Egypt is killing jihadis in the Sinai but their ham-fisted conscript troops are creating more resistance.
Egypt has been fighting Islamic terrorists in northern Sinai since 2011 and has had a difficult time dealing with a few thousand full time Islamic terrorists and twice as many part-timers. Most of the terrorists are locals who are not so much Islamic as locals angry at the way they are treated by the security forces. ...
On the Egyptian side of the border there are more Bedouin who are willing to fight the security forces, usually because of abuse by poorly trained soldiers and police prone to arrest everyone in sight. This resistance is often a family affair. Bedouins who have lost family members to military operations, usually gunfire or airstrikes, will consider revenge an obligation. For a while Islamic terror groups were able to exploit that but by 2016 the Bedouin came to understand that the Islamic terrorists were an even greater threat than the trigger-happy and undisciplined soldiers who patrolled Sinai and manned numerous checkpoints.
So on the bright side, the jihadis are worse.
As I've noted, for all the liberals here who claimed American military action was simply creating more jihadis in Iraq, how do you explain the Awakening that led our enemies in the Sunni Arab portion of Iraq to switch sides to fight against their once-allied jihadis?
Remember that the Anbar Awakening was the rejection by Sunni Arabs of the al Qaeda fanatics in Iraq. Remember what this required. It required Sunni Arabs to hate and fear fellow Sunni Moslems fighting on their side and to trust that their then-current enemy, America, could help them win once they flipped to siding with the Iraqi government. Our surge offensive was a visible sign of this commitment to beat the jihadis.
For all the talk in our Left about how awful we were in Iraq, our enemies--who we tossed out of their privileged position under Saddam and then fought for close to four years in a tough counter-insurgency fight--decided we were a better bet for their survival and future than fellow Sunni Arab jihadis. Our military power was absolutely essential to making the Sunni Arab hate and fear of the jihadis matter by giving the MINOs the confidence that they could beat the jihadis once they flipped.
American troops avoided the problem of alienating the Sunni Arabs in Anbar even as we killed the jihadis. Kudos to the Marines who had responsibility for Anbar for making good on their boast "no worse enemy and no better friend."
This is related to my complaint that only fighting jihadis ineffectively creates more jihadis.
Although perhaps we too benefited from having jihadi enemies far worse than our troops acted. But I consider that a low-odds significant explanation given the scrutiny our troops were under during the war.
(With bonus warning in that October 2013 post that the Sunni Arabs could flip back to the jihadis.)
Really, the American counter-insurgency wars in Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrated that well-trained regular troops--and not just special forces--can carry out COIN by mixing violence against enemies with restraint against civilians caught in the middle. This was really a revolution in COIN.
Egypt is fighting COIN the old-fashioned way, with conscript troops that do as much damage as good in the fight.
UPDATE: To clarify my contrast angle, our troops overwhelmingly fought honorably, as this photo from the Iraq War shows:
As Iraqis ran from trouble, an Iraqi boy took shelter behind an American soldier walking toward the threat.
