Militants Kill 235 at Sufi Mosque in Egypt’s Deadliest Modern Terror Attack<br />In an interview published in an Islamic State magazine last January, a commander in Sinai outlined the group’s hatred for Sufis<br />and their practices, including the veneration of tombs, the sacrificial slaughter of animals and what he termed “sorcery and soothsaying.”<br />The interview, in English, identifies Rawda, the district where Friday’s attack occurred,<br />as one of three areas where Sufis live in Sinai that the group intended to “eradicate.”<br />It featured a photograph of a black hooded figure brandishing a sword over the kneeling figure<br />of an elderly Sufi cleric, Sulayman Abu Hiraz, who was executed in Sinai in late 2016.<br />No group claimed responsibility for the attack, but in the past year a local affiliate of the Islamic State has killed a number of Sufis in the area<br />and singled out the district where the attack took place as a potential target.<br />CAIRO — Militants detonated a bomb inside a crowded mosque in the Sinai Peninsula on Friday<br />and then sprayed gunfire on panicked worshipers as they fled, killing at least 235 people and wounding at least 109 others.<br />At least 235 people were killed when militants detonated explosives and sprayed gunfire at a crowded Sufi mosque near Egypt’s Sinai coast.<br />The attack injected a new element into Egypt’s struggle with militants because most of the victims were Sufi Muslims, who practice a mystical form of Islam<br />that the Islamic State and other Sunni extremist groups deem heretical.<br />“The scene was horrific,” said Ibrahim Sheteewi, a resident of Bir al-Abed, the small north Sinai town where the attack took place.
