Word: egyptian
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...frontier governorate, for only the past 2½ months. But the broad-shouldered official is comfortable in his new role. He knows the turf well - the northern half of Egypt's arid Sinai Peninsula - and is well aware of its challenges. As a military general and former chief of Egyptian military intelligence, he's already well acquainted with his friends and foes in the region. (Watch a video on the tunnel smugglers of the Gaza Strip...
...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 or release for their loved ones, the governor only chuckled...
...Sinai's people are mostly Bedouin - a formerly nomadic Arab people with a distinct culture and dialect - though Mwafi is unsure of their exact percentage of the population. The Bedouin in 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...
Local authorities are extremely sensitive about the state of the Bedouin, even if it is reporting on how Bedouin feel about the government. In February, TIME published an article that chronicled the lives and politics of Bedouin who were at odds with the Egyptian government. TIME's sources ranged from wealthy arms smugglers to village farmers and the impoverished desert inhabitants of huts made of twigs. But the sentiments they expressed were the same: The Egyptian government had failed them. Not only that, but in some communities, anger at government neglect and mistreatment ran so high that Bedouin said they...
...castle and executed them. This was in retaliation for attacks on nearby Israeli kibbutzim. Then, several days later, in Rafah, another 100 or so Palestinians were shot and clubbed down as thousands were marched to a barbed-wire pen in a schoolyard for interrogation by Israelis hunting for renegade Egyptian soldiers and Fedayeen guerrillas. The Israelis deny that either event was a massacre, disputing the casualty figures and suggesting their soldiers killed smaller numbers of Palestinians in the course of suppressing riots and other resistance. (See pictures of 60 years of Israel...