The Cairo Bombing

I keep trying not to blog on weekends, but the Middle East doesn't respect my calendar. The bombing outside the Sayyidna Hussein Mosque in Cairo is the first in the city since 2005, I think, and there will be a lot of speculation about who is responsible and why it occurred now. The information is still a bit spotty; first reports said the bombs were thrown from a roof; now that they were planted under a seat. The wonders of cell-phone cameras and the Internet means there's already a Flickr photostream of photos from the scene.

The Gama'at Islamiyya, the radical group responsible for most of the violence in the 1990s, has declared a truce; certainly there are still hostile elements, would-be jihadis, sympathizers of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, freelance do-it-yourselfers, and so on out there.

Hussein's mosque is one of Cairo's great shrine mosques, a center for many events, but I think I'd go along with the assumption the press is making that the targets here were tourists, not the mosque worshippers. The Khan al-Khalili bazaar is adjacent, and there are coffeehouses and shops around the mosque's plaza. This is also the heart of the old walled Fatimid city of Cairo, and a warren of narrow, winding streets can facilitate escape and impede law enforcement. The fact that the casualties were foreign tourists makes it likely they were the target.

Of course, this being the Middle East, some opponents of the regime are already suggesting that, since Parliament is due to take up new anti-terrorist legislation to replace the Emergency Law imminently, this could even be a police provocation. That strikes me as a bit much: however much the government may use the attack to justify its authority, I don't think they're ready to start killing tourists.

More as the situation clarifies.