reporter: up to now it s been fairly conventional war fare. they ve put a lot of focus on heavy weaponry, tanks, setting up check points, mobile check points, but they re dealing with an insurgency that s been going on for essentially since 2011. it its composed of local inhab tachtss, veterans who know that terrain very well, and if you speak to human rights observers, they feel that the egyptian authorities, the army and police have been using really a heavy hand, not really trying to win the hearts and minds of the inhabitants of the northern sinai but really just trying to eliminate them militarily, and that, they say, is why this has gone on so long. it s important to emphasize this is really just in the
insurgencies. they have killed hundreds of police and soldiers there over the years and also just getting reports from reuters that we can t confirm right now that the egyptian military has started airstrikes in the area around that mosque in the mountainous area where they believe that some of these militants may be hiding out. but we ve yet to confirm that ourselves yet. all right. stand by, ali. let s go to jacob. he is on the ground in cairo. jacob, what are you hearing from where you are? what we are hearing is that this is a very strategic attack. if you look at where the attack is, ali, it s basically between the palestine egypt border and gaza and the capital of cairo itself. and it s an attack on a mosque. it s the first big attack on the mosque in decades in egypt. and it s actually a sectarian kind of war fare coming to egypt. not only against christians which we ve seen basically over
disposal. i think all of that will be looked at. i want to stress that these operations are normal in general. we have people in these places doing important work and i want to make sure that americans understand that this is more normal than abnormal as tragic as the loss of these soldiers lives is. the pentagon has said this is routine patrol but these service members they were in unarmored vehicles, no rapid response from the u.s. side. does any of that concern you? it doesn t necessarily concern me. it s not really unexpected. niger is not a mature battlefield. we sent small special forces teams to conduct unconventional war fare. the infrastructure in africa isn t built up the way we have it built up in the middle east. there aren t enough resources to go around. as tragic as this event is
concerns about something happening that is not intended because of him saying something like this, do you worry about that? you know, i don t right now. i don t see anything that was said that necessarily leads me to believe that this is going down the wrong road. he does have very solid advisers and general mattis and kelly and folks who understand the nature of war fare, is there a potential for a miscalculation with this kind of rhetoric? of course. the stakes are very high right now. i would just remind the president and any senior political leader as a former war fighter is to just take when you make comments like that, understand the severity of what you re saying and regard it with the honor that it deserves that men and women will go fight and die for whatever policy our politicians put forward and 15 years into this war, let s not make statements like that lightly. if you say that, you need to mean it. he s also told military folks
legal issues pertain to national security. ben runs a well-regarded blog called lawfare, which i think is kind of a page 1 on war fare. ? on may 16th, ben wittes did this online, on twitter. which is a weird thing. nobody knew what was wrong with him. nobody knew what this was about. you can see the time stamp there, he sent it at 3:18 p.m. on may 16th. hey, ben wittes, what s that about? well, then later, boom. literally the word boom. two hours and eight minutes