But after the Rabaa massacre, Al Qaeda’s Iraqi arm could declare that “two idols have fallen: democracy and the Muslim Brotherhood—bankrupt.” The choice now was clear: “ammunition boxes over ballot boxes.”
A renegade Libyan general, Khalifa Hifter, took his cue from Sisi. He announced in early 2014 that the imaginary Libyan Supreme Council of the Armed Forces would dissolve its Parliament, arrest its Islamists, and eradicate their movement. Hifter repeated parts of Sisi’s coup speech almost verbatim, like his promise of a transitional road map.
The prime minister laughed it off. At his base near Benghazi, though, Hifter received weapons and other support from the UAE and Egypt in violation of a United Nations embargo (first confirmed in a leaked recording from Sisi’s office and in hacked emails among UAE diplomats, and later common knowledge). Soon armed groups for and against Hifter were bullying the Parliament. The political process broke down. Libya burst into a civil war that continued for years.
The Iraqi arm of Al Qaeda broke away a few months after the massacre in Cairo to become the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, also known as ISIS or ISIL. By June of the next year, ISIS had declared a “caliphate” stretching deep into Syria. And by the summer of 2015, it had capitalized on the chaos of the Libyan civil war to seize control of a hundred miles of its Mediterranean coastline around the city of Sirte.
I often heard people in the Arab world and in the West cite the mayhem that broke out across Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Yemen to justify Sisi’s takeover. Look at the mess the Arab Spring made! But the hope soured only after Sisi took power, with the resurgence of the old order and the vindication of the jihadists. What Tahrir ignited, Rabaa extinguished.
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Egyptian military spokesmen began predicting the imminent defeat of the North Sinai jihadists almost immediately after Rabaa. As more and more soldiers were killed there, month after month, the spokesmen repeated the same predictions. The army was just mopping up. The generals barred foreigners and journalists from the area. Then the military police arrested the local stringer we had relied on. A military press release had boasted of killing four militants in his village, and his crime was writing on Facebook that the soldiers had instead killed four unarmed civilians. He was let out after a few weeks but was scared away from reporting.
So Mayy el-Sheikh—always brave—went undercover: an Egyptian woman in a head scarf in the passenger seat next to a Bedouin driver in a small, beat-up car with North Sinai license plates. At checkpoints, the police talked only to the male driver, assuming she was his female relation.
The army had walled off the center of the provincial capital, Arish, like a miniature version of the American Green Zone in occupied Baghdad. The Egyptian authorities had shut down all mobile phone or internet service during daylight hours, in part because militants used phone signals to detonate roadside bombs. And at dusk the soldiers enforced a strict nighttime curfew. Residents and doctors reported dozens of innocent civilians killed by gunshots from jumpy soldiers at checkpoints. Helicopters hunting militants had turned whole towns into rubble. Locals in Arish ducked behind closed doors to speak to Mayy, and they whispered nervously about Brigade 101—a military detention facility inside the walled security zone and notorious for torture.
“The slaughterhouse,” several residents called it. “The people who get taken to Brigade 101 don’t get out,” a doctor at the local hospital told Mayy. I thought of Room 101, the interrogation chamber in George Orwell’s 1984.
Some referred to Ansar Beit al-Maqdis as “Brigade 102”—the rival gang that terrorized their villages. Brigade 102 owned the night, when the soldiers retreated inside their walled compounds. But even by day the jihadists put up checkpoints and controlled the roads in some areas of the North Sinai.
Ansar Beit al-Maqdis swiftly grew in sophistication, staging coordinated attacks with waves of assailants, and striking ever farther from the Sinai—especially in the western desert, close to Libya. No longer an Al Qaeda foothold, Ansar Beit al-Maqdis pledged its allegiance to ISIS in 2015 and tested the tactics of its new caliph. The renamed Sinai Province of the Islamic State captured and briefly held the major North Sinai town of Sheikh Zuwaid. The Egyptian air force attacked the town in order to drive the militants out before sundown.
The militants beheaded suspected informers and, in one case, a Westerner: a Croatian working for a French petroleum company whom they had abducted on a highway. They put out slick, gory videos in the Islamic State style. Then they tried their hands at bombing airplanes. In the fall of 2015, the jihadists brought down a Russian charter jet taking off near Sharm el-Sheikh in the South Sinai. Two hundred twenty-four people were killed. After that the militants shifted to attacking Christians, too.
