Following Friday’s attack on a mosque in north Sinai, in which 305 were killed, annual parade is cancelled

Egypt’s Sufi worshippers have said they will go ahead with celebrations to commemorate the birth of the Prophet Muhammad despite an attack on a mosque in the Sinai peninsula that left 305 dead and 128 injured.

The attack on al-Rawdah Mosque in the northern Sinai town of Bir al-Abed on Friday was the most deadly in modern Egyptian history. A bomb tore through the house of worship just after Friday prayers, killing many of those inside including 27 children.

Egypt’s public prosecutor, Nabil Sadeq, said that up to 30 militants then surrounded the main entrances to the mosque and 12 of its windows with four-wheel-drive vehicles before opening fire on those inside. The militants reportedly then walked among the dead shooting those they believed were still breathing.

While there is yet to be any claim of responsibility for Friday’s attack, witnesses recounted seeing militants flying the black banners of Wilayat Sinai (the Governorate of Sinai), who pledged allegiance to Isis in 2014. Associated Press reported on Sunday that elders in the village had been warned by Isis operatives to stop collaborating with security forces and not to hold Sufi rituals to commemorate the birth of Muhammad.

Abdel Hady al-Qasaby, the head of Egypt’s Supreme Council for Sufi Orders, told the Guardian that celebrations would continue inside mosques across Egypt, most prominently in the Hussein Mosque in central Cairo. He added that outdoor celebrations were cancelled. “We will only cancel the annual Sufi parade,” he said, “as we are mourning our martyrs.”

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Salem, a resident of Bir al-Abed who worships at the Rawda mosque, spoke of his anger at the attack. “I spent last night attending the mass burials of people I knew, or saw in the neighbourhood for years,” he said. “We put 30-40 bodies in one mass grave, dug with bulldozers.”

He added: “As Sufis, we always felt endangered. [The militants] demolish graves even when they’re above ground level – they wanted to bomb Sufi tombs, and they even killed three of our preachers.”

The attack marks a violent escalation in the scope of those targeted by the militants. Beginning with attacks on military and security installations in the Sinai peninsula in 2013, the group formerly known as Ansar Beit al-Maqdis has waged a gruesome insurgency against the Egyptian state. In the past year, the group targeted Christians in the Sinai as well as waging an increasingly bloody string of attacks on Christians in mainland Egypt. But the attack on the Rawda mosque signals that the group has expanded its list of targets to include Sufi sites, which are present in mosques across Egypt.

Sufism is a set of practices within Islam often characterised as a focus on spirituality or mysticism, and “should be understood as the default setting of Muslim religious life in Egypt”, according to a 2011 report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Tombs of Sufi saints are found adjacent to thousands mosques across the country, with up to 100 prominent sites in Cairo alone. Isis militants believe that Sufi worship at these tombs is a form of apostasy.

The Egyptian president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, vowed that Friday’s attack “will not go unpunished”, and subsequently launched airstrikes against alleged militant positions in North Sinai. On Saturday, Egypt’s armed forces released a video showing the air assault, pledging to continue operations targeting the militants.

Access to northern Sinai is illegal for foreign nationals as well as many independent observers, making the targets of such strikes or their success impossible to verify.

Sisi has spoken of the need for a “religious revolution” in Islam to fight extremism, and instigated a nationwide state of emergency in April following attacks on two churches that killed dozens of worshippers. But despite these efforts, thousands more mosques containing Sufi sites such as tombs, or worshippers who visit mosques with known Sufi clerics, are now potential targets. The result is a colossal challenge in a country of an estimated 95 million people. “With limited manpower, there is a need to focus on larger mosques with more people, or ones that have identifiable symbols like Sufi tombs,” said HA Hellyer, an analyst with the London-based think-tank the Royal United Services Institute.