The attacks on American hotels in Amman, Jordan on November 9 were said to have prompted outrage throughout Muslim countries and especially in Jordan because most of the casualties were Arab Muslims. That is again the case with the attacks on the Dahab resort town in the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt , but the Dahab attacks are even more difficult to comprehend because they seemed designed to target Egyptians. In Amman, the locations selected for the attacks were at least places with the highest concentration of foreigners and prominent symbols of the US presence in Jordan.
In Dahab, however, terrorists timed their attacks to coincide with Egyptian holidays, guaranteeing a considerably higher ratio of Egyptians to foreigners than usual . The basic precepts of radical Islamic ideology and the hierarchy of enemies defined in that ideology dictate that an attack a week prior, during the Passover holidays, which brought thousands of Israelis into the Sinai, would have been much more likely than one timed to take place after their departure.
The deliberate timing of the Dahab attacks leaves little doubt that the intended targets were Egyptians or Egyptians commingled with a relatively few number of foreigners. This detail is the source of anger and confusion among Arab Muslims over this attack. However, a look at the social context and likely perpetrators of this attack reveals that the motives behind this attack are probably different than those guiding al-Qaeda -affiliated cells in their operational planning.
Investigations carried out following the Taba and Sharm al-Sheikh attacks in the Sinai Peninsula revealed that Sinai Bedouins from the northern district of the Peninsula were behind the operations. . Currently, Egyptian authorities are also hunting down suspects in northern Sinai and on May 1 reported that three suspects in the attack had been killed during a manhunt in the area. If it is northern Sinai Bedouins who carried out the attacks on Dahab, then their grievances, unique from those of international al-Qaeda-affiliated or inspired entities, explain the timing and targeting of those attacks.
Unlike most terrorist attacks carried out by al-Qaeda and their affiliates, economic dynamics probably played strongly into the desire of Sinai terrorists to attack southern peninsular resorts. The history of the Sinai is a story of a brutal reversal of economic fortunes that left once wealthy tribes impoverished due mostly to the actions of the central government in Cairo. Before the construction of the Suez Canal, the tribes of the northern Sinai were the wealthiest in the area, benefiting from well-traveled pilgrimage routes traversing their territory, which connected North Africa to the Levant. The canal, especially Egypt?s nationalization of it in the 1950s, circumvented Sinai trading routes. Development projects then further chipped away at northern Sinai tribes, often to the benefit of once poor southern Sinai tribes, reversing economic dynamics on the Peninsula. The creation of Sinai resorts provided a source of income to some of the southern tribes, although those resorts and other economic projects in the Sinai Peninsula often brought in labor from Cairo and Alexandria, limiting availability of jobs for Bedouins. Other actions by the central government further eliminated legitimate sources of livelihood. Though the government in recent years built a canal to bring Nile water to the northern Sinai Peninsula for farming, farmers were brought in from Cairo and the Nile Delta area, excluding residents of northern Sinai from their last shot at a legitimate livelihood (source).
Northern Sinai tribes who presided over wealthy trading routes are now surviving by smuggling weapons and contraband, and, for the most part, they exist in a state of grueling poverty. It is not difficult to imagine, in a tribal society, the desire for vengeance that would accompany such systematic stripping of tribal honor and livelihood. Repeatedly attacking Sinai Peninsular resorts embarrasses the government in Cairo, vents jealousy over the better fortune of once weaker southern Sinai tribes, and, in the case of Dahab, attacks the relatively well-off Egyptians from the Nile Delta who can afford to vacation in the Sinai. Targeting Dahab during Egyptian national holidays targets all those viewed as responsible for the current predicament of northern Sinai tribes and those who have benefited from the development of the Sinai Peninsula to their exclusion.
While perpetrators of Sinai attacks may frame some of their complaints and borrow their terrorist methods from the international Jihadist movement, their resentment is sourced in a dynamic that has been perhaps better articulated by Karl Marx than Osama bin Laden. Recognizing this and attempting to address it will be central to preventing further violence in the Sinai Peninsula. While in other parts of Egypt and the Middle East, efforts to de-radicalize extremists often takes the form of addressing the ideology that leads to terrorism in the way of cracking down on radical Imams and reforming school and university curricula, in the Sinai Peninsula counterterrorism efforts will have to acknowledge the strong influence of economic disparity in order to be successful.
