Crackdown With Reverberations : Cairo retaliates for random attacks by militants on foreign tourists

This week’s bloody raids by Egyptian security forces on Muslim militant strongholds mark the latest battle in a continuing war whose international dimensions grow increasingly clearer.

President Hosni Mubarak’s government has come under ever more violent pressure from terrorists who aim at establishing a revolutionary Islamic regime in Egypt. Officials and police officers have been assassinated and Egypt’s 3.5 million Coptic Christians have been singled out for assault. But it is in the economic area that the most serious blows by the radicals have fallen. Random attacks on foreign tourists, most of them Westerners, have frightened away visitors and severely depressed the tourist industry, one of the country’s chief sources of revenue. It was against this backdrop, and concurrent with the opening of the trial of 43 Muslims accused of attacks on tourists, that the government moved against Islamic strongholds in Cairo and the southern city of Aswan.

The main target in the Aswan raid was a mosque frequented by followers of Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman. The defendants in the Cairo trial are also closely associated with this cleric. So, too, it’s now known, is Mohammed A. Salameh, who is charged with aiding and abetting the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York.

Rahman fled Egypt a few years ago and obtained a U.S. visa in Sudan, despite being listed by the State Department as a suspected terrorist. He now operates out of a storefront mosque in Jersey City. Salameh, a Palestinian who is illegally in the United States, worshiped at the mosque. None of this by itself proves a connection between radical Muslims who are trying to subvert a U.S. ally and the New York bombing. But at a minimum it suggests a possible link that calls for even closer international cooperation in identifying and monitoring suspected terrorists. Almost certainly Egypt, along with other Arab countries, will face continued violent challenges from anti-Western Islamic extremists. The West can’t afford to think that it is immune from those challenges.