Under seige in Sinai, ISIL digs up WWII mines

Fighters from the "Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant" (ISIL) affiliate Wilayat Sinai have been digging up old mines and explosive materials buried in the desert to use in their clashes with the Egyptian forces, according to recent media reports.

This suggests that the siege Egyptian forces have imposed on ISIL is working, and has severed its logistical supply routes, experts told Al-Mashareq, as extracting old mines is a last-resort process fraught with danger.

According to recent media reports, up to 20 million mines are buried in the sands of northwest Egypt, planted there during World War II.

The mines, which cover vast tracts of the desert, were planted between 1940 and 1943 during battles between warring sides, said Brig. Gen. Jawdat Ashraf of the Egyptian police, who is currently stationed in Sinai.

"Despite the vastness of the area covered by the mines, detecting infiltrators looking for mines is fairly easy with the aerial surveillance conducted by Egyptian Army military helicopters, which spot any suspect group headed to the area," he told Al-Mashareq.

Local residents avoid those areas, he said, because they know the risk involved in entering them, so anyone who goes there is there to look for explosives.

"Several terrorists groups have in fact been detected in the area and were dealt with appropriately," he said.

Security agencies in the region have been taking meticulous inventory of all instruments used in archaeological surveys and excavation, he noted, and have declared them to be unlicensed weapons.

"They are informing local residents they must hand them over to security agencies, and gave them a grace period to do so without legal implications," he said.

A perilous process

From a technical standpoint, it is feasible to re-use mines long buried in the Sinai desert, said Maj. Gen. Yahya Mohammed Ali, a retired Egyptian army officer who specialises in extremist groups.

But this would require a lot of effort and precise work, he told Al-Mashareq, noting that these mines have been buried for decades.

"The extraction process requires special survey equipment," he said. "Apparently terrorist elements have resorted to using instruments used in archaeological surveying" which have been widely used in the peninsula.

The extraction process is very dangerous, he explained, but a large amount of explosive materials can be obtained from this source, especially as a number of the mines are anti-armour and anti-tank mines.

"The fact that terrorist elements are resorting to using this method to obtain explosive materials is conclusive proof of the success of the blockade imposed on the areas in which they are hiding and the severance of their logistical supply routes," Ali said.

Extremist groups operating in Sinai are looking for new sources of explosive material since planting roadside bombs and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) are among the main tactics they use, he added.

Ramped up security

Stepped-up security measures have prevented extremist groups like ISIL from carrying out mass terror attacks against military and civilian targets, Ali said.

"The only option they have left is to sneak to main or side roads to plant explosives and detonate them remotely or time them to explode at a certain time," he said.

Forensic examination of a number of IEDs, including some that had been detonated and others that were discovered before exploding, confirmed that their explosive content dates back to the World War II era, he said.

Mines planted in the Sinai desert are scattered randomly and not according to fixed maps as they should have been, said Sami Gheit, a researcher with Al-Sharq Centre for Regional and Strategic Studies.

"Egypt has faced great difficulties in its numerous attempts to remove them due to the nature of the desert terrain and vastness of the mined areas," he told Al-Mashareq.

The detection of such a large number of mines requires high tech equipment and is very costly, he said, noting that many areas where mines were planted are quite far from populated areas, industrial projects or paved roads.

In addition to the mines, Gheit said, there are hundreds of thousands of rockets that date back to World War II which did not explode due to a malfunction.

Many missiles were also abandoned in the desert after the sudden retreats by armies in the area, he added, some of which were stored in underground shelters where they have remained since.