Egypt Bombings Bear The Mark Of Al Qaeda
Updated: 8:35pm UK, Friday 24 January 2014
By Sam Kiley, Foreign Affairs Editor
Not unprecedented, not unpredicted, the Cairo bombings blamed on radical Islamist groups do have a new distinctive signature - al Qaeda.
The global Jihadi movement has specialised for years in what the military call "complex attacks" - the assault of several targets in close chronological order.
The Egyptian capital was rocked by three explosions in one morning.
They were mostly targeting the organs of the state but, by hitting a metro station, they also signalled to the Arab world's most populous state that violence is going to continue to be a way of life.
Ironically, the terror attacks suit the military-dominated government of Egypt as much as it furthers the agenda of the violent groups who want to bring it to its knees.
The massive car bomb outside the state security building in Cairo, which left a gaping hole in the street and at least four dead, was easily predicted.
It flows directly from the massacre of supporters of ousted President Mohammed Morsi during July and August last year as they protested against the military coup that deposed him.
The former president's Muslim Brotherhood has foresworn the use of violence, and continues to insist that this is its position.
But the scale of the killing of Egyptian citizens by their own military last year inevitably led to a violent backlash.
This started in the Sinai where local tribes have been infiltrated by al Qaeda agitators, and further radicalised through violent Islamist groups from neighbouring Gaza, a Palestinian territory.
It has been inflamed by the banning of the Brotherhood late last year and the arrest of many of its leaders who have, therefore, been denied a peaceful platform.
Poor, disenfranchised, youth across the Middle East have been easy prey for the radicalising messages of al Qaeda-style groups who offer a simple means - violence - to a simple solution to their many woes - the establishment of an Islamic caliphate.
By launching attacks on the capital, the terrorists have played into the narrative of the military - that ridding the country of the Brotherhood is part of a necessary fight against terrorism.
The bombs are likely to signal greater attacks on personal freedoms by the government which have already resulted in the rounding up of non-Islamic pro-democracy activists and even the extended detention of foreign journalists.
The military calculation, which has the support of many Egyptians, is that it can crack down on radical Islamic groups so hard that it can crush them - much as it did for decades before the revolution which ended military rule in January three years ago.
The difference today is that al Qaeda-style violence is a global phenomenon which is tearing into the Middle East in Iraq, Syria, the Lebanon, and parts of the Palestinian territories.
It is ultimately self-sustaining, but it is fuelled by oppression.
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