Cairo: Egyptian President Abdul Fattah Al Sissi Wednesday inspected the border with Libya, two days after Egyptian warplanes struck Daesh-linked targets in the troubled neighbouring country.
Al Sissi met with army commanders and inspected troops deployed in Egypt’s western border zone to “emphasize combat readiness against Daesh militants”, state television reported.
“The president made a message to the troops positioned along the border, urging them to prevent terrorist attempts and deal firmly with any cross-border infiltration and smuggling bid,” the broadcaster quoted a security source there as saying.
The online edition of semi-official newspaper Al Ahram posted pictures of Al Sissi and army commanders examining what the paper called maps of Daesh positions in Libya.
Egypt is pushing for a UN authorization of an international military intervention in Libya, which is quickly sliding into chaos. Libya has rival governments, parliaments and militias, which have been locked in fighting for months.
Egypt is backing Libya’s internationally recognized government and parliament, forced by Islamist-allied militias to relocate from Tripoli to the eastern city of Tobruk.
On Sunday, Daesh militants released a video showing the beheadings of 21 Egyptian Christians abducted in Libya more than a month ago.
Al Sissi vowed a tough response and hours later sent jets to bomb extremists’ stronghold in the eastern town of Derna.
During his tour of the Egyptian-Libya border on Wednesday, Al Sissi also conferred with local tribal leaders, calling on them to help stave off attempts by “terrorist and criminal elements” to infiltrate through the frontier, state television said.
Egypt shares a border of more than 1,000 kilometres with oil-rich Libya. The porous border has reportedly been used for an illegal flow of arms into Egypt in recent years.
Earlier this week, Egypt imposed a ban on its citizens’ travel to Libya where more than one million Egyptians are believed to already work there.
Local TV stations have since aired complaints from Egyptians trapped inside Libya, saying they could not leave the North African country for fear of reprisals by hardline Islamists.
