Yochanan Visser is an independent journalist/analyst who worked for many years as Middle East correspondent for Western Journalism.com in Arizona and was a frequent publicist for the main Dutch paper De Volkskrant. He authored a book in the Dutch language about the cognitive war against Israel and now lives in Gush Etzion. He writes a twice weekly analysis of current issues for Arutz Sheva. (Read Monday's analysis: Iran is closing in on Israel, here.)
Last week, Egypt’s local ISIS branch Wilayat Sinai released a video depicting a daring attackusing a Kornet anti-tank missile on a helicopter of the Egyptian air force. The helicopter had just brought Defense Minister Sedki Sobhy and his colleague, Interior Minister Magdy Abdel-Ghaffar, to a military airport near the city of Al-Arish in the northern Sinai Peninsula.
The missile attack killed one of the pilots of the helicopter as well as a security guard and Sobhy’s bureau chief.
It wasn’t the first time the Jihadist group in the Sinai desert had used advanced missiles to target regime forces. In the summer of 2015, Wilayat Sinai released a video showing the aftermath of a missile attack on an Egyptian frigate that cruised in the Mediterranean Sea opposite Al-Arish.
A few months later, the by then most lethal and dangerous ISIS branch in the Middle East downed a Russian airplane. It was blown up mid-air in northern Sinai with an explosive device hidden in a soda can in the cargo hold, killing all 224 people aboard the jet and causing a complete halt in Russian civilian flights to Egypt.
The attack on the helicopter, however, revealed something that should serve as a wake-up call not only to the Egyptian regime of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, but to the Israeli Defense Forces preparing for a future clash with the ISIS branch across the southern border as well..
The visit by the two Egyptian ministers to the air force base in Al-Arish had not been announced in advance and nobody knew the exact arrival time of the helicopter.
The attack shows that Wilayat Sinai has excellent intelligence gathering capacities and is able of carrying out sophisticated terror attacks and assassination attempts at the time of its choosing, without the knowledge of government intelligence agencies and the Egyptian military. READ MORE
