Fighting terror with a four-point strategy: Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El Sisi urged Arab and Muslim leaders on Sunday to rise above their differences and collaborate with each other and the rest of the world to battle the growing threat of terrorism. Addressing an audience at the Arab-Islamic-American summit in Riyadh yesterday, El Sisi spoke of the need for a “clear action plan with a designated time frame to root out the funding and arming of terrorism.” The Egyptian president presented a “comprehensive” four-pillar counterterrorism strategy that goes beyond military and strategic tactics to tackle issues including ideology and support for terrorist organizations. “This includes effectively confronting movements that conceal and market themselves as political entities, when in fact they foster terrorists and infiltrate societies…to prey on popular will to practice their extremist and exclusionary policies.”

The strategy goes like this: To truly fight terrorism, we must recognize who the terrorists are (hint: the US needs to officially label the Ikhwan as a terrorist group), recognize their partners and support systems, prevent them from recruiting new followers by pursuing reforms to religious discourse and education systems, and restoring peace to the Middle East, the instability of which has helped it become a fertile breeding ground for extremist thought and action. “The comprehensive approach, based on the four aspects that I have mentioned, ought to lay the foundation for a new phase of cooperation among our countries and peoples,” El Sisi said, praising US President Donald Trump for his “robust policy to address the challenges of terrorism” and his willingness to help mediate resolution for the conflicts of the Middle East.

You can read El Sisi’s full speech here (pdf) in English.

Egypt has been lobbying the US congress to pass a bill that would designate the Ikhwan an illegal terrorist organization, arguing that the group’s existence poses a threat to the region. The UAE government echoed that sentiment on Sunday, describing the group as “the main beacon of terrorist and extremist thought” in the Middle East in a statement picked up by Sky News Arabia.