Under Egypt's Volcano; Along the Sinai coast, Egypt created the largest gated playground in the world, a tourist cocoon of five-star pleasures and world-class scuba-diving.

Publication: Vanity Fair

Publication Date: 01-OCT-06

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COPYRIGHT 2006 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

Byline: Scott Anderson

The commercials are slick and alluring, holding out the promise of a pampered, hedonistic holiday in the sun: beautiful young couples lounging poolside, swimmers frolicking with dolphins and colorful fish, three women with fine, bikini-clad butts, gazing out at an azure sea. It is quite far into the spots before the dark-skinned locals first put in an appearance, but even they are no cause for alarm-most are in tailored servant uniforms and wear friendly smiles as they cater to their paler-complected guests. It's not clear where all this fun is taking place-maybe the Caribbean, maybe somewhere in the Mediterranean-until at the very end of the commercials, shown endlessly on CNN International, it's revealed to be someplace called Egypt's Red Sea Riviera.

Until a few years ago, no one had heard of the Red Sea Riviera. Perhaps that's because most of the shiny beach-resort hotels that fall under the marketing label aren't on the Red Sea at all, but rather on the Gulf of 'Aqaba, that narrow strip of water which separates the eastern coast of Egypt's Sinai Peninsula from Saudi Arabia and Jordan. No matter, because it really could be anywhere. From Taba, at the very north end, flush on the border with Israel, all the way down the 125 miles of rugged Sinai coastline to the main tourist resort of Sharm al-Sheikh, the visitor exists in a cocoon of pleasure scrubbed clean of exoticism, the largest gated playground on the planet. Within those gates are five-star hotels and restaurants and world-class scuba-diving, a Hard Rock Cafe, and McDonald's. Outside those gates is everyone and everything else, a purity maintained by police checkpoints on all roads leading into the enclave. The only Egyptians allowed to enter are those wealthy enough to vacation in the zone, or those who can prove they have jobs there; the others are turned back.

But in the modern world, ugly reality has a way of intruding into even the most sanitized playgrounds. For the Red Sea Riviera, that ugliness started on the evening of October 7, 2004, when a vegetable-delivery truck rolled up to the entrance of the Hilton in Taba. Hidden beneath its crates of produce was a bomb so powerful it brought down the entire front wing of the 10-story hotel, killing 32; almost simultaneously, two smaller bombs exploded at tourist campgrounds farther down the coast, killing 2 more. Nine months later, in July 2005, Sharm al-Sheikh itself was the target: three more bombs, 88 more dead. And just this past April, it was Dahab, a quiet resort town midway between Taba and Sharm al-Sheikh: again three bombs, more than 20 dead.

For the Egyptian government, the Sinai bombings arrived like a ghost it thought it had long since killed. In the 1990s, shadowy Islamic guerrilla organizations carried out a series of attacks on foreigners in Egypt, culminating in a horrific slaughter of 58 tourists and four Egyptians at the Temple of Queen Hatshepsut, in Luxor, in 1997. For this direct assault on one of the bulwarks of the economy-at almost $8 billion annually, tourism is the main source of Egyptian foreign exchange-the government conducted a brutal, no-holds-barred war against al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya (the Islamic Group), killing or disappearing hundreds, and imprisoning thousands more. The pogrom effectively ended terrorism in Egypt-until the 2004 attack on the Taba Hilton.

While nowhere approaching the scorched-earth campaign directed against al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya, the Egyptian authorities have responded to the Sinai bombings in nearly identical fashion. Each time they have launched massive police dragnets among the local population of Sinai, especially in its northeast corner, rounding up hundreds, sometimes thousands. Each time, they have quickly identified the perpetrators as local malcontents working in collusion with elements of Sinai's criminal underworld. Even as those conclusions have been questioned by human-rights organizations, the government has embarked on a new public-relations campaign designed to assure foreign investors and tourists that the danger has passed, that Egypt is safe once again.

By chance, I had a passing familiarity with all three places targeted in the Sinai bombings. In the spring of 2002, after spending six weeks in Israel on a story assignment, I had decided to go to the Sinai Peninsula to unwind. Crossing the Israeli-Egyptian border on foot, I had walked the 100 yards to the Taba Hilton to pick up a rental car for the drive down the coast. On the way, I stopped off in Dahab, the site of the most recent attack, before continuing on to Sharm al-Sheikh. There, I stayed just down the street from the Ghazala Gardens, the hotel where a suicide bomber had driven into the lobby during the July 2005 attacks and claimed the greatest number of victims.

Brief as my time there was, I came to feel that I was confronting two illusions, that just as the tourist enclaves in the Sinai had little in common with the rest of Egypt, so the nation as a whole bears scant resemblance to the placid image that its boosters-the Egyptian government, its friends in the West-wish to project. It is, instead, something of a seething volcano.

With at least 80 million inhabitants, Egypt is not only the most populous nation in the Arab world but in many ways its intellectual and political nexus, the fount from which nearly every major political or religious force to spread through the region in the past century has emerged. And while much has been made since September 11 of the danger posed by such Muslim fundamentalist trends as the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia, it has been the much broader fundamentalist trends first fostered in Egypt, with their specifically anti-Western tilt, that have probably most fanned the flames of jihad throughout the region.

The pattern is unmistakable, should one bother to look. The Gama'a al-Islamiyya, a social movement espousing a rejection of Western values and a return to Islamic traditions, originated in Egypt in the 1970s before spreading throughout the Middle East. Islamic Jihad also has its roots in Egypt. Osama bin Laden was a disgruntled Saudi rich kid bankrolling Resistance fighters in Afghanistan until he came under the sway of his Egyptian spiritual mentor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and decided to go global; for that matter, 4 or 5 of the 10 original founders of al-Qaeda were Egyptian. Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, one of the masterminds behind the first World Trade Center bombing? Egyptian. Mohammed Atta, the ringleader of 9/11? Egyptian. Wherever one turns in the arena of Islamic jihadists, one is likely to find either the direct or spiritual influence of an Egyptian.

I decided to take a closer look at the Sinai bombings, sensing that in exploring who might have been behind them and why I could glimpse the darker currents that run beneath the surface in Egypt. To do so, however, would mean somehow skirting the Egyptian state-security apparatus-no small obstacle. In the wake of the 1997 Luxor massacre, for example, the Swiss government launched an official investigation into the killings (most of those murdered had been Swiss citizens) but had been thwarted at every turn by the Egyptian authorities and finally abandoned the effort.

Still, there was at least one strong lead to follow. In the parking lot of the Taba Hilton, authorities had found the mangled bodies of the two men who had driven the delivery truck to the entrance; it's likely they had been running for their lives when the bomb went off prematurely. One of those dead men was identified as Suleiman Flaifil, a previously unknown day laborer from northern Sinai. Nearly 10 months later, Suleiman's older brother Muhammad was killed in a shoot-out with police while on the run from an indictment in the Taba case. Whatever the actual circumstances of Muhammad's death-being killed in a "shoot-out" with police is a suspiciously common event in Egypt-it was hard to imagine any possible motive for the authorities to have invented Suleiman's role in the Taba bombing. My goal, then, was to find out whatever I could about the mysterious Flaifil brothers.

But to focus solely on a tragedy, even one on a grand scale, is to render only a limited...

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