Over the next eighteen months, the Islamic State fighters assassinated more than a half dozen local Copts, burned homes, destroyed churches, and forced more than a hundred families to flee for their lives. On Palm Sunday 2017, two Islamic State church bombings far from the Sinai, in the cities of Tanta and Alexandria, killed at least forty-five people.
Western officials had told me privately in 2014 and 2015 that they believed there might have been at most 2,000 Ansar Beit al-Maqdis fighters in the North Sinai; some American diplomats put the number at half that. The Egyptian authorities said only a few hundred. But by April 2017, Egypt had lost more than 3,000 soldiers and police fighting what, by its own count, were only a few hundred “terrorists.” If you added up the body counts in its press releases, the Sisi government claimed its security forces had killed a total of more than 6,200 militants—more than three times the highest estimate of the number of fighters in Ansar Beit al-Maqdis at any time. The official numbers did not add up.
American diplomats griped to one another about how little fighting power that $1.3 billion a year in military aid had bought. Even after four years, the Egyptian army could not defeat the rabble of militants in the Sinai. Were new fighters replacing the fallen so quickly? Who was Egypt killing?
The story of two Bedouin brothers shed some light on the puzzle. The episode began in Rafah, a town of about 80,000 people near the Gaza border. By the summer of 2015, Sisi’s government had demolished thousands of buildings there, displacing more than 3,200 families and razing acres of their farmland. The idea was to create a buffer zone with Gaza to prevent militants from hopscotching the border. But leveling a whole city won few friends among the displaced.
On July 18, 2016, two teenage brothers—Daoud Sabri al-Awabdah and Abd al-Hadi Sabri al-Awabdah, both of the Rumailat clan—were arrested in the wreckage. It is impossible to know why, because the police brought no charges and conducted no trial. The brothers disappeared. Their families assumed Brigade 101 had swallowed them up.
But the two brothers turned up a few months later, in a leaked video recorded that fall in a patch of rocky desert. Soldiers, intelligence officers, and progovernment militiamen in military uniforms and body armor were milling around near an American-made Humvee. The militiamen were leading around some captives, bound and blindfolded. Daoud, who was sixteen, was lying on the ground in a red shirt, with his hands and feet tied together.
“Just not in the head, not in the head,” a commander was heard shouting. A militiaman fired four shots from his Kalashnikov into Daoud. “That is enough,” the commander said.
Daoud’s nineteen-year-old brother, Abd al-Hadi, was wearing blue jeans and standing, with his arms tied and eyes covered. “Boy, are you from the Abu Shanana family?” a militiaman demanded, grabbing him by the hair. Sporadic gunshots went off in the background. Abd al-Hadi and his captor traded tribal names and village locations until they had pinpointed where Abd al-Hadi’s family had lived, like two people from the same hometown meeting in a faraway place.
“Okay, come then,” the soldier or militiaman said at last, and he led away the prisoner.
Militiamen tossed Abd al-Hadi to the
ground. “Get on with it, come on!” someone shouted. Two progovernment gunmen stood over Abd al-Hadi. One pulled off his white blindfold. Another shot him five times, lowered his Kalashnikov, and walked calmly away. Six other dead bodies in civilian clothes were lying nearby.
After the killings, militiamen and soldiers placed weapons on the ground around the corpses, as if they had been armed when they died. This bit of staging, too, was all recorded on video.
“Should I change the position of the weapon?” a voice asks. “Finish, finish!” the cameraman tells him.
On November 5 and again on December 6, the Egyptian Defense Ministry released official propaganda footage showing the two dead brothers and six other bodies. “Eight armed terrorist elements” eliminated in a gun battle, the ministry said.
Footage from the same scene also appeared on a promilitary website. “This is the revenge for those who died,” a soldier standing near the bodies proclaimed in this video. The Department of Moral Affairs, the military’s propaganda arm, was in on the frame-up, and the satisfied officers had shared their home movies.
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International called the videos evidence of war crimes, part of a pattern of arbitrary and extrajudicial killings by a military that received more from American taxpayers than any country but Israel.
