Daily Times

“The worst is yet to come,” worried Egyptian analyst Ismail Alexandrani in July after local militants claiming Islamic State (IS) patronage struck an Egyptian warship and set it ablaze. His fears have come true in an unexpected way. The Wilayet Sinai or Sinai Province (SP) offshoot of IS took credit for downing a Russian-owned Metrojet airliner on October 31. All 224 passengers flying from Sharm el-Sheikh to St Petersburg died in the crash. In its self-congratulatory tweets, SP referred to those killed as “Russian crusaders”.
The first few days after the crash were fraught with confusion. Egyptian President Abdul Fateh el-Sisi dismissed IS claims as “propaganda” while Kremlin spokespersons insisted that any verdict without proper evidence was premature. The UK government, however, was quick to speculate based on intelligence reports that the plane crash was indeed terroristic in nature. British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond noted there was a “significant possibility” that the plane fell prey to an “explosive device” in the cargo hold.
US President Barack Obama also chimed in 24 hours later, saying it was “certainly possible that there was a bomb on board”. This irked the harried Russian and Egyptian officials desperately trying to find some technical fault or pilot error to pin the crash on. SP militants, on the other hand, have clearly never heard of Sun Tzu. This revered Chinese general and strategist from over two millennia ago wrote in The Art of War: “If he [the enemy] is in superior strength, evade him.” SP’s failure to comply with his time-tested wisdom means it is either remarkably brave or incredibly stupid.
A group formerly known as Ansar Beit Al-Maqdis before it pledged fealty to IS last year, SP has been fighting Egyptian forces in the Sinai Peninsula since 2011. The army engineered the ouster of former President and Muslim Brotherhood chief Mohamed Morsi in 2013, angered the Islamists and stoked the Sinai insurgency. Last October, an SP car bomb killed 29 Egyptian soldiers in the North Sinai town of El-Arish. More recently, just a few days after the Metrojet crash, a suicide attack linked to the group targeted a police club in the same town, killing at least six police officers.
Like jihadist movements everywhere, SP fuses local grievances with pan-Islamism to justify its actions, solicit funding and keep the recruits rolling in. Since 1979, Egyptian governments have used the Sinai as a buffer zone between Cairo and the perpetually restive Gaza Strip. Local Bedouins cannot join the army and countrywide development projects have largely ignored the peninsula. After Morsi’s removal, especially, it is not hard to imagine that Muslim Brotherhood partisans inside the regime would be willing to help SP embarrass Abdul Fateh el-Sisi, the usurping general-turned-president. An inside job is exactly what a cargo bomb entails after all.
Still, SP was doing fairly well as an annoying critter in a non-newsworthy desert until this grand statement of intent. In the process, the group has waved a giant red flag at Russia and has invited its ire for no apparent reason. Also, if the Chechnya and Ukraine conflicts were any indication, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s approval ratings at home will not take a significant hit. If anything, Putin now has the moral high ground to both continue military operations in Syria and widen their radius to strike back at IS throughout the Middle East.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad also profits from this tragic incident. His position as a necessary, secular ally in the fight against regional extremism grows stronger with every IS-related fatality. It is going to become increasingly hard for the White House to keep referring to IS and Assad in the same breath. That said, if SP reports to the IS nerve centre in Raqqa, why target Russia at all?
There is, of course, also the ‘wrong number’ theory. It is possible that a bomb on board the Russian airliner was pure coincidence and it could have ended up on any international flight leaving Sharm el-Sheikh. This would explain why SP is being so cryptic about the operational details of the attack. The bomb may have been theirs but someone else smuggled it in.
Interestingly, the newly clairvoyant US Defence Secretary, Ashton Carter, saw this coming. At a NATO meeting in Brussels on October 8, he predicted: “In the coming days, the Russians will begin to suffer from casualties.” The astonishing accuracy of his prediction opens up a whole new can of conspiracy theories. Who, then, really downed Metrojet Flight 9268?

The writer is a freelance columnist and audio engineer based in Islamabad