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Report: US mulls pulling Sinai peacekeepers over ISIS threat
An AP report suggests that the United States is reconsidering the presence of American peacekeepers in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, which borders Israel, due to the growing threat of ISIS terror.
American forces have helped monitor the border region since Israel and Egypt signed a peace treaty in 1979. Fiji and Colombia also currently have peacekeeping troops in the area, but the 700-strong American contingent is by far the largest. The peacekeepers are in place to ensure compliance with the 36-year-old peace treaty. However, their role has become somewhat redundant with Israel and Egypt closely cooperating on security issues. Israel routinely permits Egypt to increase its military presence in Sinai beyond the terms of the treaty, in order to tackle Islamist terrorist in the region.
Since the ousting of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 2013, the Sinai Province group, which is affiliated to ISIS has targeted the regime of President al-Sisi, persistently attacking Egyptian military forces in Sinai. Although the regime in Cairo has been the primary target for the Sinai Province group, it has also made clear that it is committed to attacking Israel, firing three Grad rockets across the border just last month.
The Sinai Province threat has reportedly prompted Washington to consider beefing up protection for its Sinai forces or removing them altogether. AP says that the Obama Administration is conducting an “interagency review” of the situation and that the lightly-armed force “lack the capacity to take on Islamic State or other militants.” An editorial in the New York Times last week described the US presence in Sinai as “increasingly obsolete” and warned that, “An attack on the multinational force … could open a new front in the American-led war against the Islamic State, or ISIS, which has an offshoot in Sinai.” The editorial noted that Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently told a US Congressional committee that “I fully expect” the threat to US forces in Sinai “to increase.”