to the Islamic State's murder of Egyptian Christians in Libya this past
weekend seemed to be a welcome addition to the fight against the
extremist group. But observers say Egypt's actions since then indicate
President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi is focusing on his own domestic politics
and not on the interests of the broader fight against the Islamic State,
or ISIS.
Concern is growing because Egypt's tightly controlled
political environment is awash with claims the Islamic State is secretly
connected to Qatar and the United States, which are publicly committed
to defeating the extremist group. Analysts say that although such talk
threatens to damage the unity of the countries combating ISIS, it proves
helpful for Sisi, as it bolsters the idea that Egypt is under threat
and only he can save it.
This idea seemed to have taken hold in Al Aour, the village that was home to 13 of ISIS's Egyptian victims.
"I have a message to Obama," Emet Suleiman Shahata, the brother of
one of the men beheaded by a Libyan offshoot of the Islamic State, told HuffPost this week at the village's Coptic Christian church. "Egypt will be strong no matter what our enemies do."
Shahata
and the men around him interrupted each other in their rush to explain
precisely how the U.S. helped make the ISIS atrocity possible.
"The United States is the backbone of support for Qatar and Turkey, and they are backing terrorism," Shahata continued.
Powerful
institutions in Egypt have promoted these sentiments. Sisi's delegate
to the Arab League, Tariq Adel, sparked a diplomatic crisis in the
Middle East on Wednesday by telling Cairo's state-run news agency
he believes Qatar supports terrorism. He made the claim after a
Qatari foreign ministry official was quoted
warning that Egypt's airstrikes in Libya could harm civilians. Qatar on
Thursday called its ambassador to Egypt back to Doha, its capital, "for
consultation."
Prior to Adel's remarks, media outlets in Egypt
also had promoted the idea that Qatar and the U.S. are aiding terror. On
Tuesday, Middle East news site Al Bawaba published a headline that
stated: "Strike Qatar...Daesh [ISIS] will fall."
And on Thursday, the leading newspaper Al Masry Al Youm ran a cartoon showing "Daesh,"
the preferred Arabic term for the Islamic State, intertwined with "USA."
The state-run newspaper Al-Ahram
ran a front-page story the same day calling Qatar, Turkey and the U.S. the "triangle of the forces of evil."
Sisi
has never fully warmed to either the U.S. or Qatar. Both governments
expressed support for the elected Muslim Brotherhood-run government, a
product of the Arab Spring, that Sisi and the military overthrew in 2013
in a restoration of Egypt's autocratic old guard.
"The Egyptians
feel like they're under siege and understandably so," Fahad Nazer, a
terrorism analyst at intelligence consultancy JTG Inc. and former
political analyst at the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Washington, said
Thursday in an email. "Anything less than unequivocal support --
especially given lingering differences with Qatar over the Muslim
Brotherhood -- was likely to add to the tensions."
Like Turkey,
home to the most powerful Islamist government in the region, Qatar has
been connected to the Brotherhood (though it publicly
denies supporting it).
It has sparred with other Arab monarchies in the Gulf over that view.
Those monarchies, most notably Saudi Arabia and the United Arab
Emirates, have provided Sisi with billions of dollars to shore up his
regime. For them, the previous Egyptian government posed an existential
threat by showing that Arab democracy and political Islam might work.
They're backing Sisi to ensure the largest Arab country remains an
autocracy.
The U.S. has its own problems with the Egyptian general
because of its mixed messages regarding Egypt's return to
authoritarianism. While it continues to give Egypt
millions per year in largely military aid, as it has since the country signed a truce with Israel in 1979,
the U.S. administration has condemned the government's increasing assault on civil society.
The U.S. and Egypt presently have "mutual frustration," a U.S. official
told the Daily Beast this week. The Pentagon made clear
on Wednesday
that Egypt did not inform Washington before it flew U.S.-made F-16
fighter jets to bomb ISIS camps near the town of Derna in eastern Libya.
Still, Sisi has tried to sell himself as a
reasonable and important Muslim voice against the rise of extremism, a message
U.S. conservatives are buying. And it looked in December like ties between the strongman and both Washington and Doha were improving, with the
arrival of the first U.S. ambassador to the country since the fall of the democratic government and an
apparent reconciliation between Qatar and Sisi's anti-Brotherhood backers in the Gulf.
