2 soldiers killed by unknown attackers in Egypt’s Sinai

By Ahmed al-Waily

CAIRO (AA) - Two Egyptian soldiers were killed Wednesday when unidentified attackers targeted a checkpoint in the northern Sinai Peninsula, according to local security sources.

Unnamed security sources were quoted in the local media as saying that several gunmen had attacked a security checkpoint outside Sinai’s city of Rafah near Egypt’s border with the Gaza Strip.

The incident comes two days after 18 security personnel were killed when their vehicles struck a series of roadside bombs in northeastern Sinai.

The Welayet Sina (“Sinai Province”) group, which the Egyptian authorities say is linked to the Daesh terrorist organization, later claimed responsibility for the roadside-bomb attack.

Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula has remained the epicenter of a deadly militant insurgency since mid-2013, when Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s first freely-elected president, was ousted and imprisoned in a bloody military coup.

Since then, hundreds of Egyptian security personnel have been killed in attacks across Sinai, especially in the peninsula’s volatile northeastern quadrant, which shares borders with both Israel and the Hamas-run Gaza Strip.