At least six military personnel were killed and five were injured when an improvised explosive device (IED) targeted security vehicles on Sunday. The security vehicles were securing the ring road in Al-Arish, the capital city of the North Sinai governorate. The armed forces spokesman said in a statement on his official page, that the "armed forces assert that such cowardly terrorist actions only increase the resolve of its members and their determination to continue to uproot terrorism". This comes less than a week after the gas pipeline between Al-Arish in North Sinai and the Jordanian city of Aqaba was bombed for the 26th time in three years. No casualties were reported in this attack. Attacks against security forces have escalated since former president Mohamed Morsi's ouster in July 2013. This rise in insurgency had been centred in North Sinai but it eventually spread to other parts of the country, reaching Mansoura in the Nile Delta area in December and Cairo in January in two deadly attacks on security buildings. While these attacks were carried out using explosives, there has been a trend in recent months to strike police officers in drive-by shootings. More than a dozen police officers have been killed this year in drive-by attacks in the Nile Delta governorate of Sharqeya alone. A Ministry of Foreign Affairs factsheet places the death toll for terrorist activities between January 2011 to April 2014 at 971, including 477 policemen and 187 army personnel. Ansar Beit Al-Maqdis, an Al-Qaeda inspired militant organisation based in Sinai, has claimed the majority of violent attacks against both police and armed forces including ones which took place outside the Sinai Peninsula.
