20 December 2017•Update: 20 December 2017
By Rabea Abu Zamil
CAIRO
The Daesh terrorist group on Wednesday claimed responsibility for yesterday’s rocket attack on an airport near the city of Al-Arish in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.
On Tuesday, an Egyptian army officer was killed -- and another two injured -- when unknown perpetrators fired a rocket at the airport, according to Egyptian officials.
Notably, the attack coincided with a visit to the area by the Egyptian defense and interior ministers.
On Wednesday, pro-Daesh accounts on Twitter quoted the Daesh-linked Amaq New Agency as saying that Daesh fighters had “shelled Al-Arish airport during a visit by Defense Minister Sedki Sobhi and Interior Minister Magdi Abdel-Ghaffar”.
The news agency claimed that the group had had advance knowledge of the ministers’ visit to the region to inspect military detachments deployed in the area.
According to Amaq, the attackers had “targeted an Apache helicopter with a guided Kornet missile as it attempted to land at the [Al-Arish] airport, destroying the helicopter and killing a handful of army officers”.
Earlier Wednesday, Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi convened a high-level security meeting to discuss the situation in the volatile peninsula.
The Al-Arish International Airport is located roughly 8 kilometers from the headquarters of Egypt’s North Sinai Security Directorate.
Civilian flights at the airport have been suspended since 2013 due to the precarious security situation in and around Al-Arish, which stands close to the borders of both Israel and the blockaded Gaza Strip.
The Sinai Peninsula has remained the epicenter of a militant insurgency since mid-2013, when the army ousted Mohamed Morsi -- Egypt’s first freely elected president -- in a bloody military coup.
