A Great and Terrible Wilderness

Correction appended: Nov. 8, 2013

The Greek orthodox monastery of St. Catherine on the slopes of Mount Sinai — where tradition says God delivered the Ten Commandments to Moses — ought to be the last place on earth targeted by Muslim militants. The monastery’s museum displays a copy of a 7th century letter dictated by the Prophet Muhammad, specifically ordering that the compound be protected by armies carrying the flag of Islam into Egypt. “Instead of conflict, we are an example that these things that make for conflict can be transcended,” says Father Justin, who runs the monastery’s library. “So that Sinai becomes a symbol of peace.”

The symbol is now in peril. On Aug. 15, Egyptian authorities ordered St. Catherine’s to be shuttered, fearing an attack by the Islamist extremists who have made Sinai the latest battleground for global jihad. Egypt’s ruling military was sending tanks, helicopters and F-16s into the “great and terrible wilderness” of Deuteronomy, and the generals were unable to guarantee the monastery’s safety. The extremists seemed to care little for the area’s history. “I don’t think it has any sentimental value to the jihadists,” says Mohammed Abu Noor, a professor of religion in the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian enclave that abuts Sinai. “The only value for them is that Sinai’s security is out of control.”

The place where the Law was handed down is now lawless, and the consequences could shake the entire Middle East. The Sinai peninsula dangles like a shark’s tooth between Asia and Africa, a land bridge of flat, monotonous desert in its northern half — where the army is hunting militants — giving way to mountains farther south, including a central formation that calls to mind Afghanistan’s Tora Bora. The conflict that closed down St. Catherine’s threatens the Suez Canal, which borders Sinai to the west and the rest of Egypt to the east. Its isolation allows extremists the room to lurk and plot that al-Qaeda enjoyed in Afghanistan before 9/11 and that jihadis enjoyed in the Anbar region during the Iraq War. “Basically, Sinai has become a failed state, or failed region — ungoverned,” says Jonathan Fighel, an Israeli counterterrorism expert who advised American forces in Iraq.

But since July 3, when Defense Minister Abdul Fattah al-Sisi removed Mohamed Morsi as Egypt’s elected, Islamist President, Sinai’s militants have redirected their fire toward a familiar target: the state. The two have never hit it off. Mainland Egypt, defined by the Nile, regards Sinai as something apart and its population of 500,000 tribal Bedouin as second-class citizens. Cairo rules the peninsula by military governors and administers it not by bureaucrats but by police — or it did until the February 2011 day Hosni Mubarak stepped down as President, and the entire force simply vanished.

The resulting security vacuum was filled by men with guns. These included Bedouin — only too happy to operate their smuggling networks unmolested — and Islamist militants, who were the smugglers’ best customers. The relationship goes a long way toward explaining the current fighting. In its northeastern corner, Sinai shares a border with Gaza — only for 13 km, but the distance is perforated with more than 1,000 tunnels. The tunnels allow Hamas, the militant Islamist group that governs Gaza, to bypass Israel’s control of the enclave. They smuggle in fuel, cigarettes, cars and arms. And they are an escape route for people, including militants too radical for Hamas. When the Palestinian group cracked down on fundamentalists who tried to establish an emirate in southern Gaza three years ago, the hardest core escaped through the tunnels to Sinai.

They found the desert wastes very hospitable. Sinai already was home to a substantial militant population, many of them Bedouin coaxed toward jihad by fundamentalist imams. When Mubarak fell, their ranks were swelled by radicals who had used the ensuing chaos to escape from prison — along with political prisoners, including Morsi himself. Ramzi Mowafi, a dentist who broke out of the same jail as Morsi, once worked as a battlefield medic for Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. Egyptian officials claim he’s now emir — prince — among Sinai’s bands of takfiris: militants intolerant of anyone who does not share their severe vision of Islam. The most prominent is Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis (Partisans of Jerusalem), which mounted the complex attack on an Israeli border highway in August 2011. More recently, the group was behind a Sept. 5 car bombing on the motorcade of Egypt’s Interior Minister, who survived.

