Egypt—At least 305 persons were killed when Militants attacked a mosque during Friday prayers in the Sinai Peninsula.
The attacks were carried out with explosives and gunfire simultaneously. It is the deadliest ever bombing by Islamic extremists in Egypt. The attack carried out a mosque frequented by Sufis, members of Islam’s mystical group, in the north Sinai town of Bir al-Abd. Islamic militants, including the local ISIS ally, consider Sufis heretics because of their less literal interpretations of the faith.
The ISIS affiliate has been waging a stepped-up campaign of violence in northern Sinai for years and has claimed deadly bombings on churches in the capital, Cairo, and other cities, killing dozens of Christians. It also is thought to have been behind the 2016 attack of a Russian passenger jet that killed 226.
But this was the first big militant killing on a Muslim mosque and the startling bloodshed eclipsed any past attacks of its kind, even dating back to a previous Islamic militant insurgency in the 1990s.
Updated: 6 pm, Nov 25, 2017
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