On November 24th, 2017, the Egyptian state media reported militants launched a bomb and gun attack on a mosque in Egypt’s North Sinai province, killing 235 people and injuring 109 people.
Their target was the al-Rawdah mosque which is located in the town of Bir al-Abed. The militants attacked on Friday during morning prayers.
Officials called it the deadliest terrorist attack in Egypt’s modern history. President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi promised his people that he would respond to the attack on al-Rawdah mosque and find out who did it.
For now, no group has claimed the attack yet, but some people think that the militants have a connection to ISIS because they have been responsible for some deadly attacks in the province.
A witness stated that dozens of gunmen arrived in off-road vehicles and bombed the packed mosque before opening fire on worshippers as they tried to flee. Also, they block the roads with their vehicle, so people couldn’t escape either.
Majority of the people who were attacked are followers of Sufism. They are called Sufis. Locals in Sinai said, Sufism is a mystical branch of Sunni Islam and they attend the mosque regularly.
Although Sufis are widely accepted across much of the Muslim world, some Jihadist groups, like ISIS don’t like them at all and they don’t see them as Muslims either.
When I heard about this news, I was confused and heartbroken on why someone attacked a mosque in a dominantly Muslim country. The majority of the militants were Muslim so it didn’t make sense on why would they attack a holy place that means so much to Muslim people all over the world.
Then, I thought to myself, as a Muslim girl, why didn’t I hear a lot about this? This was Egypt’s deadliest attack, yet there wasn’t much coverage on the event in the United States.
Islam dominated countries don’t get enough coverage on terrorism attacks when something tragic occurs. I never understood why not enough people are informed. Do some people think that because they don’t live there, there’s no need to be concerned? Is it Islamophobia?
I never bought it up and was afraid to talk about it because it is a controversial topic and as a Muslim girl, I hesitated to voice my opinion but now this has to change because of it’s importance.
Hundreds of people were affected in this attack and they need help but how can we help if we don’t hear about it on the news? These people are victims of terrorism like the victims who were attacked in Paris, France in 2015 and San Bernardino, California in 2016.
What happened in Paris and San Bernardino was horrible. I was upset when I heard about it on the news for the first time and I prayed for the victims.
However, they received a lot media coverage and people even changed their Facebook profile pictures to the Paris flag. People tweeted about it for days and it was trending on social media for weeks. In San Francisco, City Hall lit up the colors of the French Flag.
I changed my profile picture too, but why didn’t we do the same thing for the people who were attacked in Sinai? Why weren’t people talking about it on social media and changing their profile picture to support Sinai?
I don’t think it’s right that a lot of people don’t know what is happening in Muslims countries because it’s not covered on the news as much. You find out about these attacks rarely or after weeks when it happened.
For example, my country Bangladesh, a dominantly Muslim country was attacked by terrorism and I only read one article about it. Only one.
I was worried sick for my relatives that live there and thankfully, they were fine because my family called them to make sure.
Only my Bengali friends talked about this and it upsets me that only a small percentage of people were concerned about my country.
I believe if no one covered what happened in Bangladesh, I wouldn’t have known about it and if my family members there were safe.
Countries, such as Afghanistan, Iraq, and Kashmir had terrible attacks in their countries too, but they are statistically significantly less likely to be covered on the news, based on the data from The Rand Crop and The New York Times.
But, it’s not only Muslim dominated countries. Countries like India, Colombia, and Thailand received less coverage on terrorism attacks.
I believe it’s due to the proximity because if it was closer to home and we had a stable relationship with these countries, then there’d be more news coverage globally.
I also believe there is a bias in new coverage of American/European attacks v. attacks in other countries and that has to change because these people are victims too and what they went through and are going through is horrible. People have the right to know about attacks outside America/Europe and want to help victims.
I don’t want a person, who is from Sinai that lives in America, not hearing enough information and not being sure what to do.
Other countries should get equal media coverage as Europe and United States on terror attacks because at the end of the day, they are people too and we need to support each other on this matter because we all went through this before, but in different ways. We need try to understand each other and support each other to the best of our abilities.