Islamic State affiliate kills 17 in Sinai attacks

Fifteen soldiers and two civilians were killed in five simultaneous attacks Thursday targeting security checkpoints in Egypt’s North Sinai, where the army is battling the local branch of the Islamic State group, police said.

Gunmen opened fire on soldiers with automatic rifles and rockets at separate checkpoints south of Sheikh Zuweid, east of the provincial capital of El-Arish, police officials told AFP.

Seventeen people were killed in the attacks, while 15 militants died in subsequent gun battles, the officials said.

Another attack targeted a military facility in North Sinai, but police did not specify where, while in a separate incident, a mortar shell fell on a house east of the provincial capital El-Arish, wounding three civilians, police and health officials said.

Ansar Beit al-Maqdis (Partisans of Jerusalem), founded in 2011, changed its name last year to the Sinai Province after pledging allegiance to IS, which controls territory in Iraq and Syria.

The group, which has claimed several sophisticated attacks against security forces in the restive peninsula, now wants to establish a province of the self-declared IS caliphate.

After the army ousted Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in July 2013, militants claimed a string of deadly attacks against security forces which they claimed were in retaliation for a brutal government crackdown against Islamists.

Ansar Beit al-Maqdis’ initial attacks in 2011 were against Israel.