A TERROR WARNING IN SINAI / THE WALL STREET JOURNAL REVIEW & OUTLOOK

Review & Outlook

A Terror Warning in Sinai

The ISIS threat will become global unless it is defeated soon.

   Egyptian investigators check the debris from a crashed Russian jet in Sinai, Egypt on November 1. Photo: khaled elfiqi/European Pressphoto Agency 


It may be some time before investigators in Egypt can confirm claims by Islamic State (ISIS) that it is responsible for the “downing” last weekend of a Russian passenger jet over the Sinai peninsula, ostensibly in retaliation for Vladimir Putin’s intervention in Syria. Russian commercial carriers have a notorious safety record, and it’s too soon to rule out that a structural or mechanical failure caused the plane to break apart in the sky, killing 224 passengers and crew.

Yet by Thursday the weight of evidence was sufficient to persuade David Cameron that it was “more likely than not” that the plane was brought down by “a terrorist bomb,” with President Obama adding that “it is certainly possible that there was a bomb on board.” The British Prime Minister suspended U.K. flights to the resort town of Sharm el Sheikh, stranding thousands of British tourists, and Mr. Putin suspended Russian flights to Egypt on Friday.

So much, then, for Mr. Obama’s conceit that the world can somehow diminish the strength and reach of ISIS by not paying it too much heed. In February the President was asked by the Vox website whether “the media sometimes overstates the level of alarm people should have about terrorism.”

“Absolutely,” he replied, adding that level of attention given to terrorism is “all about
ratings.”          

Mr. Obama’s claim might be an easy sell with the readers of left-wing blogs. It must seem detached from reality to U.S. allies, including Egypt, who find that the outspreading chaos of Syria has now reached them. The Egyptian economy has recovered modestly over the last year thanks largely to a jump in tourism, which accounts for 5% of GDP and more than a million jobs. “The magnitude of the effort needed to secure the needs of 90 million people is huge and beyond any one man’s effort,” Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi told us in March. Now it’s become that much bigger.

The Egyptian military has been fighting a terrorist insurgency in Sinai for years, turning much of the peninsula into a no-man’s land. In 2014 terrorists shot down an Egyptian military helicopter with a surface-to-air missile. In July they hit an Egyptian patrol ship using a guided missile. In September four U.S. troops serving with a multinational peacekeeping mission in Sinai were injured when two improvised explosive devices hit their convoy.

Nearly 300 Egyptian soldiers and several hundred civilians have been killed in the fighting. Islamic State considers Sinai a “province” from which its fighters—mostly local Bedouins who swore allegiance to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi last year—can stage attacks against the rest of Egypt, Israel and nearby Saudi Arabia. That’s no small risk, especially considering that Egypt must also contend with Islamic State offshoots on its border with Libya.

But the larger danger is ISIS’s growing ability to win the allegiance of geographically distant groups or individuals beyond Syria or Iraq. It is doing so partly through its sophisticated propaganda channels, but mainly by the power of its example. As long as ISIS is in the fight and undefeated by the U.S. or other “apostate regimes,” it becomes a natural pole of radical attraction—the proverbial “strong horse” in the race for ideological sympathy among young Muslims around the world.

That’s what makes the Obama Administration’s lackadaisical approach to fighting ISIS so dangerous.

Local battlefield reverses such as ISIS’s conquest of Ramadi in May don’t stay local. They amplify a growing Mideast and world perception that the U.S. has no stomach for a real fight and is prepared to tolerate the existence of Islamic State over the long term. The longer ISIS holds large chunks of Iraq and Syria, the stronger its offshoots in Sinai, Afghanistan, North Africa and elsewhere will grow.

The greatest folly of the Administration’s Mideast policy has been to imagine that an arms-length approach to the region’s troubles would keep its problems away from us. But as with the refugee crisis in Europe, or ISIS-inspired jihadist attacks in the U.S., the tragedy in Sinai is another reminder that trying to downplay the threat of terrorism only brings its risks closer to home.