The jihadis are waiting in Egypt We had all better hope they are correct. Sinai's population is 500,000; the rest of the country weighs in at 85 million. The second half of the argument about Sinai, militant Islamism and the nation's political impasse goes as follows: while Sinai may be the heartland of whatever violent jihadist groups remain in the country after their gradual defeat in the 1980s and 1990s, the brand of political Islam that dominates the rest of the country is the Muslim Brotherhood. The difference is that the Brotherhood believes in peaceful and often charitable endeavour, rather than war. Even after this week's massacre of 50 of its supporters outside the Republican Guard barracks in Cairo, most shot down by the police and army as they called for the reinstatement of their deposed president, its leaders say they are committed to non-violent resistance. It is hard to portray the Brotherhood as a warrior caste, though attempts have been made, when the casualty list from Monday morning's "clashes" are so one-sided: just one soldier and two police died, and we have still not been told how. Yet fears that the worsening fighting between supporters of Mr Morsi, troops, and the largely secular protesters who demanded his overthrow might descend into civil war are not limited to scare-mongers. Here is what the Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party, the organisation it set up and controls to run in elections, had to say in the immediate aftermath: "The party calls on the international community and international organisations and bodies, and all the free world, to intervene to stop further massacres and end military rule, so as not to create a new Syria in the Arab world." If it does not intend to take up arms against the new order, how could Egypt end up like Syria? One answer, of course, rests with the army. If the military leadership wanted to look like a new Assad, it could hardly have done a better job on Monday. After shooting large numbers of civilians, it then held an absurd press conference in which a television station whose coverage it did not like - Al Jazeera - was ejected, and in which it simply refused to offer an explanation as to how 50 citizens died. It claimed the Republican Guard base came under attack from "armed terrorists" - a phrase Mr Assad's flacks also used from the start of the Syrian uprising - and showed dubious videos to prove it. All were filmed in daylight, even though the fighting began in the darkness of early dawn. Whatever the claim and counter-claim about who started the trouble, if the army cannot defend itself without killing large numbers of civilians, one wonders how it can claim to be competent to introduce the democratic institutions that most Egyptians crave. That incompetence is reassuring to some Egyptians, in a strange way. Many of the secular classes who demonstrated against Mr Morsi - particularly in Cairo, where support for the Brotherhood is weakest - still trust the army to hand over power eventually. They believe that unlike in Syria, or in Algeria in the 1990s, where the army also stepped in to annul an electoral process after an Islamist party looked like coming out on top, the army has no appetite for civilian power. As they see it, the fact that it has no competence for it either lends weight to their arguments. They may be fooling themselves. But in any case an all-out descent into Algeria-style conflict is only one option for a more violent Egyptian future. What alarmed many observers - including some in Washington - about the Brotherhood's year-long rule was that its message of peaceful Islamism did not bear the expected fruit, in terms of a dying away of the more violent variety. "There is some concern in some parts of the US government that in the last year Salafi jihadist groups have strengthened, not weakened," says Seth Jones, a jihad-watcher at the Rand Corporation, with a background in US military special operations. The signs are fairly clear even outside Sinai, which has seen soldiers killed in terror attacks, skirmishes on the Israeli border, and repeated bombing, Yemen-style, of gas pipelines. On September 11 2011, militant groups stormed the American embassy in Cairo, an incident overshadowed by the death later that evening of the US ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens, in a similar attack in Benghazi. US intelligence now believes Egyptian jihadis played a key role in both attacks. It focuses on a group led by an Egyptian with close ties to Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian leader of al-Qaeda, called Mohammed Jamal. One of his close associates in Cairo is Mohammed al-Zawahiri, Ayman's brother. Groups like his, which are now regularly issuing calls to battle on al-Qaeda's favoured online media platforms, of course distance themselves from the Brotherhood, whose engagement in the political process they oppose; and the favour is returned. But their continuing existence suits the rhetoric of the Brotherhood, and its message of "either us, or terror" - a message that was ironically purveyed constantly by ex-President Hosni Mubarak even as he oversaw a gradual Islamisation of Egyptian society. Notably, while Mohammed Jamal was eventually arrested under the Brotherhood, Mohammed al-Zawahiri was released from prison, and continues to roam Cairo's television studios, defending the jihadist cause. And what starts in the TV studio in the Middle East often ends up on the street - by way of places like Sinai. There is no end in sight to the political impasse between the army and the Brotherhood. The two sides are not talking, and the Brotherhood threatens endless resistance. Washington is reluctant to intervene. Saudi Arabia and other neighbours, now seeing Egypt as a new front in the war on political Islam, are egging the army on (and sending cash). Compromise, in the last two years in the Middle East, has been short on the ground. But where compromise fails, violence often begins, and despite Egypt's overwhelmingly urbane and gentle people, there is no shortage of those who could purvey it.