Egypt's government struggles to exert authority in the Sinai desert NORTH SINAI, Egypt - A week after seven Egyptian soldiers vanished into the clutches of militants who roam this nation's restive Sinai desert, President Mohamed Morsi celebrated their release with a victorious reception at a Cairo air base, where he credited cooperation between his government and the military for the rescue. But Bedouin tribal leaders and residents of villages in north Sinai, an area where homegrown militant groups are gaining strength, say Morsi's government had little to do with it. Rather, leaders of Bedouin tribes that form a majority in this region said they led a negotiated solution to the hostage crisis for fear of sullying their mutually beneficial relationship with the military, a power center they view as more potent than the government. Bedouin say the military mostly ignores their smuggling enterprises and the desert's simmering militant activity, as long as it leaves soldiers alone - a line that the kidnapping earlier this month crossed. The incident underscored both the widening militant presence in the Sinai, a vast region along Egypt's shared border with Israel and the Gaza Strip, and Morsi's continued inability, two years after the fall of former autocrat Hosni Mubarak, to influence the increasingly violent course of events in a near-lawless territory that has long been the military and intelligence services" jurisdiction. There is no security at all. So if you get upset and you want to blow something up, you go and do it," said Hussein Menaii, the tribal leader who brokered the soldiers" release in a talk between military officials and Salafist Jihad, the group that abducted them and whose members come mostly from Menaii's Sawarka tribe. Promises unfulfilled An annex to Egypt's 1979 Camp David peace treaty with Israel restricts the quantity of troops and military equipment in the peninsula. For years, that meant that Egypt's interior ministry and intelligence service performed much of the region's policing, which Bedouin say included arbitrary arrests and kidnappings that fueled opposition to the state. During Egypt's 2011 uprising, armed Bedouin tribesmen chased police from their posts across much of Sinai. Since then, only the military has had a tangible, if limited, presence in the peninsula. Meanwhile, violence has risen in the form of attacks on police stations, tourist kidnappings, rockets fired at Israel and explosions of a pipeline that transported natural gas to Israel and Jordan. Some of the shadowy militant groups behind the incidents are believed to be rooted in Bedouin communities and motivated by anger at the Egyptian state, while others are linked to Palestinian militant groups and direct their attacks at Israel. Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood have sought inroads in the Sinai by promising development and equal rights to a Bedouin population that has long complained of discrimination, abuse and neglect and threatened further unrest. Since taking office last July, Morsi has visited the Sinai three times and hosted several delegations of Bedouin tribal leaders in Cairo - more than Mubarak ever did.