Summary

Gunmen kidnapped two Americans Feb. 3 on Egypt's Sinai Peninsula. Thought the two were later released, the incident highlights Cairo's loosening security grip on the Sinai, and will harm Egypt's tourism sector, still recovering from unrest after the Arab Spring.

Analysis

Masked gunmen abducted two Americans Feb. 3 from a tourist bus travelling from St. Catherine's Monastery to Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula and released them just hours later.

The kidnapping is part of a string of incidents highlighting Cairo's failure to maintain security in the era after the ouster of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Insecurity in the Sinai damages Egypt's tourism industry, which comprises 12 percent of the economy and employs 5 percent of the population, thus preventing the industry from recovering from Arab Spring unrest.

According to witnesses, masked men thought to be Bedouins intercepted the bus as it returned from St. Catherine's, a major Sinai tourist destination, near the village of Wadi al-Soal. The men seized the two Americans, both in their 60s, and their local guide and stole from the other passengers.

Security officials in the southern Sinai immediately alerted the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and deployed police forces and a military aircraft for an emergency search operation. The rapid deployment shows how seriously Cairo took the incident given the involvement of U.S. citizens. They also tried to begin negotiations with the attackers via local tribal elders. These efforts apparently bore fruit.

The motivations behind the attack remain unclear. Some reports claim the kidnappers demanded the release of their confederates held in Egyptian jails in exchange for the hostages. The theft of valuables from passengers and the speed at which the captives were released may indicates they were kidnapped to demand a ransom.

The kidnapping occurred just two days after Bedouins kidnapped Chinese workers in el-Arish in the northern Sinai. Those abductors demanded the release of their relatives detained in connection with a 2004 bombing. It also comes two weeks after a French tourist died in a shootout in Sharm el-Sheikh.

Incidents like these are not uncommon in the Sinai Peninsula, a vast desert isolated from the Nile Delta and where Bedouins historically have clashed with settled communities. This string of incidents, however, points to an increasingly unstable security situation in the Sinai -- one that Cairo is losing its grip over. The death of the French tourist and the Feb. 3 kidnappings are especially significant given that they occurred in the southern Sinai, a hub of tourist activity in Egypt. According to official numbers, the tourism industry declined 30 percent in the last year -- a decline likely to worsen should tourists continue to be targets.

Conversely, outbreaks of violence in urban centers of the Egyptian Delta will prevent the Sinai tourism industry from recovering, such as the soccer stampede in Port Said, where more than 70 people died. The same day as the Sinai kidnappings, two Egyptians were killed in the city of Suez, along with a demonstrator and an army officer in Cairo during violent protests, attended by thousands, against the Interior Ministry. Images of bloodstained bleachers and crowds of young men with machetes in urban centers tarnish Egypt's reputation as an accommodating tourist destination even more than the isolated and quickly resolved incidents of kidnappings by discontented Bedouins in the desert.

On the other side of the Sinai, Israel is watching developments like this carefully. It fears the political crisis unfolding in Egypt's urban centers is distracting the Egyptian army and preventing it from securing the Sinai as effectively as under Mubarak. The Israelis fear the presence of various militant organizations that operate in the Sinai, such as the emergent Al Qaeda in the Sinai, suspected of planning operations from the town of El Arish in the northern Sinai. While select groups of Bedouins have facilitated the operations of militant organizations such as these in the past, that does not seem to be the case with the bus incident. This kidnapping was settled quickly, appears to have been criminally motivated, and was contained to the southern Sinai. Still, the Egyptian security apparatus' failure to prevent such incidents increases Israeli fears.

This article is republished at Lebanonwire with permission of Stratfor, the world's leading private intelligence provider.

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