Sisi puts army on high alert

Cairo

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi yesterday ordered his army to be ready to carry out any mission inside or outside the country to protect its national security amid tensions over Turkey’s intervention in neighbouring Libya.

Turkey supports the Government of National Accord (GNA) in Tripoli, which, with Turkish support, has reversed a 14-month assault on the capital by Khalifa Haftar’s eastern-based Libyan National Army (LNA) Sisi yesterday toured an air base near Egypt’s 1,200 kilometre-long western border with Libya, where state TV showed him watching fighter jets and helicopters taking off.

“Be prepared to carry out any mission, here inside our borders - or if necessary, outside our borders,” he told several air force pilots and special forces personnel at the base. He said the Egyptian army was “one of the strongest in the region”. “It is a rational army; an army that protects and does not threaten... this is our strategy, our beliefs and our principles that we will never change.”