CAIRO, May 7 (Reuters) – Eleven Egyptian soldiers, including an officer, were killed on Saturday in an attack by suspected jihadists on a road checkpoint in the Sina Peninsula, an Egyptian spokesman said. armed.
This is one of the deadliest attacks in recent years in northern Sina, where Egyptian security forces have been fighting for nearly a decade against fighters linked to the Islamic State (IS) group.
The attack took place on Saturday morning near a water pumping station along the road leading from the Suez Canal to the town of Hasanah in central Sina.
The attackers used a car bomb and pick-up trucks equipped with heavy machine guns before military reinforcements arrived and chased them away, security sources said.
According to army spokesman Gharib Abdel Hafez, the attackers were surrounded in an isolated region of the mountainous and desert peninsula.
The attack has not yet been claimed. (Report Ahmed Tolba and Ahmed Mohamed Hassan, written by Nayera Abdallah and Aidan Lewis, French version Tangi Salan)