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Al Qaeda's New Sinai Front

(Daily Beast) Bruce Riedel - Al Qaeda sympathizers have opened a new front for the jihadist terror group in one of the most sensitive and combustible parts of the Middle East. The nascent group operates in the Sinai Peninsula where the borders of Israel, Egypt, and Gaza come together. In the wake of last week's major Palestinian terrorist attack into Israel, which used the Sinai as a base, Al Qaeda's presence adds another dangerous ingredient in the explosive Arab-Israeli tinderbox. None of Al Qaeda's official media outlets has yet recognized the jihadists in the Sinai as a formal branch of Al Qaeda, but Ayman Zawahiri, the Egyptian who has replaced Osama bin Laden as emir of Al Qaeda, has publicly congratulated those jihadists who blew up the Egypt-Israel gas pipeline and has called for more attacks on Israeli targets in his latest audio commentary on the Egyptian revolution. Many Zawahiri supporters are among those released in the jailbreaks in Egypt this year, and he has long tried to rebuild the infrastructure of the terror underground he led in Egypt in the 1990s. Also freed in the jailbreaks were terrorists involved in attacks on tourist hotels in the Sinai in 2005 and 2006 that killed more than 100 people.
2011-08-22 00:00:00
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