Egyptian Christians are dying again at the hands of jihadists

A bus of pilgrims after the terrorist attacks

According to Arabic TV channel al-Arabiya, November 2, 2018 was made completely unmotivated cruelty attack by Islamist militants on a bus with a local Christian pilgrims in Central Egypt. Near the city of Minya, about 200 kilometers South of Cairo, armed extremists, caught in two vehicles and opened fire on a bus carrying a group of Egyptian Copts.

The attack occurred on the way back from the Coptic monastery of St. Samuel the Confessor, when the bus went to the city of Sohag; the wounded were taken to the hospital in Beni-Mazar.

About his involvement in the attack, announced almost immediately banned in Russia and many other countries, the radical jihadist group “Islamic state” in its appeal through the portal in the messenger Telegram.

Recall that the Christian minority in Egypt (represented in the vast majority of the Copts) is approximately 10% of the 96 million population of this country, and this religious and ethnic group was and still is in recent years one of the main goals of the Islamists.

So, in 2017 during several high-profile attacks that were carried out mainly in churches, killing more than 80 Egyptian Christians : in April of 2017, killing more than 40 people during explosions in two churches; in a month in the province of Minya were again killed 28 Christians, after the Egyptian authorities declared a state of emergency in the country. However, in December 2017, the militant “Islamic state” (*banned in Russia) killed 9 people during an attack on a Church in a Christian suburb of Cairo. Moreover, in 2017, it killed several dozen soldiers of the Egyptian army and police from among the Muslims (recall that Christians are forbidden to serve in the Egyptian power structures, and access to public authorities is extremely difficult).

    

The “last straw” was the explosion of jihadists year ago the mosque in the Sinai Peninsula, where going to pray a lot of Egyptian “security forces”, the victims of which became more than 300 people. In result, the Egyptian army began to stagepath forces in the Sinai, where since the fall of the power of the President-Islamist Mohammed Mursi in 2013, there was virtually independent region under the control of jihadists.

During the complex anti-terrorist measures, the government finally conducted a large-scale operation “Sinai-2018”, which in this region were killed more than 450 militants and hundreds of persons who helped them or sympathized with, was arrested. However, to completely eliminate the problem of Islamic terrorism in Egypt the authorities have not yet succeeded. Moreover, in this country, often occur just a massacre of Christians without visible participation of any Islamist groups, so in December 2017, hundreds of Egyptian Muslims defeated the Christian Church in the southern suburbs of Cairo.

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