Al-Qaeda's deputy leader says an Egyptian group has joined its network. The Egyptian group, Jamaa Islamiya, is apparently a revived version of a group that waged a campaign of violence in Egypt during the 1990s but was crushed in a government crackdown. "We announce to the Islamic nation the good news of the unification of a great faction of the knights of the Jamaa Islamiya ... with the al-Qaeda group," Ayman al-Zawahiri said in a videotape aired on Aljazeera on Saturday.| “We announce to the Islamic nation the good news of the unification of a great faction of the knights of the Jamaa Islamiya ... with the al-Qaeda group...” |
It was the first time that al-Qaeda has announced an Egyptian branch, but it was not clear whether the new version of Jamaa Islamiya really has a presence on the ground in the country. The Egyptian government detained many thousands of Jamaa Islamiya members or sympathisers in the 1990s, when the group was waging a low-level guerrilla war against the security forces, mainly in the south of the country. Hundreds have come out of detention over the years after renouncing the use of violence to overthrow the government. And its leaders declared a truce with the government in 1997, after an attack on tourists in Luxor. The group has not claimed any attacks since the late 1990s.
Egypt has seen a string of bombings against tourist resorts in the Sinai Peninsula since October 2004, killing 98 people. Egyptian authorities have said those attacks were carried out by a group calling itself Monotheism and Jihad [al-Tawhid wal Jihad], with links to Palestinian fighters.
| Actually, the links would be with Zark's al-Tawhid organization, but close enough. |