THE FORGOTTEN FRONT
Exploring Israel's Covert Airstrikes in the Sinai Peninsula
For over a decade, a brutal insurgency has been waged by Islamist militant groups in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula — a natural land bridge connecting the continents of Africa and Asia. From 2011, Egypt experienced a wave of civil unrest and instability that began with a revolution inspired by the Arab Spring uprisings, followed by a military coup in 2013 that placed the country’s current president, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, in power.
Militant groups and tribes based in the Sinai Peninsula took advantage of the volatile security situation. As Egyptian security forces were preoccupied with the chaos occurring in the capital, militants began launching attacks and claiming territory in the remote mountainous regions of the Peninsula.
One of the militant groups, Ansar Beit al-Maqdis, eventually pledged allegiance to the Islamic State in 2014 and would become one of the organization’s most destructive affiliates. The group has since been responsible for a multitude of high profile attacks that have terrorized Egypt.
In 2015, for example, the group claimed responsibility for bringing down a Russian passenger jet over the Sinai Peninsula, killing all 224 passengers and crew onboard. Then in 2017, approximately 40 militants from the group attacked a Mosque in the northern region of Sinai, killing 305 people and injuring 128, making it the deadliest attack in Egypt’s history.
Most recently, the group claimed credit for an attack in early May 2022, against a water pumping station near the Suez Canal. The militants killed 11 members of the Egyptian military, including an officer, who were tasked with defending the facility.
Although the Egyptian military has had some success degrading the Islamic State’s branch in the Sinai, it continues to pose a serious threat to the region.
It is in this context that Egypt has permitted some aerial assistance from its non-Arab neighbor to the east, Israel.
Israel’s desire to support Egypt’s campaign against Islamic State’s Sinai branch should come as no surprise, as both countries share a mutual interest of strengthening security along their shared border.
The militant group has also targeted Israel on numerous occasions in the past. In May 2017, a rocket was fired across the border from the Sinai Peninsula during then-US president Donald Trump’s visit to the country. Later that same year, the Islamic State claimed it had fired 2 more rockets from Sinai into the Eshkol regional council of southern Israel, but no casualties were reported.
Islamic State militants have also bombed the critical gas pipeline in northern Sinai that runs between Egypt and Israel multiple times, the most recent occurred in January 2021.
Most significantly, Islamic State’s Sinai branch also has a well-documented history of collaboration with Hamas, the Palestinian nationalist movement that controls the Gaza strip and has been involved in several controversial wars against Israel over the years.
The first rumors that Israel was carrying out airstrikes in the Sinai Peninsula appeared in 2016, when an ISIS-affiliated media group made the claim.
Since no evidence was provided, the claim was chalked up as a propaganda effort by the Islamic State to place blame on the enemy ‘Jewish state’.
However, later that year an Israeli official was cited in a Bloomberg report stating that Israeli drones had in fact conducted several strikes against militants in Egypt, with the approval of al-Sisi’s government.
Unconfirmed reports of these airstrikes began to emerge on a semi-regular basis. Throughout 2017, there were a series of reports from pro-ISIS accounts attributing the group’s losses in the Sinai to Israeli bombs.
Then in early 2018, a detailed report was released by the New York Times explaining the scale of Israel’s secret air campaign in the Sinai that had been ongoing for over 2 years, in which more than 100 strikes had been carried out. American and Israeli officials who were familiar with the airstrikes claim they began as far back as 2015 and were responsible for the elimination of numerous high-ranking ISIS members.
Though unconfirmed, Israeli airstrikes continued to be reported throughout 2019, on January 3rd, 4th and 15th, and then again in December.
The Israeli airstrikes remain highly classified. Neither the Egyptian or Israeli governments have ever commented on them.
According to reports, the Israeli aircraft are often unmarked and fly “circuitous routes” to give the impression they have taken off from Egyptian territory.
However, some evidence emerged in mid-2018 when ISIS-affiliated news agency, Amaq, released a video showing an ISIS fighter holding the remnants of an Israeli munition purportedly used in an airstrike carried out in northern Sinai earlier that day. Hebrew markings can easily be identified on the right-hand side of the munition’s label, pictured below.
Interestingly, throughout 2020 and 2021 there were no reports that any Israeli strikes had taken place. This led many to believe that Israel had likely concluded its air campaign in the region. There is also a possibility that it was too preoccupied with the situation in Gaza that had reached a point of crisis in early 2021.
Then a recent development came in May 2022.
In issue 336 of the Islamic State’s weekly newsletter, al-Naba, the group claimed that one of its commanders in the Sinai, Abu Omar al-Ansari, had been “assassinated by Jewish planes” back in April. The newsletter cites an unnamed source, who also explains that Israeli war planes have been intensifying their air support for the Egyptian military in recent months.
Regional news outlets have reported on the Islamic State’s bold claim, sparking debate among experts and analysts who thought Israel had ended its Sinai air campaign years ago.
According to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED) Project, there have been very few confirmed airstrikes in the Sinai Peninsula since the beginning of 2022. However, Egypt’s strict refusal to allow journalists to report on the Sinai conflict makes credible information difficult to access. The number of strikes may in fact be much higher.
Since the start of the year, all strikes have been confined to the north-eastern regions of Rafah and Sheikh Zuweid, close to the Egypt-Gaza border.
This suggests that the Islamic State only maintains a presence in a very small pocket of the Sinai nowadays, in comparison to its height in 2015-2017 when it controlled large areas in the north and central regions of the Peninsula.
Regardless of how much involvement Israel still has in this conflict, it is clear that their efforts have been of great support to the Egyptian military. The Islamic State’s Sinai affiliate is a much lesser threat today than it was when it first emerged.