CAIRO (Dispatches) – Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has opened a strategic naval base on the Mediterranean Sea to “secure shipping lines”, the presidency said.
“It is the latest Egyptian military base on the Mediterranean, and will be focused on securing the country’s northern and western front,” the Egyptian presidency said in a statement on Saturday.
State-run newspaper Akhbar Al-Youm reported that the new Egyptian base includes an airstrip and a 1,000-meter (3,280-foot) long pier.
The base was named “July 3” after the day eight years ago when Sisi led the military removal of president Mohamed Morsi.
Egypt has three other naval bases in the Mediterranean and one in the Red Sea.
The base lies some 255 kilometers (160 miles) west of Alexandria, towards the border with Libya, a country where both Egypt and the United Arab Emirates have played a key military role.
Libya’s new transitional executive emerged from a UN process that was launched in November in Tunis, then voted on in Geneva and confirmed by Libya’s parliament on March 10.
Egypt and the UAE were key backers of Khalifa Haftar, the eastern-based Libyan military commander who had tried to seize the capital Tripoli from the previous government.
In April, Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly travelled to Libya, where he had talks with interim prime minister Abdulhamid Dbeibah, in a new sign of warming ties between Cairo and Tripoli.
Dbeibah visited Egypt in February on his first official trip abroad after his election.