SUMMARY

The predominant strategy used by the Tawhid wal Jihad when trying to fulfill its goals have been acts of one-sided violence against civilians through the use of bombings. Since the exact ideology of the Tawhid wal Jihad is unknown, it is hard to establish how it justifies such attacks, or what type of thinking guides this strategy. A statement attributed to the group, released after the July attack of 2005, stated that the Tawhid wal Jihad was waging war on the Jews and the Christians to expel them from Islamic lands. This statement implies links to the Israeli-Palestinian and Iraqi conflicts, and that attacks on unbeliever –armed or unarmed- are acceptable to the group to fulfill its mission. Other statements have contained the view that tourism and ancient Egyptian archaeological sites are blasphemous. Such thinking would be in line with the ideology of other Egyptian Islamic extremists, such as the al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya, and can explain why the Tawhid wal Jihad chooses to target civilian locations and specifically tourist sites that are deemed to be sinful.

The targets attacked in one-sided violence by the Tawhid wal Jihad have exclusively been tourist resorts, in Taba, Sharm el-Sheik, and Dahab (the Dahab attack in 2006 is not included in UCDP one-sided data since it did not reach the 25 deaths threshold). The resorts are all located on the Red Sea, in the Southern Sinai. It is not however possible to discern if any specific ethnicity or nationality is targeted by the group, since the attacks have killed Israelis, Westerners, and Egyptian civilians alike. Car bombs have been the preferred modus operandi of the Tawhid wal Jihad.

Tawhid wal Jihad first became active as a one-sided actor in UCDP data in 2004, when the one-sided violence resulted in at least 25 civilian deaths. The threshold was reached after 34 civilians were killed in a bombing attack of a tourist resort in Taba.