CAIRO —
Daesh on Sunday claimed responsibility
for an attack the previous day that killed 11 Egyptian soldiers in the Sinai
Peninsula.
اضافة اعلان
It was the heaviest loss of life the
Egyptian army had suffered in years in its long-running campaign in and around the Sinai
against militants loyal to the Islamist extremist group.
“IS (Daesh) fighters killed Egyptian
soldiers, seized their weapons, and burnt down their position in West Sinai,”
the group said on its Amaq propaganda site.
Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula has been gripped for
more than a decade by an armed insurgency which peaked after the ouster of late
Islamist president Mohammed Morsi in 2013.
More than a thousand suspected militants and
dozens of security personnel have been killed since the start of operations,
according to official figures.
The army on Saturday said 11 soldiers were
killed and five others wounded in a firefight on the eastern bank of the
Suez Canal abutting the Sinai.
The military said the “terrorist” attack was
against a water pumping station.
“These terrorist operations will not defeat
the determination of the country and the army to continue uprooting terrorism,”
President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi pledged on Facebook.
Washington condemned the “terrorist attack in
the Sinai targeting members of the Egyptian military” and expressed its
condolences to the victims’ families.
France, the African Union, and Khartoum also denounced
the assault.
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