One More Massacre of Egypt’s Copts

At least 28 people have been killed in an attack on Coptic Christian pilgrims in Minya, Egypt about 85 miles south of Cairo. As Al Ahram reports:

The death toll from an attack Friday morning by unknown gunmen on a vehicles carrying Coptic Christians to a monastery in the east of Egypt’s Minya Governorate has risen to 28, with 23 injured, the governor announced. [….]

Egypt’s interior ministry released details on the attack, saying in an official statement that unknown assailants driving three 4×4 wheelers attacked by “randomly shooting” the bus carrying the Copts.

The ages of the victims ranged from children to over 60, the bishop of Minya told Egyptian private-owned TV Channel DMC. Many victims were children, only three children survived the attack, a source from the church told Al-Ahram.

President Sisi has called for an “emergency security meeting” following the attacks, though with a state of emergency already in place after the Palm Sunday bombings, color us skeptical that any new measures will be any more effective in protecting Copts than the old measures. No group has yet claimed responsibility for the attacks, though the most heinous attacks against Egypt’s Christians in recent months have been carried out by ISIS.

After the bombings in Manchester, we noted the particular barbarity of targeting children in a terrorist attack. While noteworthy, ISIS’ ideology of slaughtering the innocent is not new. Christians in the Middle East are intimately familiar with an enemy that wants them eliminated completely. The State Department has already declared that ISIS’ attacks against Christians in Iraq and Syria constitute genocide. Their intentions in Egypt are no different.