Egypt faces up to the new radicals

By Magdi Abdelhadi
BBC News, Cairo

A bomb was thrown from this bridge in central Cairo at the end of April

After several years of relative calm, Egypt has suffered a series of suicide attacks over recent weeks, just as it prepares for its first multi-candidate presidential elections in September.

There have been two attacks in Cairo within the past month - both in areas popular with foreign tourists - and last October about 40 people were killed in bomb attacks at the Red Sea resort of Taba.

Ihab Youssri Yassin struck at rush hour in one of the busiest squares in central Cairo on 30 April.

He jumped off a flyover setting off a nail bomb he was carrying. He died immediately.

Four foreign tourists and several other Egyptians were injured.

An hour later, his sister Nagat and his fiance Iman Ibrahim Khamis, opened fire on a tourist bus in another part of Cairo; then one of them killed the other and committed suicide.

No injuries were reported in this attack.

The authorities linked this group to another incident earlier the same month in which four foreign tourists were killed in what appeared to have been a suicide attack.

Radicalism

The violence sparked fears that Egypt may be on the cusp of a new wave of violence like the one that targeted foreign tourists during the 1990s.

General Ahmad Omar, the interior ministry spokesman, says there is no evidence that these people were part of a larger organisation.

Yassin came from the deprived Cairo district of Shubra al-Kheima

The man who blew himself up is thought to have been working with just friends and family.

Abdel Muniem Said, of the al-Ahram Centre for Strategic Studies, argues that the violence could be the beginning of something completely new.

"What we have now this year is a beginning of copycat radicalism. The attackers are local, they use local means that's usually very primitive. They share certain beliefs with those who are following Bin Laden. But they are not organisationally linked to al-Qaeda."

Poverty

It may never be known whether Ihab Youssri Yassin did plan a suicide attack or that he panicked when he feared that the police were after him.

But what is known about him and the others is that they come from a very poor neighbourhood north of Cairo.

Ezbet Rostum, a shanty town on the outskirts of Shubra al-Kheima, is made up of a warren of narrow alleyways and dirt roads strewn with litter.

I think everyone living in Shubra is like a bomb, you know, like a hidden bomb that can explode in himself or herself or amongst the people Nawal al-Sadawi Writer and activist

Outside the bare brick block of flats where Yassin used to live, plain clothed police prevent the media from talking to his father without prior permission.

But I was allowed to speak the landlord, an elderly man in ankle length white shirt.

He tells me he was shocked when he heard the news. He says Yassein was one of many who were rounded up by the police and a couple of girls from the ground floor flat next to where he sat were still in custody.

"I think everyone living in Shubra is like a bomb, you know, like a hidden bomb that can explode in himself or herself or amongst the people," says Nawal al-Sadawi, a prominent writer and civil rights activist.

"You see here in Shubra how people are living in poverty. They don't have the essential things in life - no water, no food, no prospects of marriage, no apartment..."

Radicals

But poverty is only one part of the problem.

Although the government keeps a close watch over militant preachers and radical mosques, there are other outlets.

So often, when you get into a Cairo cab you can hear the voice of a fiery preacher coming out of the crackling speakers of the cassette player.

Frequently the message denounces other cultures as immoral or inferior to Islam.

I don't see the recent events as Islamist violence. I put them on the continuum of social and political violence... There are so many frustrations, so unless they come out in a more democratic way, they will come out in a violent way Heba Raouf Ezzat Islamist writer

And that, many analysts believe, is the material from which "terrorists" are made; a supremacist ideology that justifies killing other people and dying as a "martyr".

Islamists refuse to acknowledge that there is a link between the violence and the concept of jihad.

The Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mohammad Mahdi Aakef, says armed jihad is justified only in the case of self-defence... but the use of violence for political ends, Mr Aakef added, is totally against the principles of the Brotherhood.

Heba Raouf Ezzat, an Islamist writer and academic, links the violence to political repression.

"I don't see the recent events as Islamist violence. I put them on the continuum of social and political violence actually. People have to protest somehow. There are so many frustrations, so unless they come out in a more democratic way, they will come out in a violent way," she argues.

New breed

But the government disagrees. General Omar of the Egyptian interior ministry says that even the most developed democracies have suffered from terrorism.

"So you cannot say that terrorism is caused by political repression, particularly now here in Egypt, where we're in the middle of a very dynamic process of reform."

The problem now facing Egyptian society, says Dr Said of the al-Ahram Centre for Strategic Studies, is that the new breed of terrorists are going to be very difficult to spot.

"What if we have a terrorist in our family? Usually something will show in his personal behaviour... to be detected and dealt with. But these people are not transformed from an ordinary citizen into a terrorist overnight.

"So our society has got to be capable of carrying the burden of trying to look around and find these people in mosques, neighbourhoods and in sport clubs."

But as I personally discovered, Mr Said's approach may prove to be problematic.

One young man thought I was a spy when I asked him what he would do if he found out that a relative had begun talking about jihad against the non-Muslims.

When I put the same question to a taxi driver, he drove me straight to the interior ministry to hand me over to the authorities.

Egyptian society faces a real dilemma. A security solution alone will not work and a community that fails to see the boundaries between devotion and fanaticism may be unable to police itself.