Last Sunday, Islamic State (IS) attacked two Coptic churches in Egypt, killing at least 44 worshipers gathered for holiday prayers. The attacks followed December’s deadly suicide bombing of another church. To Mokhtar Awad, the Egyptian branch of IS is attempting to move its insurgency from the Northern Sinai—where it has killed hundreds of Egyptian soldiers, and earlier this week launched a rocket at Israel—into Egypt proper.
For months, Islamic State has been accelerating the import of Iraq-style sectarian tactics into Egypt. In doing so, the group hopes to destabilize the Middle East’s most populous country and expand the reach of its by now clearly genocidal project for the region’s minorities. . . . It appears that the group is now focusing more time, resources, and most importantly talent on Egypt, making the situation likely to worsen in the future.
Targeting Egypt’s Christians is a cold and calculated strategy for the group. IS hopes that inflaming sectarian strife in Egypt will be the first step in the country’s unraveling. . . . And so, although the Palm Sunday attacks were hardly the first time Egypt’s Christians were targeted by jihadists, Islamists, or even ordinary Muslim mobs, they represent a sea change in the nature of the threat Egypt’s Christians now face, with far-reaching implications for the country as a whole.
IS has taken the radical step of positing that Christians are to Egypt what the Shiites are to Iraq, embracing the position that they can be killed indiscriminately and for no reason other than for what they believe. Since the December 2016 Cairo church bombing, the group’s supporters online have been forcefully pushing this notion, claiming that the Christians of Egypt were first and foremost polytheists and that due to the “treachery” they had showed, by presumably “allying” with the West and the Egyptian government, they had to be killed.
It is unlikely that this strategy will succeed the way IS envisions in Egypt, but the attempt to implement it will leave a trail of destruction that will primarily devastate Egypt’s Christian minority.
Read more on Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/04/why-isis-declared-war-on-egypts-christians/522453