Quickly after Islamist rebels overthrew the authoritarian president of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, a hashtag gathered steam on Egyptian social media: “It’s your flip, dictator.”
The message for President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt was unmistakable. However he hardly wanted the warning.
For the reason that ouster of Syria’s longtime dictator on Dec. 8, Egyptian leaders have watched occasions within the Syrian capital, Damascus, with grim-faced vigilance, realizing nicely that revolutionary hearth tends to unfold.
Each nations have had a turbulent historical past because the Arab Spring uprisings that began in late 2010 and unfold throughout the Center East.
The Syrian revolt culminated nearly 14 years later with Mr. al-Assad’s fall. The Egyptian revolution deposed the nation’s longtime authoritarian president, Hosni Mubarak, and noticed an Islamist political get together come to energy within the nation’s first free elections. Mr. el-Sisi seized energy two years later in a army takeover, and he and like-minded leaders within the Persian Gulf and past stay wary of Islamist teams gaining any energy within the area, as they simply did in Syria.
Days after Mr. al-Assad fled Syria for Russia, Egyptian safety forces arrested a minimum of 30 Syrian refugees residing in Cairo who had been spontaneously celebrating his fall, in accordance with the Egyptian Initiative for Private Rights, a rights group.
The Egyptian authorities additionally made it tougher for Syrians to journey to Egypt within the aftermath of Mr. al-Assad’s overthrow, requiring most to acquire safety clearances first.
Mr. el-Sisi has given unusually frequent addresses in latest weeks to defend his file.
“My palms have by no means been stained with anybody’s blood, and I’ve by no means taken something that wasn’t mine,” he stated in December, per week after Mr. al-Assad fell.
In doing so, he appeared to attract a distinction with the deposed Syrian chief whereas brushing apart his personal human rights file, together with a bloodbath by the Egyptian army forces that he led of what rights teams say had been a minimum of 817 individuals protesting Mr. el-Sisi’s takeover of energy in 2013.
For the reason that rebels in Syria seized energy, Egypt has arrested or started prosecuting a number of individuals thought of political opponents, together with the director of a outstanding rights group, the spouse of a detained political cartoonist and a TikTok person who had been posting movies crucial of Mr. el-Sisi. Egypt already was holding an estimated tens of 1000’s of political prisoners, lots of them Islamists.
“Two thousand and eleven is barely 14 years away,” stated Mirette F. Mabrouk, an Egypt professional on the Center East Institute in Washington, referring to the yr of the Egyptian revolution. The Egyptian authorities, she stated, “know that issues snowball.”
After years of deepening economic misery throughout Egypt, Mr. el-Sisi was already in an acutely weak place. Any trace that Egyptians might catch Syrians’ revolutionary fervor spells hassle — not as a result of Egyptians need armed revolt, Ms. Mabrouk stated, however as a result of it might take little or no for his or her disgruntlement to blow up into protest.
Essentially the most seen try and capitalize on the second has come from Ahmed al-Mansour, an Egyptian who left the nation to struggle with Syrian rebels years in the past. After Mr. al-Assad’s ouster, he repeatedly ranted towards Mr. el-Sisi on-line from Damascus.
“You’re price one bullet,” Mr. al-Mansour stated of Mr. el-Sisi in a video posted on X. It was seen 1.5 million instances.
The menace despatched Egypt’s TV anchors, who typically amplify pro-government speaking factors on their nightly broadcasts, into an uproar. One host, Ahmed Moussa, known as on Syria’s new leaders to behave.
“They have to inform us if they’re with what is going on within the focusing on of our nation or not,” he warned.
Shortly after his tirade in mid-January, the brand new Syrian authorities arrested Mr. al-Mansour together with a number of associates. He was detained on his solution to a gathering with the nation’s interim protection minister, in accordance with an announcement from the anti-Sisi motion Mr. al-Mansour based.
It’s unclear whether or not Egyptian authorities had pushed for his arrest.
Mr. al-Mansour’s group urged the Syrian authorities to launch him, saying that the Egyptian individuals had been exercising their rights towards Mr. el-Sisi simply as Syrians had accomplished towards Mr. al-Assad. His present standing is unknown.
However even with Mr. al-Mansour silenced for now, different Egyptians are unlikely to cease complaining.
Many have soured on Mr. el-Sisi after years of financial crises, the newest of which was triggered by the successive shocks of the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. However the issues are additionally rooted in authorities mismanagement and overspending, together with on grandiose megaprojects.
With Egypt deep in debt and shedding income, the foreign money has crashed, some items have turn into troublesome to seek out and inflation has soared.
Such hardships have suffocated a inhabitants of about 111 million the place practically one in three already lived in poverty, in accordance with official statistics.
Mr. el-Sisi has tried to protect himself from criticism, saying in a latest speech that the nation was already in unhealthy monetary form when he took over in 2013 and that Egypt’s speedy inhabitants progress had made it troublesome to offer for his residents. However he had spent years boasting of the prosperity he would deliver to Egypt — prosperity that by no means got here, at the same time as he inaugurated a expensive new capital city full with a gleaming presidential palace.
“Individuals are significantly discontented, and subsequently he’s attempting on the market to simply tamp issues down,” Ms. Mabrouk stated.
To start with, many hailed the president as a hero and savior for utilizing army pressure to oust the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist political get together that received the presidency following the 2011 Egyptian revolution however went on to alienate a lot of the inhabitants.
Mr. el-Sisi spent the following years stamping out the Brotherhood in Egypt, viewing it as a menace to his energy. Egyptian authorities prosecuted 1000’s of Brotherhood members and suspected sympathizers, labeling them terrorists, whereas others have fled the nation.
Even weakened, political Islamists stay a well-liked goal for Mr. el-Sisi and his supporters, who steadily invoke the hazards of political Islam.
So it was unsurprising when the Egyptian authorities sounded a notice of warning concerning the lightning rise of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the Islamist insurgent group that has taken cost in Syria. The group was as soon as affiliated with Al Qaeda however has disavowed its extremist origins.
Egypt could have had little love for Mr. al-Assad, analysts stated, however it had come to choose the brittle stability he represented to the chaos and battle that encompass Egypt in Libya, Sudan and Gaza.
It has subsequently approached relations with the brand new Syria gingerly.
Not like different Arab nations, Egypt has not but held high-level meetings with Syrian officers.
Diplomats in Cairo say Egyptian officers have privately urged different governments to stay cautious of Syria’s new management and to not elevate penalties on the nation too rapidly. They spoke on situation of anonymity as a result of they weren’t licensed to talk publicly.
Egypt’s overseas minister, Badr Abdelatty, has called on regional and worldwide companions to make sure that “Syria doesn’t turn into a supply of regional instability or a haven for terrorist teams.”
Mahmoud Badr, an Egyptian pro-government activist who helped foster the anti-Muslim Brotherhood protest motion that paved the best way for Mr. el-Sisi’s ascension, stated on X quickly after Hayat Tahrir al-Sham swept into Damascus that the group and the Brotherhood had been indistinguishable.
“It’s all a part of one community and nobody can persuade us in any other case,” he stated, citing broadly circulated photographs that confirmed the chief of the Syrian group assembly with a outstanding Egyptian member of the Brotherhood.
And although anti-Islamist sentiment stays sturdy amongst Egyptians, so does anti-Sisi sentiment.
“It comes at a really unhealthy time for Sisi,” stated Broderick McDonald, an affiliate fellow at Kings School London’s Worldwide Heart for the Examine of Radicalization.
