Gama'a al Islamiyya

Gama'a al Islamiyya (aka Islamic Group) was at one time Egypt's largest militant group. During the 1990s, the group sought to violently overthrow the Egyptian government and replace it with an Islamic theocracy. The organization, formed in the late 1970s, carried out terrorist attacks on tourists and police officers. Because so many of the attacks targeted tourists, Egypt's tourism industry was severely affected.

The U.S. State Department reports that, at its height, Gama'a Islamiyya boasted membership of several thousand, as well as thousands of sympathizers. The group claimed responsibility for the 1995 attempted assassination of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, as well as many attacks on tourist buses and a Nile cruise ship. While the group operates primarily in southern Egypt, it has support in Cairo, Alexandria, and other cities, as well as a presence in Sudan, the United Kingdom, Afghanistan, Austria, and Yemen. The Egyptian government has said that Gama'a has received financial support from Osama bin Laden as well as from Iranian and Afghan groups.

In November 1997, Gama'a Islamiyya members killed 58 foreign tourists and four Egyptians near the Valley of the Kings in Luxor. The tourists were entering the ancient Hatshepsut Temple when six gunmen disguised as police officers fired automatic rifles into the crowd. The international press reported that some of those killed had been stabbed after they were shot. In the gun battle, all of the terrorists were killed by Egyptian security forces.

When claiming responsibility for the attack, Gama'a Islamiyya maintained that it had intended only to take the tourists hostage, in an attempt to secure the release from prison of the group's spiritual leader, blind cleric Omar Abdel Rahman. (Abdel Rahman was convicted of involvement in a broad terrorist conspiracy that culminated with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; he had fled Egypt and lived in exile in Brooklyn before his conviction.) However, witnesses reported no attempt at hostage taking, just unprovoked gunfire. The flood of travel cancellations following the attack caused an estimated $500 million in lost revenue.

Egypt immediately cracked down on Gama'a Islamiyya, and those convicted of participating in terror attacks were sentenced to death in military courts. Defendants in the trials accused the state of torture and, in support of their claims, displayed injuries to the press. According to the U.S. State Department, Gama'a Islamiyya became fractured as jailed and exiled members vied for influence and leadership. In a break with Hamza's leadership, Rifa'i Taha Musa, a former senior member of Gama'a Islamiyya, signed Osama bin Laden's 1998 fatwa against the United States. The fatwa called for attacks against U.S. civilians. Taha Musa appeared in late 2000 with bin Laden and his second-in-command, Ayman al Zawahiri, in an undated video threatening retaliation against the United States for Abdel Rahman's continued imprisonment. Taha Musa published a book supporting the use of terrorist attacks in 2001, but he disappeared several months later; his fate is unknown.

Despite Taha Musa's call to arms, and the fact that Abdel Rahman withdrew his support for the cease-fire in June 2000 from his prison cell in the United States, Gama'a Islamiyya publicly denied supporting al Qaeda and has not broken the unilaterally declared cease-fire. In 2003 most of the group's jailed leaders publicly repudiated violence and terrorism, and in return, the Egyptian government has released thousands of the group's members from jail. Gama'a Islamiyya is not believed to have engaged in any further attacks since the Luxor massacre. It is believed that those members who still support the use of violence have mostly defected to the al Qaeda network.

...