Egypt Rounds Up Islamic Extremists

A huge police dragnet through Cairo’s sprawling slum of Imbaba, a district so dominated by Islamic fundamentalists that police had feared to enter parts of it after dark, has netted more than 600 arrests and an end to the extremists’ reign, authorities said Sunday.

About 14,000 officers swept through Imbaba with automatic rifles and armored personnel carriers in the five-day raid, the government’s most aggressive clampdown since a wave of Islamic violence began spreading through Egypt last spring.

Extremist groups fought back, hurling homemade firebombs at police patrol vehicles in attacks that left one police officer seriously injured.

Among those arrested over the weekend was the alleged Imbaba “emir”--head of the outlawed Gamaa al Islamiya organization, a group that held such strong sway in the impoverished district that its members openly held public meetings in recent weeks calling for the killing of infidels while security officials looked on.

The purported emir of Imbaba, Sheik Gabbar Mohammed Ali, 35, was pulled from a house where he had been hiding, and authorities said he admitted plotting attacks on 22 movie houses to draw attention away from the fundamentalist stronghold in Imbaba.

In previous meetings with reporters, Gabbar had declared Imbaba “a state within a state” and said that strict Islamic law was already being applied in many parts of the district. Local residents often complained that bearded Islamic militants beat those who did not follow Islamic law and extorted money from shopkeepers for Islamic projects.

“In the latest confrontations, they have realized that the siege is tightening and the end is approaching,” Interior Minister Mohammed Abdel-Halim Moussa said.

An additional 1,000 officers moved through villages in southern Egypt, arresting 26 suspected extremists in an area where thousands have been arrested in recent months in response to the wave of sectarian violence and attacks against foreign tourists that have posed Egypt’s most serious security crisis in years.

Human rights officials and lawyers for the extremists warned that the massive crackdown could backfire, perhaps prompting extremists to move their attacks on foreign tourists from southern Egypt to Cairo and its environs, which hold the Pyramids and dozens of crowded tourist shopping districts.

The Gamaa al Islamiya warned in a statement to news agencies over the weekend that it would step up its fight against government security forces. “We urge foreigners, Muslims and non-Muslims, to be cautious, because we will proceed in defending ourselves through all the available legitimate means,” the statement said.

Since the 1981 assassination of President Anwar Sadat and before, Islamic extremists have been battling Egyptian government forces, frequently attacking police and army patrols and assassinating former Parliament Speaker Rifaat Magoub in 1990.

But the groups have taken a new tack in recent months, directing attacks at tourists and thereby indirectly attacking a government that depends on tourism as its single largest source of foreign revenues. Tourism was expected to generate $3 billion this year until a spate of shooting attacks on tourists in southern Egypt caused bookings to plummet.

Islamic groups are calling for the establishment of Islamic law in Egypt, but moderate organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood have renounced violence and are seeking to implement their goals by political means. But the brotherhood is not permitted to operate as a political party, and groups like the Gamaa have said there is no alternative but to overthrow the government.