Islamic Extremist Violence Haunts Egypt’s Christians

The Rev. Eleya Komoss was seated in the confession room when the low murmurs inside the Mar Girgis Church where a weekly meeting of young Coptic Christians was in progress were replaced by the jarring staccato of machine-gun fire.

“I opened the door and found everyone running about,” the Coptic priest recounted Friday. “There were two girls who had been shot in the back. I pulled them inside. Another man shot in the back was calling out to me, ‘Help me, Father,’ so I pulled him inside too.

“By then, the assailants had run outside and continued shooting in the street. The scene inside the church was very hard. . . . We found ourselves in a pool of blood. It looked like a slaughterhouse.”

The attack by Islamic extremists in Abu Qurqas about 15 miles south of here killed nine people and left five wounded Wednesday evening.

It was the worst assault by Muslim extremists against the country’s Coptic Christian minority in five years--in May 1992, 12 Copts were killed in another attack in the region--and the first to take place inside a church.

The toll mounted Friday when three Christians were found slain in sugar-cane fields in the nearby village of El Zuheir. Police speculated that they had been killed by the same gunmen.

The attacks would seem to contradict the government’s repeated assertions that it has eradicated all but a few vestiges of the armed militants who say they want to establish an Islamic state in Egypt, a key U.S. ally that is generally seen as a stabilizing force in the Middle East.

But some analysts also saw the attack as a sign of the extremists’ weakness.

“In the last few years, the militants have been really squeezed by the security forces,” said Hala Moustafa, a specialist on Egypt’s extremist groups at Al Ahram Center for Strategic Studies in Cairo. “An operation such as this one was easy to carry out, it would attract a lot of attention, and at the same time it is not a direct confrontation with the government.”

According to the Rev. Macarios Youssef, another priest at the church, five masked gunmen were involved. One remained in the street, one posted himself at the door, and the other three fired randomly at the 40 or so people inside the church. They stayed for half a minute before fleeing on foot, he said.

“I would like to state that we live in love and compassion with our Muslim brothers,” Youssef added in a telephone interview. “[The attackers are] a strange tumor on our society.”

Egyptian security forces immediately put up a cordon around Abu Qurqas, stationing tanks and armored cars at churches. At least 79 people were rounded up as security forces sought clues, according to news agency reports.

In one indication of the tension in the area, police barred a reporter from getting within several miles of the church Thursday. In fact, they provided an armed escort for two-thirds of the 150-mile journey back to Cairo.

In an interview last month with The Times, Interior Minister Hassan Alfi, who has led the four-year crackdown on the militants, declared: “The security forces have total control of the situation.”

But the edginess of police near Minya seemed to suggest that a danger still exists.

“I take my gun with me everywhere, even to my bed,” one plainclothes officer said. “It is like a jungle here.”

The Abu Qurqas attack was widely denounced.

“Villainous, cowardly and low,” Muhammad Tantawi, sheik of the Al Azhar Mosque and Egypt’s leading Muslim religious authority, said in his weekly sermon Friday.

“This is an additional proof that Coptic citizens have become a target of some terrorist groups trying to spread religious discrimination and hatred,” said the Center for Human Rights and Legal Aid, an Egyptian human rights group.

According to unofficial estimates, more than 70 Copts have been slain by extremists in recent years. Islamic extremists consider the Christian Copts to be heretics and have killed Christian jewelers and goldsmiths to finance their operations. But most of their violence has been waged against the police and army.

Egypt’s Coptic minority makes up 10% of the population of 62 million, and its history predates Islam in Egypt. The Coptic Christians trace their church to only a few years after the death of Christ.

Although Copts and Muslims have coexisted mostly in peace since the Arab conquest of Egypt in AD 641, in recent years the Christians have become a dwindling minority. With the increase in attacks on Christians by Islamic militants and an official atmosphere that often appears to equate devotion to Islam with patriotism, some Copts have quietly changed their religion or emigrated.

Copts are generally more numerous in southern Egypt; in Abu Qurqas, the community is about one-third Christian.

Police suspect Gamaa al Islamiya, or the Islamic Group, in the attack. It is the largest and most active of the factions that have declared war on President Hosni Mubarak’s government.

More than 1,000 people--mainly militants and police officers--have died since the campaign of political violence began in 1992.

But the massive crackdown, including hundreds of arrests of people suspected of sympathizing with the extremists and trials resulting in harsh sentences handed down by special military courts, has resulted in a sharp decline in incidents and casualties in the last two years.

In Abu Qurqas, Youssef said, the permanent guard stationed at his church was withdrawn more than a year ago, apparently because police believed that the threat had ebbed.

With this week’s killings, however, the old feeling of anxiety has returned to haunt Egypt’s Christian minority.

“Too many attacks have occurred,” said Maurice Sadik, a lawyer and Coptic activist in Cairo. “There is a clear security failure.”