How bad is it? Last year the Multinational Force and Observers, a mostly American force stationed around Sinai as part of Egypt’s 1979 peace treaty with Israel, described the security situation as “unimaginable.” And last June, Germany’s intelligence agency declared that Sinai had replaced the Pakistani badlands of Waziristan as the training ground of choice for German extremists. Analysts say most training occurs in Gaza, where groups more extreme than Hamas maintain camps, then shift to Sinai to operate freely.

The situation turned immeasurably worse with the July 3 coup in Cairo. Within hours, Islamists overran government buildings in al-Arish, capital of Sinai’s northern governorate. An emirate was announced. Policemen were killed at the rate of one a day. Before the month’s end, al-Sisi pivoted from unrest in the mainland to launch a major military operation on the peninsula.

It has been a sledgehammer offensive. After the police disappeared, for instance, Bedouin repeatedly bombed Egypt’s natural gas pipeline to Israel, taking care to injure no one: they were merely telegraphing their displeasure that they were not getting protection money to safeguard the line.

But to Egyptian armor swarming Sinai’s north, force was only a blunt instrument. Trained to fight national armies, not an insurgency, the Egyptian military leveled suspect houses with missiles from Apache helicopter gunships and sent F-16 fighter jets screaming overhead. “They have a lot to learn in this field,” says a senior Israeli officer, speaking privately to criticize an operation Israel favors. “And they’re learning.” At a cost. By September, the most recent figures Egyptian officials have provided, the death count included nearly as many police officers as militants: about 100 each. (Although the fighting has continued, information about more-recent casualties is sketchy, and independent verification is very difficult since few noncombatants dare roam the deserts.) Egypt says a quarter of the dead are foreigners, but many of the rest are Bedouin, whose tribal code requires that deaths of members be avenged. The demand further muddies a confused battlefield. “It’s impossible to know now what attacks are terrorist attacks and what are personal revenge,” one tribal leader tells TIME.

Sometimes the author of an attack is evident from its brutality. The July 11 decapitation of a Coptic Christian was clearly the act of extremists. But if the shooting of individual officers may be the work of vengeful Bedouin, the Aug. 18 slaughter of 25 police recruits — shot in the back of the head, prostrate, on a roadside — was an assault on state authority defying Sinai’s previous norms.

As for Gaza, in July the generals moved to seal it off, shutting down the official border crossing and taking the first real action against tunnels. By early August, 794 were closed, Egyptian authorities claimed. The loss of so many supply lines immediately hurt Hamas. “We never expected the Egyptians to deal with Gaza like this,” says Salah Abu Sharkh, head of security for the Hamas government.

But the threat to Israel from Sinai’s lawlessness remains. Even after adding a high-tech new border fence, officials fret about the high ground above the Red Sea resort of Eilat, where a militant with a shoulder-fired missile might get a clear shot at a commercial flight coming in to land. The fears have prompted one closure of the airport and altered flight paths. El Al Israel Airlines ceased flights altogether for several days in September.

That month, Egyptian authorities allowed St. Catherine’s to reopen. But the fighting has continued in the north, car bombs and assassinations answered by air strikes and leveled houses. And on Oct. 7, a car bomb exploded in El Tor — far from Mount Sinai but close enough to hurt: it was the first strike in Sinai’s heavily guarded, tourist-dependent south.

The monks may have their solitude a while longer. “Structurally, this was built as a fortress,” Father Justin says, noting that the walls of St. Catherine’s are 18 m high. He pauses and adds, “It’s easily turned back into a fortress.” But it wouldn’t be the most positive message to come down from Mount Sinai.

— with reporting by Ashraf Khalil / Cairo and Aaron J. Klein / Tel Aviv

Correction: The location of the Suez Canal was misstated in an earlier version of this story.