CAIRO -- Militants detonated a bomb inside a crowded mosque Friday and then sprayed gunfire on panicked worshippers as they fled the building, killing at least 235 people and wounding at least 109 others.
Officials called it the deadliest terrorist attack in Egypt's modern history.
The scale and ruthlessness of the attack, in an area of the Sinai Peninsula wracked by an Islamic insurgency, sent shock waves across the nation -- not just for the number of deaths but also for the choice of target. Attacks on mosques are rare in Egypt, where the Islamic State has targeted Coptic Christian churches and pilgrims but avoided Muslim places of worship.
The attack injected a new element into Egypt's struggle with militants because most of the victims were Sufi Muslims, who practice a form of Islam that the Islamic State and other Sunni extremist groups deem heretical. And it underscored the failure of President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, who has insisted that he needs to crush political opposition to curb the threat of Islamic militancy, to deliver on his promises of security to Egyptians.
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No group has claimed responsibility for the attack, but in recent months the local affiliate of the Islamic State group had killed a number of Sufis in the area and singled out the district where the attack took place as a potential target.
"The scene was horrific," said Ibrahim Sheteewi, a resident of Bir al-Abd, the north Sinai town where the attack took place. "The bodies were scattered on the ground outside the mosque. I hope God punishes them for this."
A Sinai police officer said the dead included at least 15 children. A witness put the toll even higher, saying he helped gather the bodies of 25 children.
The Egyptian military, which has been battling a local affiliate of the Islamic State group in northern Sinai for years, carried out several airstrikes in the area targeting militants fleeing in four-wheel-drive vehicles, an Egyptian military official said.
Violence in Sinai surged after 2013, when el-Sissi came to power in a military takeover that deposed the democratically elected president, Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood.
But even by recent standards in Egypt, where militants have blown up Christian worshippers as they knelt at church pews and gunned down pilgrims in buses, the attack Friday was unusually ruthless.
"I can't believe they attacked a mosque," a Muslim cleric in Bir al-Abd said by phone, requesting anonymity for fear he could also be attacked.
The attack started midday during Friday prayers when an explosion -- most likely set off by a suicide bomber, according to security officials -- ripped through al-Rouda mosque in Bir al-Abd, a small town 125 miles northeast of Cairo. As worshippers fled, they were confronted by gunmen who, witnesses said, had pulled up outside in four-wheel-drive vehicles.
The gunmen lingered at the scene as emergency workers arrived to treat the wounded, opening fire on several ambulances, a government official said on state television.
Abdullah Abdel-Nasser, 14, who was attending prayers with his father, said that at one point during the attack, a militant shouted for children to leave, so Abdullah said he rushed out, though he was wounded in the shoulder by shrapnel and a bullet.
"I saw many people on the floor, many dead. I don't think anyone survived," he said at a hospital in the Suez Canal city of Ismailia, where about 40 of the wounded were taken, including many children.
Mohammed Ali said 18 members of his extended family were killed in the attack. The mosque belonged to a local clan, the Jreer, so many of its members worshipped there.
"Where was the army? It's only a few kilometers away. This is the question we cannot find an answer to," he said.
Afterward, dozens of bloodied bodies wrapped in sheets were laid across the mosque floor, according to images circulating on social media. Relatives lined up outside a nearby hospital as ambulances raced back and forth. The state news agency MENA put the death toll at 235.
El-Sissi convened an emergency meeting of top security officials, including the interior minister, spy chief and defense minister.
"The military and the police will take revenge," he said in a televised speech.
Until a spate of attacks on Christian churches this year, Egyptian militants had avoided large-scale attacks on Egyptian civilians. After a massacre in Luxor that killed 62 people, mostly tourists, in 1997, President Hosni Mubarak began a sweeping crackdown that crushed the Islamic insurgency centered in southern Egypt.
When a new insurgency flared in north Sinai after the military takeover in 2013, the extremists leading it were careful to focus their attacks on uniformed security forces. But as those militants embraced the Islamic State's tenets, they have gradually set aside that emphasis.
An Islamic militia in Sinai called Ansar Beit al-Maqdis pledged allegiance to the Islamic State in 2014 and has since proved to be one of its most effective local affiliates. The group's deadliest attack targeted a Russian jetliner that crashed shortly after takeoff from Sharm el-Sheikh in October 2015, killing all 224 people on board.
In an interview published in January in an Islamic State magazine, a commander in Sinai outlined the group's hatred for Sufis and their practices, including veneration of tombs, the sacrificial slaughter of animals and what he termed "sorcery and soothsaying."
The interview, in English, specifies al-Rouda, the district where Friday's attack occurred, as one of three areas where Sufis live in Sinai that the group intended to "eradicate."
Egyptian security forces also have been closely monitoring returning Islamic State fighters from Syria and Iraq, over fears that an influx of battle-hardened jihadis could insert a volatile new element into Egypt's militant mix.
President Donald Trump, writing on Twitter, denounced the attack as a "horrible and cowardly." In a later tweet, he said the attack explains why the United States needs a border wall with Mexico and restrictions on immigration, which he referred to as "the ban."
Information for this article was contributed by Declan Walsh and Nour Youssef of The New York Times and by Brian Rohan and Samy Magdy of The Associated Press.
A Section on 11/25/2017