Including a strong contingent from Germany.
EL-ARISH, Egypt (AP) — A fringe group so extreme that it worries even Egypt’s Muslim ultraconservatives is secretly reviving itself with greater firepower and followers in the country’s volatile Sinai Peninsula.
Followers of the group known as Takfir wil-Hijra, dubbed “Takfiris,” lead secretive, isolated lives where anything and anyone that does not adhere to their limited interpretation of the Quran is deemed heretical. They dream of a puritanical Islamic state in Sinai.
While not all Takfiris are militants fighting jihad, or holy war, their ideology makes them easy pool to draw from for the armed groups believed to be behind attacks against Israel and Egypt’s military in Sinai.
Takfir wil-Hijra has swelled in numbers in recent months, multiplying from a few hundred faithful in Sinai before last year’s popular uprising to at least 4,500, living in the impoverished small towns of northern Sinai, according to security officials and local Bedouin tribal leaders. Their rise underlines how lawlessness after security agencies fell apart with the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak last year have fueled the spread of more hardline ideologies in Egypt.
The long festering woes in Sinai have come to the forefront as the Egyptian military wages a week-old expanded operation in the peninsula aimed at uprooting Islamic militants. The operation was sparked by a surprise attack earlier this month in which gunmen killed 16 Egyptian soldiers at a checkpoint near the border, then attempted an attack into Israel.
Sinai’s arid land of rugged mountains and desert roads dotted by towns and villages has long been neglected by the government, with investments directed to just a few tourist-friendly cities along its southern Red Sea tip. Its northern territory, which borders the Mediterranean Sea, Israel and the Gaza Strip, remained largely desolate, subsisting mostly on illegal trafficking of migrants and drugs as well as trade through underground tunnels to Gaza, largely sealed off by Israel and Egypt since the militant group Hamas took power there in 2007.