Lawless Sinai Shows Risks Rising in Fractured Egypt

By ROBERT F. WORTH, NYT

SHEIKH ZWAYD, Egypt — Every night at dusk, the streets of this desert town near the Israeli border empty out, and the chatter and thump of gunfire and explosives begin. Morning reveals the results: another dead soldier, another police checkpoint riddled with bullets, another kidnapping. In mid-July, the body of a local Christian shop owner was found near the town cemetery, his head severed, his torso in chains.

The northern Sinai Peninsula, long a relatively lawless zone, has become a dark harbinger of what could follow elsewhere in Egypt if the interim government cannot peacefully resolve its standoff with the Islamist protesters camped out in Cairo.

In the five weeks since Egypt’s military ousted the Islamist president, Mohamed Morsi, the endemic violence here has spiraled into something like an insurgency, with mysterious gunmen attacking military and police facilities every night.

Last week, the violence threatened to draw in Israel. On Thursday, Israel briefly closed an airport at the Red Sea resort of Eilat after Egyptian officials warned about the possibility of militants firing rockets from Sinai. The next day, up to five suspected militants were killed and a rocket launcher was destroyed in an airstrike in Sinai, the state news media reported, and there were unconfirmed reports that Israel had carried out the strike.

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