Sinai interior. Wilson44691/Wikimedia commons (some rights reserved)
Amidst the violence that continues unabated in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and beyond, international media attention has recently been diverted to Sinai once again. The sparsely populated peninsula in Egypt's northeast, with its history of low-level Islamist insurgencies, has made headlines time and again after a series of attacks against state security forces over the last few years, most recently with a number of simultaneous attacks that killed dozens of Egyptian soldiers in late January.
Yet attention usually quickly returns to the more destructive, larger-scale conflicts in the region; as it did even after one of the peninsula's most infamous jihadist groups pledged allegiance to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), re-naming itself Wilayat Sina, the 'Sinai Province' of the Islamic State. However, Sinai militancy offers valuable insights into the socio-economics and politics behind contemporary jihadist violence elsewhere in the Middle East.