Sultan
Barakat, the director of research at the Brookings Doha Center, told
The Huffington Post that though he believed Qatar's rulers were "quite
used to rhetoric that comes from Egyptian media," the recall of the
ambassador suggested a sudden increase in concern.
"He's only returned recently to Cairo," Barakat noted.
Nazer said in his email that relations between Cairo and Doha may be unraveling because of
the change of leadership in Saudi Arabia
after the death of King Abdullah in late January. The late Saudi ruler
was thought to have pressured Qatar's ruler to work with Sisi, Nazer
told The Huffington Post.
Libya has remained a major battleground
for the ongoing conflict between Qatar and the anti-Brotherhood forces
linked with Sisi despite the signs of regional reconciliation. The
country is split between two militia-backed governments: one in the west
composed of both moderate and radical Islamists, which is thought to be
supported by Qatar, and a more secular Sisi-backed one in the east,
which is internationally recognized but seen as too connected to the old
Gaddafi regime.
It is the militia of that eastern government,
based in Tobruk, that
aided Egypt in its anti-ISIS airstrikes. U.S. officials
said last August
that Egypt and the U.A.E., the secular government's chief backers, had
covertly launched airstrikes against the western-based Islamist groups'
militias. But the Egyptian bombing raid this week was Sisi's first overt
military involvement in the Libyan civil war.
The United Nations
is mediating talks between the two sides that have yet to bear fruit
largely because various factions still do not see a peaceful resolution
as being in their best interest, The Huffington Post has learned. The
Islamist militias carried out their first airstrikes against their rival
on Wednesday,
days after the release of the ISIS video in which the Egyptians were
shown being beheaded. The same day, the secular government asked, with
Egyptian support, for the U.N. to
lift an embargo on the import of arms into the country. The U.S. and Britain
responded late Thursday that Libya should first establish a unity government.
U.S.
officials did not anticipate Sisi's government would further complicate
the civil war by publicly accusing Qatar of backing ISIS. Despite the
fact that Egypt has conflated Islamists in Egypt and in Libya with the
Islamic State, it is a serious escalation for Cairo to call a fellow
Arab government an ISIS backer. Analysts say this rift is the last thing
Washington needs as it considers how to respond to ISIS: Cairo would be
on the frontlines of any effort against ISIS expansion in Libya, and a
U.S. base in Qatar is the center of the U.S. air war against the
militants in Iraq and Syria.
For now, the U.S.
has not taken a public position
on the Egyptian airstrikes or the subsequent inter-Arab spat. A
spokesperson for Gen. John Allen, the U.S. envoy to the anti-ISIS
coalition, declined to comment on the situation's impact on the
coalition.
But the crisis came as a high-profile Egyptian envoy
was in Washington for the White House Summit on Countering Violent
Extremism. A National Security Council spokeswoman said in an emailed
statement Thursday that National Security Adviser Susan Rice had met
with Egypt's foreign minister on Thursday and re-affirmed the
Washington-Cairo partnership. She did not reference the strikes in
Libya, but did note that Rice said the U.S. and Egypt should cooperate
in Libya to "address threats from terrorism and to promote a unified
Libyan government that can represent the aspirations of all Libyans."
She also said Rice expressed U.S. concerns about human rights and
political freedom in Egypt.
There were no immediate signs of other
Arab states successfully repairing the rift. The Gulf Cooperation
Council, which includes Qatar and five other Gulf states that have
supported Sisi, offered conflicting messages Thursday, posting on its
site two messages from its secretary-general. The first one
noted
the "sincere efforts of the state of Qatar in cooperation with the GCC
countries to fight terrorism and extremism on all levels" (and has
apparently
since been removed), and the second one
indicated support for Egyptian actions in Libya while making no mention of Qatar. The Egyptian government and media outlets in Egypt said that the second statement
contradicted the first -- and indicated that the council did not mean to criticize Egypt's claims about Qatar.
That
means the parties directly involved likely will be responsible for
restoring this rift. Either Doha will lose face by moving to ease
tensions without an apology from Egypt, or Sisi will have to take a
political loss and prove he prioritizes international cooperation over
domestic crowd-pleasing.
Akbar Shahid Ahmed reported from Washington, D.C., and Sophia Jones reported from Al Aour, Egypt.
This story has been updated with the Egyptian response to the Gulf Cooperation Council's statements.
Even more H.S. drama -- 
