There was a series of coordinated Islamist terrorist attacks today on the Egyptian military in the Sinai, killing at least 53 soldiers. Resultant fighting is reported to have killed about that many of the “militants,” as well.

This is the latest installment in a long, long war Egypt has been fighting to keep control of the country from Islamist extremists. I’ve written about the history of the struggle in many posts, most of which can be found here; if you read just one, I’d recommend this. And whether the current group calls itself the Muslim Brotherhood or any one of a number of other names, or is a splinter group, the goal is the same: to topple al-Sisi’s [I’ve seen many different spellings] government, to undermine the Egyptian military that currently shores up the government, and ultimately to control the country:

The assault came a day after Egypt’s President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi pledged to step up the battle against Islamic militants and two days after the chief prosecutor was assassinated in the capital, Cairo. The officials said 50 militants were killed in fierce fighting that started in the early morning and was still raging at the end of the day ”” the deadliest battle in Sinai since the 1973 Arab-Israeli war.

Later in the day, a special forces team killed nine members of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, including a former member of parliament, in a raid on an apartment in Cairo’s Sixth of October district, security officials said. The team was fired upon when they entered the home and returned fire, killing the nine men. No security forces were wounded, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to brief the press.

Previous strongman Mubarek first came to power after Anwar Sadat’s assassination by similar forces within the Egyptian military:

Earlier in [Sadat’s] presidency, Islamists had benefited from the ‘rectification revolution’ and the release from prison of activists jailed under Nasser but Sadat’s Sinai treaty with Israel enraged Islamists, particularly the radical Egyptian Islamic Jihad. According to interviews and information gathered by journalist Lawrence Wright, the group was recruiting military officers and accumulating weapons, waiting for the right moment to launch “a complete overthrow of the existing order” in Egypt. Chief strategist of El-Jihad was Abbud al-Zumar, a colonel in the military intelligence whose “plan was to kill the main leaders of the country, capture the headquarters of the army and State Security, the telephone exchange building, and of course the radio and television building, where news of the Islamic revolution would then be broadcast, unleashing””he expected””a popular uprising against secular authority all over the country.”

In February 1981, Egyptian authorities were alerted to El-Jihad’s plan by the arrest of an operative carrying crucial information. In September, Sadat ordered a highly unpopular roundup of more than 1500 people, including many Jihad members, but also the Coptic Pope and other Coptic clergy, intellectuals and activists of all ideological stripes. All non-government press was banned as well. The round up missed a Jihad cell in the military led by Lieutenant Khalid Islambouli, who would succeed in assassinating Anwar Sadat that October.

Each leader of Egypt faces a dilemma of how much to crack down, and how hard. It’s an old old story in Egypt (and elsewhere), and al-Sisi is confronting his own version of it. My reading of al-Sisi is that he’s one of the best leaders Egypt has had in modern times, and I wish him good luck. He’ll need it.