stolen from her house last Friday, but she decided to seek the services of a medicine man in Sofia Village rather than report the matter to police. The suspects were identified as Wycliffe Kinara and Richard Duki, both Kenyan nationals from Nakuru. Bees 'handcuffed' one of them around the wrist, while another had the TV set reportedly stuck on his hands

HOW BOTSWANA NEW PRESIDENT SURPRISED THE WORLD BY APPOINTING 29 YEARS OLD WOMAN MINISTER.

The newly sworn in presidentof Botswana, Mokgweetsi Masisi has also sworn in his 18-member cabinet last Wednesday and making the list is the country’s youngest member of parliament Bogolo Joy Kenewendo. The 30-year-old economist, media commentator and policy analyst first joined parliament in 2016 as a specially elected MP by former president Ian Khama, and she is now the Investment, Trade and Industry Minister. Her appointment as a minister makes her the country’s youngest minister and one of few women to ever gain political leadership in the landlocked Southern African country. This feat has generated a lot of reaction from many young Africans on social media who were not only admiring her good looks, but rethinking the choice of older political leaders in their countries. One Twitter user EnviroMan from South Africa compared Bogolo to the women in his country’s cabinet who he described as Gogos – which means Grandmothers in the Xhosa language. “Get to

A 26-YEARS-OLD WOMAN ADOPTS 14 AFRICAN ORPHANS.

London, ENGLAND: A young British woman has become mum to a staggering 14 Tanzanian children she met after volunteering in an orphanage on her gap year. Letty McMaster, 26, was just 18 years old when a month-long trip volunteering at an orphanage in Africa changed her life forever. She ended up staying for three years to support the children she had met, and when the orphanage shut down, Letty took in nine youngsters who would have been left homeless. Seven years on, she lives with the children after becoming legal guardian to them ALL - as well as five more kids she met on the streets or at a safe house she runs. Letty McMaster. Letty, from Tunbridge Wells, Kent,  said:  "These children are my whole life, I raise them all on my own and they keep me going through the long hours of juggling everything. "I'd always had in mind that I wanted to help street children so my family and friends weren't surprised but I never expected to end up doing all this. " I am the pa

WOMAN ACCIDENTALLY SHOOTS A MAN IN THE HEAD WHILE SHOWING OFF ON FACEBOOK LIVE.

Houston police are investigating an incident where a man was accidentally shot in the head in a car. Three people were inside the vehicle in a petrol station carpark around 2:30am after Easter Sunday. A Facebook Live video was recording the two people playing around with two handguns, however, at one point, victim Devyn Holmes could be heard saying: "You're making me nervous." Another person replied: "It ain't got no clip, bud." Holmes tried to stop Cassandra Damper from waving the gun around the in car while she was talking about 'lying ass hoes'. He asked Damper where she's from and she replies: "Say something bitch". Seconds later the trigger was pulled and 26-year-old Holmes was shot in the head. Image: Jam Press. A CCTV camera captured the moment Damper and the other man jumped out of the car before several people who heard the commotion came over to see if they could help. Police and emergency se

UGANDA ANNOUNCES "KILL THE GAYS" LAW IMPOSING DEATH PENALTY TO HOMOSEXUALS.

Kampala, UGANDA: Uganda has announced plans to impose the death penalty on homosexuals. The bill, colloquially known as “Kill the Gays” in Uganda, was nullified five years ago on a technicality, but the government said on Thursday it plans to resurrect it within weeks. The government said the legislation would curb a rise in “unnatural sex” in the east African nation. “Homosexuality is not natural to Ugandans, but there has been a massive recruitment by gay people in schools, and especially among the youth, where they are promoting the falsehood that people are born like that,”  the country’s ethics and integrity minister, Simon Lokodo, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “Our current penal law is limited. It only criminalises the act. We want it made clear that anyone who is even involved in promotion and recruitment has to be criminalised. Those that do grave acts will be given the death sentence.” Mr Lokodo said the bill, which has the support of the co

STUDY SHOWS "DTP VACCINE" KILLS MORE BABIES THAN IT SAVES.

A shocking 2017 study published in Ebiomedicine (a peer-reviewed open access online-only medical journal) reveals that the DTP vaccine kills ten times more babies than it saves.  Researcher Søren Wengel Mogensen examined the mortality rates of infants between the ages of 5 and 5 months who were given early vaccinations for DTP (Diptheria-Tetanus-Pertussis) and OPV (Oral Polio Vaccine). They found that there was a 10-fold mortality rate compared to infants who did not receive the vaccine: Results Among 3–5-month-old children, having received DTP (± OPV) was associated with a mortality hazard ratio (HR) of 5.00 (95% CI 1.53–16.3) compared with not-yet-DTP-vaccinated children. Differences in background factors did not explain the effect. The negative effect was particularly strong for children who had received DTP-only and no OPV (HR = 10.0 (2.61–38.6)). All-cause infant mortality after 3 months of age increased after the introduction of these vaccines (HR = 2.12