The White House offered condolences and urged a firm response Friday after the murder of at least 235 people at a Sufi mosque in northeast Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.
Although there has been no claim of responsibility, the attack is believed to have been committed by ISIS-linked jihadists active in the region that borders Israel and the Gaza Strip.
“There can be no tolerance for barbaric groups that claim to act in the name of a faith but attack houses of worship and murder the innocent and defenseless while at prayer,” the White House said in a statement.
“The international community must continue to strengthen its efforts to defeat terrorist groups that threaten the United States and our partners and we must collectively discredit the extremist ideology that forms the basis of their existence,” the statement said.
Earlier in the day, President Trump tweeted “[t]he world cannot tolerate terrorism, we must defeat them militarily and discredit the extremist ideology that forms the basis of their existence!”
Eyewitnesses told Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram gunmen opened fire after detonating improvised explosive devices during Friday prayers.
Jihadis detest Sufi veneration of saints, and ISIS militants have destroyed Sufi sites elsewhere, bulldozing a shrine in Libya and killing 83 people with a February suicide attack on a shrine in southern Pakistan.
There have been several recent attacks on another large Egyptian religious minority, Coptic Christians, since the country’s elected Islamist leader Mohamed Morsi was ousted in 2013 by current Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, who has a more secular outlook.
Recent terrorist attacks in Egypt also include the 2015 downing of a Russian jet with 224 fatalities. A bomb is believed to have been aboard the flight, which left the Sinai Peninsula’s southern resort area.
