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...appointment is no accident. North Sinai is not a territory the Egyptians take lightly. Bordered on the west by the Suez Canal Zone and on the east by Israel and the volatile Gaza Strip, North Sinai is home to a thriving cross-border smuggling trade and a sometimes rebellious local Bedouin population. Mwafi says the skills of his previous job have come in handy in governing Egypt's wild east. "As the director of military intelligence," he explains, "I had very good relations with the director of Israeli military intelligence." He adds that representatives of the two forces meet "every...
Smuggling along Egypt's border with Hamas-ruled Gaza via underground tunnels has skyrocketed in the past two years, driven by an Israeli blockade on the Strip. Smuggled goods have become the Palestinian territory's only lifeline outside of aid and a valuable source of income to Sinai's marginalized Bedouin. But from a security standpoint, the trade is a round-the-clock law-and-order concern - particularly guarding against the transport of weapons and persons - and one that Mwafi says yields daily intercepts and arrests. "We are always in a situation because we are near Gaza and Israel," says...
Indeed, the governor likens his Egypt-Gaza border to the U.S.-Mexican border, and his security challenges to U.S. terrorism challenges. That may be a stretch. Gaza, a tiny, densely packed territory fenced in by Israel and run internally by the militant Islamist group Hamas, is hardly Mexico. But North Sinai's significance in the broader scheme of Egyptian national security is huge. Egypt fears spillover from Gaza's internal crises and has warned of foreign-terrorist infiltration via the tunnels. Asked about a recent protest outside a state security center by several dozen Bedouin women who were demanding trials...
...Sinai are Egyptian and have been for as long as Sinai has been Egyptian - but that hasn't quieted a modern history fraught with tension and mutual distrust. Cairo has received sharp local criticism in recent months for its construction of a new subterranean barrier along Egypt's Gaza border, meant to cut off smuggling. Analysts say the heightened crackdown on the lucrative underground trade, coupled with years of harsh treatment and sweeping arrests by security forces after terrorist attacks on Sinai beach resorts in 2004 and '06, has increased tense exchanges between security forces and the local population...
...story about the U.S.-Mexican border...