The Bedouin desert wastes where a Russian passenger jet was downed are now a launchpad for Egypt’s deadly Isis offshootGrey jeans,black trainers and a surface-to-air missile were all that could be seen of the man waiting under a tree for an Egyptian military helicopter to flit past in early January 2014. He fired and the aircraft tumbled to the ground, a moment captured on video by the group that would become Isis Sinai Province, and released in triumph soon after.
The attack served notice to the Egyptian military and the rest of the world that Sinai’s Islamist insurgents had stepped up their ambitions and their capacities,drawing weapons and inspiration from the region’s other spiralling conflicts. If final week’s explosion on board a Russian Metrojet flight from Sharm el-Sheikh proves also to have been their work, those ambitions have reached a recent level.
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Source: theguardian.com