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29 March 2024

Militant attacks kill 7 soldiers in Egypt's Sinai

Published
By AFP

Seven Egyptian soldiers and several militants were killed on Thursday in at least two attacks in North Sinai where the army is battling the local branch of the Islamic State group, police said.

Gunmen opened fire on soldiers with automatic rifles and rockets at checkpoints in Sheikh Zuweid and Rafah, the Egyptian crossing point to the Palestinian Gaza Strip, police officials told AFP.

A third attack targeting a military facility took place in North Sinai, but police did not specify where.

At least seven soldiers were killed and 20 people wounded, mostly military personnel, the officials said, adding that seven "terrorist elements" were killed during the gunfights.

In a separate incident, a mortar shell fell on a house east of the provincial capital El-Arish, wounding three civilians, police and health officials said.

Ansar Beit al-Maqdis (Partisans of Jerusalem), founded in 2011, changed its name last year to the Sinai Province after pledging allegiance to IS, which controls territory in Iraq and Syria.

The group, which has claimed several sophisticated attacks against security forces in the restive peninsula, now wants to establish a province of the self-declared IS "caliphate".

After the army ousted Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in July 2013, militants claimed a string of deadly attacks against security forces which they claimed were in retaliation for a brutal government
crackdown against Islamists.

Ansar Beit al-Maqdis' initial attacks in 2011 were against Israel.