Sinai insurgency: An enduring risk

A man is seen riding his motorbike through a wall destroyed by an attack by the Egyptian Army in a Northern Sinai village [Getty]

"[Multinational Force and Observers soldiers] are outgunned by the terrorists [Sinai Province or SP] right now, and it's a dangerous mission," said retired Lieutenant General Mark Hertling. "They [SP insurgents] have mortars and artillery that they have been firing on the base camps."

The statement came after Defense Secretary Ash Carter formally notified Egypt and Israel that the United States was considering reconfiguring its mission in Sinai by increasing reliance on remote sensing technology and therefore was withdrawing US troops away from the restive North. The reason?

It is Sinai Province. The organisation gave an oath of loyalty to the so-called Islamic Stateof Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) in November 2014.

Egypt in 'a state of war'?

"It is a situation there that has risk," said Pentagon spokesman Captain Jeff Davis, referring to the Sinaian insurgency. The US saw "the risk" coming a while ago. In 2005, a senior Egyptian security official in Sinai told a US official delegation that the "only good Sinaian bedouin is the dead Sinaian bedouin".

Cairo's security policies

More than a decade ago, US security officials and other independent security experts warned that Cairo's security policies in Sinai are both immoral and ineffective; more likely to aggravate an existing problem than resolve it.

The pulling of troops from the MFO owing to an insurgency is the first development of its kind since the peacekeepers were deployed