CAIRO — The Muslim Brotherhood has targeted Christian communities in its insurgency campaign against Egypt’s military-backed regime. Christian groups said Islamist fighters, many of whom linked to the Brotherhood, were attacking churches and Christian-owned businesses throughout Egypt.

 The Christian groups said the Brotherhood torched at least 40 churches in eight provinces.

“It’s Christians in Egypt who pay the price to overthrow tyranny,” Antoine Adel, spokesman for the Maspero Youth Union, said.

The Interior Ministry has confirmed that Islamist supporters of ousted President Mohammed Morsi were targeting churches. On Aug. 14, the ministry said seven churches were destroyed in the first stage of the Brotherhood campaign.

“Today, the churches of Egypt became like a censor with fire coming out of it mixed with incense raised to the heavens as a sweet aroma so that God may have compassion on his people and perform unprecedented wonders,” the Coptic leader of the Assiyut province, Metropolitan Mikhail, said.

Maspero, which monitors the rights of Egypt’s minority Coptic community, said most of the attacks took place in Alexandria and Minya. The organization said the Brotherhood was trying to exploit friction between the majority Muslim community and Copts. “They seek to drive a wedge between Christians and Muslims,” Adel said.

Copts were said to have played a major role in the opposition to both Morsi and his predecessor, Hosni Mubarak, both overthrown by the military.

They said Egyptian security forces failed to protect Coptic interests during the current military crackdown on the Brotherhood in which nearly 1,000
people were killed. Egypt’s military leader, Defense Minister Abdul Fatah Sisi, said the churches would be restored.

“There was no security presence,” Gabriel Dafshan, a spokesman of the Christian Youth Center in Minya, told the official Al Ahram daily. “Even when we called the Fire Department for help they said they were themselves being attacked.”