Al Qaeda slips further from political goals
Egypt's security state has pushed Islamic radicals who once reigned in neighborhoods like Imbaba to the fringes.
from the September 11, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
A turning point for Imbaba
In 1992 the situation looked more ominous. More than 10 years earlier, Egypt's Islamic Jihad had assassinated President Anwar Sadat, using members of the Egyptian Army it had managed to recruit. A key leader of the organization was the Egyptian doctor Ayman al-Zawahiri, who went on to become Al Qaeda's No. 2.
In the 1980s, that group and the Gamaa Islamiyah (GI), whose spiritual leader is the blind sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, currently serving a life sentence in the US for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center attack, continued to target officials for assassination, and in the 1990s moved into large-scale terrorist attacks.
In 1992, Sheikh Jabir Mohammed Ali, a firebrand leader of the GI started telling reporters that his men had "liberated" Imbaba from the Egyptian state. He vowed the rest of Egypt was next. The government of President Hosni Mubarak had had enough; that December, thousands of troops rushed to seal off the neighborhood and for a month, they moved door to door, arresting hundreds.
At the time it appeared to some observers that Egypt was at the precipice of an Islamic revolution. But in fact, the violent tactics of Sheikh Jabir's men had turned off many devout Egyptians and that December was the beginning of a crushing defeat for the militant revolutionaries.
"Many very religious people grew fed up with being pushed around and threatened all the time," he says. "A lot of people might want women to wear head scarves, or to have a more Islamic country. But the group's men were on the streets with chains and knives. They were burning video stores and barbershops."
The GI's wave of violence culminated in a 1997 attack in Luxor, in which 58 foreigners and four Egyptians were murdered by a gang of militants. Those killings led to a backlash among average Egyptians and threw the tourist-based economy of Upper Egypt into a tailspin.
The role of government repression also can't be discounted in controlling these movements. In the 1990s, the government made thousands of arrests, sometimes rounding up men because of the mosque they prayed at or because they wore long beards. Also, there have been credible reports of torture of militants in Egyptian prisons.
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