The indiscriminate state response fed a cycle of political violence and further alienated Sinai’s Bedouins from Cairo. Under the three-decade–long emergency law that was in place until 2012, security forces under the Ministry of the Interior responded to the emerging terrorist threat with dragnet arrests, detaining and torturing thousands, human rights observers say. High-profile bombings of resorts between 20, which had a combined death toll of about 130, as well as a spate of clashes between Bedouins and police, tourist kidnappings, and other smaller attacks occurred after two decades of what were seen as malign policies. "The United States and Israel were telling Mubarak for years that neglect of the Sinai was going to come back to haunt them," says CFR Senior Fellow Steven Cook. In North Sinai, schools and hospitals were left unstaffed. They were blocked from jobs with the police, army, and the peninsular peacekeeping force, the Multinational Force & Observers (MFO), which is one of the region’s largest employers. Cairo encouraged labor migration to the Sinai from the Nile Valley, Pelham wrote, offering these internal migrants preferential access to land, irrigation, and jobs, while denying native Bedouins such basic services and rights as running water and property registration. The North was starved of investment while Mubarak sought to establish a Red Sea Riviera in the more sparsely populated South, particularly in Sharm el-Sheikh, where he had his summer villa. But the capital’s drive to centralize control was never fully realized.īedouins were excluded from tourism and energy development projects championed by Hosni Mubarak, experts say. Since 1979, tribal chiefs have been appointed by the region’s governors, military officers chosen by the central government. The peninsula’s native Bedouins bear long-standing grievances stemming from economic deprivation and political alienation. Palestinians and Egyptians from the Nile Valley make up smaller portions of the peninsula’s population. The Bedouins were stigmatized as collaborators of Israel’s fifteen-year occupation of the peninsula after the 1967 war, and some complain that Cairo continues to view them as a " potential fifth column," wrote Economist reporter Nicolas Pelham.
The region’s majority Bedouin population shares closer historical and cultural ties to the Levant and Arabian Peninsula than the Egyptian mainland.
Though the peninsula is a land bridge connecting Africa and Asia, historically it has separated as much as joined them. Three smaller, more densely populated governorates straddle the Suez Canal. Much of the North’s population is concentrated along the coast, while many inhabitants of the mountainous interior are nomadic. The sparsely populated North and South Sinai are home to 550,000 people, or 0.7 percent of Egypt’s population, on a landmass comprising 6 percent of Egyptian territory. The area contains five of Egypt’s twenty-seven governorates. The Gulf of Aqaba gives Israel its only outlet to the Red Sea. Some 8 percent of global trade transits through the canal, including 3 percent of global oil supplies. The Sinai Peninsula is a strategically significant triangle bounded by Gaza, Israel, and the Gulf of Aqaba to its east, the Mediterranean to its north, and the Suez Canal to its west.
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After the Egyptian military reasserted its authority in July 2013 and cracked down on Islamists nationwide, militant groups escalated their attacks on peninsular security forces and expanded their reach to cities along the Suez Canal and even Cairo. Poverty and political alienation among the region’s native Bedouins, combined with political dislocations since former president Hosni Mubarak’s government was toppled in 2011, have allowed nonstate armed groups to thrive, posing new threats to global trade and the peace on the Egypt-Israel border. Bringing Justice Home: Dispatches from the ISIS ‘Beatles’ TrialĮgypt’s Sinai Peninsula, envisioned by the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli treaty as a buffer zone to build trust and ensure peace, has become a haven for transnational crime and Islamist militancy.
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