Two days ago, an investigative press report published by the French website “Disclose” revealed that Egypt used intelligence information provided by France through a secret military mission in Egypt to target civilian smugglers on the Egyptian-Libyan border during anti-terror operations.
– The report made a great resonance because it relied on leaked military documents from French intelligence, and immediately the Ministry of Defense ordered the opening of an investigation into the matter, and an invitation was received from representatives in the French Parliament to conduct other investigations.
– There is no official response from Egypt so far, but the link to the leaked papers was blocked in Egypt one day after the report was published.
– What’s the story? Is it real or not? What can we see? And what do we need to abide by during the war on terrorism?
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What is the story?
– Disclose relied in its report on hundreds of military documents that it obtained from an unknown source, and according to the report, in the period between 2016-2018 it was a secret military mission in Egypt.
– This mission was joint between the French military intelligence and the Egyptian army, and its name was “Sirly” and its goal was to provide intelligence information about the militants who pose a terrorist threat to Egypt from the western border.
– The operation was a monitoring of the Egyptian-Libyan borders through a light surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft leased from the French Military Intelligence Directorate.
– After monitoring and collecting this data through the images, it is assumed that they are compared to confirm the identity of the people and the reality of the potential threat, and are they terrorists or not?
– But what happened was that this initial information was used to target Arab women regardless of what they were, and mostly countries would be smugglers across the border.
– The task of gathering information was the French side entrusted with it, but members of the French intelligence team noticed the Egyptian army’s use of the information they provided to it in the framework of this military cooperation in targeting civilian smugglers who have nothing to do with terrorism.
– The report also says that the members of the international team informed their superiors of these violations more than once, and this was only two months after the start of the mission in February 2016. On one occasion, according to the site, the liaison officer told the French mission that the Egyptians wanted to “take direct measures against human traffickers.” The fight against terrorism is no longer a priority.
The report estimates that from 2016 to 2018, nearly 19 civilian targets were targeted by attacks by the Egyptian army, most of whom were civilian smugglers between the ages of 18 and 30, who were driving carts carrying cigarettes, drugs, weapons, petrol, grain and rice.
One of these attacks was on July 6, 2017, in which 3 citizens were killed in the Bahariya Oasis after a missile fell on them, and smugglers were mistakenly targeted, and one of them was an engineer working on paving roads named Ahmed Al-Feki.
– The incident happened when the engineer and 3 workers were going in a four-wheel drive vehicle to one of the wells in the mining area, and one of the workers got down to collect water from the well in order to get out to meet a plane that hit the car, in which the engineer and 2 workers were present.
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Is the story real?
No one can be certain about the exact details of the matter because it was done within the framework of a secret military operation, but in general there are many details that must be investigated by Egypt in a transparent manner, and certainly the same is happening in France, so that we can fully understand the truth of the matter.
But there is a lot of evidence that confirms that the story, at least in part, is true, and it is the story of the engineer who was killed, in addition to the fact that during this period there was an intense intelligence and military cooperation between Egypt and France.
Egypt in this period and in subsequent periods made more than one armament deal with France, including Rafale planes, an offensive naval frigate, four corvettes for the Egyptian Navy and two Mistral helicopter carriers.
– Also, what confirms that this is a true story is that in similar stories, the army hit civilians by mistake and they received compensation from the state and the president himself apologized to them on the air.
But in this case, it was clear that they were directly targeted, and it was known that those targeted by the planes could be smugglers, not armed terrorists.
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Ok what is the problem?
– There are people who can say what the problem is. Most of those who were beaten were not smugglers, and they could be drug or weapon smugglers.
– The truth is that this logic has a problem because it threatens the success of the anti-terror strategy itself. If there are arms smugglers, it is important to arrest and interrogate them in order to know the ways of smuggling weapons, and you can understand the situation more, and if there are drug smugglers, they are imprisoned and prosecuted, not targeted by planes.
– Also, of course, in this way, it is possible and it happened that ordinary civilians were killed without any guilt, and we have the case of an ordinary road engineer with workers, I mean, and it is possible for an ordinary civilian to be an Arab driver smuggling gasoline or sugar in others, who will be bombing like this, I mean.
The state is supposed to use violence to impose the force of the law, not for revenge or collective liquidation. It makes no sense at all to overlook these stories, because there are innocent lives who die outside the framework of the law, like Engineer Ahmed El-Feki and others.
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What do you need for similar things like this?
– In order to understand why the process of analyzing the information captured by these reconnaissance planes is important, and how the process of verifying a person’s identity before striking is very important, we can see the most famous story of the most famous terrorist who was killed, Osama bin Laden.
– The CIA preferred to follow the house in which Bin Laden lived for months, and their analysts analyzed everything, even the clothesline, the number of pieces of clothing on it, the behavior of the people and the tree under which he was smelling air, and they discovered from it that it might actually be him.
– After months of analysis and information gathering, they were surrounded by a 70% possibility that it would be him, and another team of analysts had a 40% chance, and even after all this study and analysis, Biden, who was then the Vice President, agreed with it because he was not convinced and the Minister of Defense was the same, but Obama Authorize and agree to the transaction.
There are many stories about tracking down terrorists, even French intelligence stories, and this tells us the importance of targeting the right person, and making the most of the intelligence resources you have, not hitting workers for help and salvation.
There are other examples of failed operations that produced massacres against civilians, including the US drone strike in the Afghan capital, Kabul, which killed 10 people from one family, including 6 children.
– The US military said at the time that it targeted a vehicle that was carrying at least one person linked to the terrorist organization ISIS, and the fact that the man came out was just a paramedic with no need.
– The commander of the US Central Command, Kenneth McKenzie, said during a press conference, “We apologize for this, and I take full responsibility,” and described the raid as a “tragic mistake.”
After him, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin apologized in a statement for what he described as a “fatal mistake” due to the civilian casualties caused by the raid, and said: “We will seek to learn from that.”
– Therefore, we need disclosure in this file, and the military spokesman, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, or any responsible party in the state comes to tell us where the truth is, and admits the mistake if it happened, apologizes, and holds the official who made a mistake, and compensates the victims, this is the least of the few.
On the contrary, acknowledging the killing of civilians by mistake and compensating them in such operations is important to give credibility to the anti-terror operation as a whole.
– We are waiting for clarifications about dangerous information like this, and it was not useful for the first reaction to the spread of the report to be blocking the site and salvation, because this is not how countries succeed in fighting terrorism.
There is no alternative to transparency and professionalism in our operations against terrorism, in order to avoid the occurrence of grievances in the areas where the war is taking place.
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