Egypt's Regime Blames Qassam for Its Own Failure

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

The Egyptian army is unable to achieve stability in Sinai, and Egyptian soldiers keep falling into the traps of armed terrorist groups. Egyptian soldiers in Sinai have become victims of the Egyptian army’s lack of readiness, and it occurs to the observer that these soldiers are bait for snipers and bombers, without the snipers and bombers finding much difficulty in reaching their targets.

The Egyptian army is failing in Sinai — this is what the developments in the security situation on the peninsula indicate. It is a vast army, possessing advanced equipment, surveillance and bombing aircraft, and the capacity for maneuvers, and yet it is struggling to control a small geographic area in northern Sinai, known for its sparse population and few residential clusters. It is a confined region without complex terrain that would help terrorists hide and plan calmly. Sinai is a geographic expanse similar to desert regions — an exposed area that gives away anyone moving or operating within it. It is not terrain suited to guerrilla warfare. And yet, despite this, armed groups remain active, and the Egyptian army is unable to achieve any significant accomplishments against them.

It is clear that the Egyptian army is flabby and lacks a high state of readiness. Perhaps its readiness is of a middling level, which gives grounds to believe that this army cannot wage wars, even when facing only a small number of fighters in a small geographic area. This deficiency the Egyptian army suffers from developed over the years under Hosni Mubarak, and the army weakened considerably because its fighting doctrine collapsed in practice, on the assumption by the Egyptian regime that enemies were no longer present after the Camp David agreement with the Zionists. For this reason, there is an urgent need to rebuild the Egyptian army, train it according to the latest methods, and arm it in a way that enables it to face challenges and keep the Egyptian state cohesive.

And if the Egyptian army is this weak, what will it do if these fighters move into the Egyptian interior and wage an armed confrontation against the regime, as they did in Syria?

There is no Palestinian who could conceivably think of killing an Egyptian, whether civilian or military, and whoever fails to achieve his goals should confront his own people with the truth rather than cast his failure onto others. We want to preserve the bonds of affection and cooperation with the great Egyptian people, and we despise the idea of resentment and rancor growing between us. We belong to one nation, partners in good times and bad, and it is not permissible for the Egyptian regime to behave with this kind of acrobatics, which will bring great harm to the fraternal, historic relations between two peoples organically bound to one another.

The Qassam Brigades form the backbone of the Palestinian resistance. In three wars, in cooperation with the various resistance forces in Gaza, they managed to foil Israeli assaults and taught the Zionist enemy harsh lessons. It is the Qassam Brigades who stand defending the honor of the Palestinian people and the honor of the Arab nation, after Arab states knelt before Israel and raised the Zionist flag over their capitals. And it is the Qassam Brigades who defeated Israel’s ground army in the 2014 war. The Zionist army did not hold out for a single day against the Palestinian resistance, and was forced to flee the Gaza Strip under the pressure of the successful and ingenious Qassam military operations, without achieving any accomplishment of its own. The Qassam Brigades are sacred to the Palestinian people, and any assault on them is an assault on the entire Palestinian people, and on Palestinian history and geography itself. It should be that those who were defeated before Israel stand at the threshold of Qassam, grateful and thankful for what it has done to wash away the Arab disgrace that still stains the faces of the Arab regimes.

If you, the Egyptian regime, do not want to help the Palestinian people, then leave them be. Let them manage their own affairs and circumstances, and put an end to the tightened siege you impose upon them. Shame and disgrace to the regime, and glory and immortality to our righteous martyrs and to the great resistance of the Palestinian people. And if the Egyptian regime has scores to settle with the Muslim Brotherhood, let it settle its scores far away from the Palestinian people. It is true that Qassam grew out of the Muslim Brotherhood, but it does not concern itself with party politics; rather, it works around the clock, day joined to night, preparing and readying itself to face the Zionist enemy — the very enemy without whose permission Egypt cannot send its own army into Sinai.

The Europeans have decided that Hamas is not a terrorist organization, and the Qassam Brigades are Hamas’s military arm — or does the Egyptian regime want to claim it is more eloquent than the Europeans, and more precise in defining terrorism and terrorists?

The ruling of the Egyptian court gladdened the hearts of the Israelis, who have long wagered on tearing apart the Arab homeland and on the internal Arab disputes that harm the nation and weaken it further. The Egyptian court served as a help to the Israelis against these young Palestinians who dedicated their lives to their sacred homeland and to the defense of their people and their nation.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “النظام المصري يغطي فشله باتهام بالقسام” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.