Islamic militant group Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis pledged allegiance to the Islamic State (also known as ISIS or ISIL) in November 2014, after a deadly attack on Egyptian security forces in the Sinai Peninsula. The group, based in Sinai and now known as ISIS-Sinai Province, has escalated attacks over the past year and a half.
In January 2015, Sinai Province militants launched a series of attacks on army and police bases in North Sinai. On July 1, militants killed more than 20 Egyptian soldiers in attacks on army checkpoints on the peninsula, in one of the biggest attacks since the Sinai insurgency started after the 2011 Egyptian revolution. Just 15 days later, militants used a guided missile to hit an Egyptian navy patrol ship in the Mediterranean.
In response to this escalation of violence, the Egyptian military launched Operation Martyr’s Right last September to target militants in North Sinai. This has caused Sinai Province to change its strategy from large-scale attacks to more frequent small-scale ones. The militants reportedly carried out more than 31 attacks in multiple areas across the Sinai in a two-week period this past March, according to the London-based Al-Araby al-Jadid news website. Moreover, the group has expanded operations outside the peninsula, including in Cairo and Giza. BBC Monitoring reports there are between 1,000 and 1,500 active Sinai Province militants.
The establishment of an ISIS affiliate in Egypt certainly raises U.S. security concerns in the region, yet the core interests at the heart of the U.S.-Egypt relationship remain unchanged. These interests include preferred access through the Suez Canal, overflight rights, counterterrorism cooperation, and Egypt’s role in Israel and the greater region. Egypt expert Eric Trager, who is a fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told The Cipher Brief what has changed since the 2011 uprising is that the U.S. has placed greater concern on human rights and the question of whether a deteriorating human rights situation – after Hosni Mubarak’s overthrow in 2011 and Mohamed Morsi’s ouster in 2013 – will lead to further instability.
In response to Morsi’s removal from power, the U.S. suspended some assistance to Egypt between 2013 and 2015; but the Obama administration soon realized withholding aid was not making Egypt more democratic and, moreover, it was hurting the strategic partnership. “It was a lose-lose,” says Trager.
Moreover, Egypt began turning to France and Russia to fill the military and other assistance void left by the U.S. during that short time period, damaging U.S. interests even further. So in March 2015, the U.S. lifted its aid suspension, allowing full U.S. security assistance to flow back into the country.
Since the signing of the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty in 1979, Egypt has received nearly $64 billion in U.S. security and economic assistance, with an annual average of about $1.3 billion in security assistance from FY2011 to FY2015, according to a 2015 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office. The Director of International Counterterrorism and Security Assistance Issues at the GAO (and lead on the 2015 report) Charles Michael Johnson, Jr., told The Cipher Brief the $1.3 billion per year comes from U.S. Foreign Military Financing (FMF) funds, of which Egypt is the second largest recipient, after Israel.
Although the U.S. values human rights – as official policy – Johnson told The Cipher Brief the U.S. Departments of State and Defense have not conducted proper end-use monitoring and human rights vetting on assistance to Egypt over the past few years. A recently released GAO report, also headed by Johnson, outlines the details. Basically, Johnson said, “…there are human rights requirements to ensure the U.S. does not provide equipment to foreign security forces in which there is credible evidence of gross human rights violations. We did not find that DoD and State have done 100 percent of the vetting in Egypt that their policies call for.”
Part of the problem is resistance from Egyptian counterparts, partially due to questions of sovereignty and a feeling of infringement. However, Johnson says State and DoD have no excuse. “The law requires 100 percent vetting, unless they use a national security waiver, which doesn’t exist in this case,” he stated.
The U.S. now finds itself in a quagmire. The current regime, led by President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, is in a kill-or-be-killed struggle with the Muslim Brotherhood, notes Trager. In this kind of dangerous domestic security situation, withholding U.S. aid neither promotes democracy nor furthers U.S. strategic interests. Yet a lack of proper equipment end-use and human rights vetting threatens to potentially implicate the U.S. in a violation of the Leahy Law on U.S. military assistance to foreign military units.
As long as the ISIS-Sinai Province remains active in the peninsula, the U.S. will continue – if not ramp up – security-related assistance to Egypt, despite the country’s questionable democratic record.
Kaitlin Lavinder is an International Producer with The Cipher Brief.
