Egyptian Islamic Jihad

Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ), Egyptian extremist organization that originated in the late 1970s and developed into a powerful force in the 1980s and 1990s. Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) allied with the al-Qaeda network in the late 1990s, and the two groups merged in 2001.

EIJ coalesced out of a variety of smaller militant groups in the late 1970s under the leadership of Muhammad Abd al-Salam Faraj. His treatise Al-Farīḍah al-ghāʾibah (1981; The Neglected Duty), which urged Muslims to use violence for the purpose of creating an Islamic state, became the group’s ideological platform. On October 6, 1981, EIJ members disguised as soldiers assassinated Egyptian Pres. Anwar Sadat, shooting him in front of Egyptian television cameras during a military parade. A crackdown followed that saw most of the organization’s leaders imprisoned. During that period, fractures within EIJ worsened, and the group’s Upper Egyptian wing broke away to form an independent organization, al-Jamāʿah al-Islāmiyyah (“the Islamic Group”), under the leadership of Omar Abdel Rahman.

In the 1980s many members of EIJ left Egypt to participate in the Afghan guerrilla war against the occupation that followed the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. It was in Peshawar, Pakistan, that EIJ’s leaders Sayyid Imam al-Sharif and Ayman al-Zawahiri became acquainted with the Saudi financier and organizer Osama bin Laden, who founded the al-Qaeda network in the late 1980s.

Soon after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, Sharif, Zawahiri, and other EIJ leaders joined bin Laden in Khartoum, where he was hosted by Sudan’s government. Ties between EIJ and al-Qaeda continued to deepen. Veterans of EIJ came to constitute a large portion of al-Qaeda’s senior leadership, while EIJ relied on al-Qaeda for the planning and execution of its armed operations against the Egyptian government. EIJ claimed responsibility for foiled assassination attempts on Interior Minister Hassan al-Alfi in August 1993 and Prime Minister Atef Sedky in November 1993. Those attacks, along with EIJ’s failed attempt to assassinate Egyptian Pres. Hosni Mubarak during a visit to Ethiopia in June 1995, provoked a crushing repression of the group inside Egypt, forcing the group to find targets abroad. EIJ’s deadliest attack was its bombing of Egypt’s embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, in November 1995, which killed 17 people. However, EIJ was largely overshadowed by al-Jamāʿah al-Islāmiyyah, which waged a far-bloodier campaign inside Egypt, killing numerous officials, civilians, and foreign tourists.

EIJ and al-Qaeda announced a formal alliance in 1998, and the two groups merged fully in 2001. Zawahiri became Osama bin Laden’s deputy and was affiliated with the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.

In mid-2007, as part of a “deradicalization” program, Egypt released more than 130 jailed members of EIJ in exchange for their renouncing violence. That year also saw a series of publications by Sayyid Imam al-Sharif renouncing terrorism as un-Islamic. Sharif’s writings drew a lengthy rebuttal from Zawahiri.