veiled4allah: Egyptian jihad?

Hossam El Hamalawy is an Egyptian journalist who covers militant Islamic groups for the Cairo Times. On the second anniversary of 9/11, he looks at Gama'a Islamiya (Islamic Group), one of the major terrorist groups in Egypt, in Forgive Me, Government, For I Have Sinned.

Gama'a Islamiya is closely affiliated with the group Al Jihad (also known as Islamic Jihad and Egyptian Jihad), which was responsible for the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1981. Gama'a Islamiya is linked to the original plot to bomb the WTC in 1993 as well as the horrific massacre of 70 tourists at Luxor in 1997.

As Hamalawy reports, Gama'a Islamiya declared a truce with the Egyptian government in 1997 (before the Luxor attacks, in fact) and in the last several years its leadership have publically renounced violence. It was around this same time that Al Jihad seems to have merged with al-Qa'ida. The long-time leader of Al Jihad is Ayman Zawahiri, now better known for being Bin Laden's "right hand man".

Some analysts think that Zawahiri is the real brains behind al-Qa'ida while Bin Laden is merely its public face. For instance, Jane's Intelligence Review wrote "Indeed, the genesis of what the USA thinks it is coming to grips with may well lie more in Egypt than in Saudi Arabia.". Similarly, the Middle East Institute believes that the May bombings in Riyadh are similar in nature to the 1997 Luxor attacks and that both show Zawahiri's hand. An organization called DefenseWatch goes even further, arguing that Egyptian Al Jihad has more or less taken over al-Qa'ida.

Gama'a Islamiya and Al Jihad have roots in Egypt going back to the late 1960s and early 1970s and are a radical offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is probably Egypt's most senior Islamist group, dating all the way back to 1928. Gama'a Islamiya and Al Jihad take much of their ideology from Syed Qutb (see my previous discussion of Qutb's followers here). The history and development of this movement from the Muslim Brotherhood to Al Jihad is traced in Karen Armstrong's book, The Battle for God. Whether or not al-Qa'ida is actually a Saudi façade on what is now a primarily Egyptian organization, as the sources cited above claim, the Egyptian components of it are clearly quite important and deserve to be studied in their own right.