In Egypt, terrorists used to target tourists. Now the army kills tourists it thinks are terrorists. - The Washington Post

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/09/14/in-egypt-terrorists-used-to-target-tourists-now-the-army-kills-tourists-it-thinks-are-terrorists/

In Egypt, terrorists used to target tourists. Now the army kills tourists it thinks are terrorists.

A four-wheel-drive vehicle crosses Egypt's western desert and the Bahariya Oasis, southwest of Cairo. (Amr Abdallah Dalsh/Reuters)

If you want to create terror, targeting tourists is a good way to do it.

Egyptians know this well. In 1997, terrorists later linked to the Islamist group al-Gamaa al-Islamiya massacred 58 foreign nationals and four Egyptians at the Deir el-Bahri archaeological site near Luxor. After the high-profile attack and others like it, Egypt's tourism sector suffered badly. "We are facing the biggest crisis in the history of tourism in Egypt,'' Tourism Minister Mamdou el-Beltagi told al-Ahram newspaper at the time.

On Monday, Egypt's Interior Ministry revealed that 12 people, including at least two Mexican citizens, had been killed in an attack on a tourist convoy in the remote western desert. This time, however, the perpetrators weren't terrorists. They were a joint police-military patrol.

In a statement posted on Facebook, the Interior Ministry said that the group had been in a prohibited area during an operation against terrorist groups and that an investigation would be conducted to determine the "justification for the presence of the tour group." An account given by the Egyptian tour operator to the Spanish newspaper El Mundo seemed to contradict this, saying that the tourists had been eating at a rest stop in an unrestricted area when they were targeted by Egyptian warplanes.

Egypt's tourism industry has struggled since the 2011 Arab spring: By 2012, the number of visitors arriving in the country had fallen by about 37 percent, with potential visitors clearly worried about political instability in the country. After Egypt's Islamist-led government was ousted in 2013, President Abdel Fattah al-Sissi attempted to rejuvenate Egypt's tourism sector, with official hopes of 47 percent growth in tourism revenue in 2015. However, the country faces a growing insurgency that already has targeted tourists in its troubled Sinai peninsula and the U.S. State Department warns against all travel outside metropolitan Cairo and Alexandria and other major tourist areas.

The vast western desert has long been a popular tourist destination, but it has recently attracted terrorist groups. In August, militants claiming to represent the Islamic State group said they had killed a Croatian man after abducting him in the area. On Sunday, a statement posted by the group to jihadist forums claimed that the group had battled Egyptian forces and caused them to retreat in the area. The area, which sits along Egypt's border with Libya, has become an important base for smugglers.

Among commentators online, there were widespread doubts about Egypt's explanation as to why forces fired upon the western desert convoy, with some noting that the Egyptian government had killed more tourists recently than the insurgency it fights: a brutal irony, given Egypt's history of terrorist attacks against tourists, as Egyptian-born writer Mona Eltahawy noted on Twitter.

"Next time Cairo complains international press damages Egypt's tourism by negative reporting, remind them: the press didn't fire on tourists," H.A. Hellyer, an Egypt expert and nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution, wrote on Twitter. Others wondered if the Interior Ministry was admitting its mistake only because of the tourists. "How many Egyptians are killed this way in raids in Sinai?" wrote Mohamed El Dahshan, a development economist and writer.

Perhaps the most damning comment came on Facebook from Mahmoud Salem, a blogger and activist. "The tourists are to blame," he wrote. "They did venture into an 'unsafe zone.' It's called Egypt."

"Don't come here," Salem concluded.