Egyptian officials shrugged off the complaints. An army general said on a television talk show that the scenes filmed were Brotherhood fabrications. Sisi was unbothered. But I better understood where some of those dead “jihadists” came from. Western diplomats told me they believed that the Egyptian security forces were using the Sinai as a dumping ground for the bodies of prisoners killed under torture in the prisons of the mainland. The torture victims were added to the “terrorists” body count.
I did not see how the Egyptian military’s haphazard tactics would get anywhere, but I was surprised again. By 2017, British and American diplomats were telling me that the Islamic State no longer set up checkpoints on the highways. Soldiers no longer cowered in their barracks at night, afraid for their lives.
What was the secret, after four years of fighting? It was not the Egyptian military. It was Israel.
Egypt and Israel had fought four wars on their Sinai border, if we count the skirmishing around the Suez Canal crisis. On April 25 of each year, Egypt celebrates Sinai Liberation Day, commemorating the final withdrawal of the last Israeli troops in 1982. But the two militaries cooperated closely through their four decades of peace, I knew. Sisi’s government and its news media still ceasely vilified the Jewish state as a loathsome enemy. Collaborating with the “Zionists” was as damnable as treason.
A few weeks after Sisi took power, in August 2013, two mysterious explosions killed five suspected militants in a district of the North Sinai not far from the Israeli border. When an Associated Press report suggested Israeli drones had killed the militants, Sisi’s spokesman vigorously denied it. “There is no truth in form or in substance to the existence of any Israeli attacks inside Egyptian territory,” Colonel Ahmed Ali said, promising an investigation that never happened. “The claims of coordination between the Egyptian and Israeli sides in this matter are totally lacking in truth and go against sense and logic.” The Israeli armed forces declined to comment. The event was almost forgotten.
But by late 2015—when the Islamic State had planted its flag in Sinai, begun aspiring for territory, and brought down the Russian jet—Israel’s leaders lost patience. The continued failure of the Egyptian army to secure the peninsula was getting dangerous. The Israeli air force began a secret campaign of air strikes against suspected militants inside Egypt, often hitting them as frequently as twice a week or more, all with the blessing of President Sisi.
Israel flew unmarked drones, jets, and helicopters. The jets and helicopters covered up their markings and flew circuitous routes to give the impression they took off from the Egyptian mainland. Sisi hid the strikes from all but a small circle of senior military and intelligence officers. No journalists were allowed in the area, and the state-dominated news media never asked questions. Israeli military censors restricted public reports of the strikes there as well.
But by the end of 2017, Israel had carried out far more than a hundred secret strikes inside Egypt: a covert air war.
Amazed British and American government officials had hinted to me for two years about the growing scale of the attacks that Israel had carried out over the Egyptian Sinai with Sisi’s blessing. By 2017, several American officials told me that Israel deserved much of the credit for the Egyptian government’s limited success in containing the Islamic State (even though more vicious jihadists sprang up to replace each leader killed, one diplomat noted). Israeli military officials griped to the Americans that Egyptians were not doing enough on their end, sometimes failing to send in ground forces after an air strike when the Israelis had asked for a coordinated sequence of operations. But for more than two years, under two American administrations, all sides kept it quiet, afraid of the potential for unrest in Egypt if Israel’s role became known.
Egypt’s reliance on Israel, though, altered the dynamics of the region. On February 21, 2016, Secretary of State Kerry convened a secret summit in Aqaba, Jordan, with Sisi, King Abdullah, and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Part of Kerry’s agenda was a regional agreement for Egypt to guarantee Israel’s security as part of a deal for a Palestinian state.
Netanyahu scoffed. What could Sisi offer Israel? Netanyahu asked, according to two Americans involved in the talks. Sisi depended on Israel to control his own territory, for his own survival. Sisi needed Netanyahu; Netanyahu did not need Sisi. And Sisi, for his part, told American officials directly that he would do nothing to pressure Netanyahu.
In 2017, President Trump announced that the United States was recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Washington was no longer waiting for an Israeli agreement with the Palestinians to make the Holy City the shared capital of two states. Egyptian diplomats publicly denounced Trump’s decision, even initiating a United Nations resolution to condemn it. But a leaked audio recording captured an Egyptian intelligence officer coaching talk show hosts about how to persuade the public to accept the Jerusalem decision in the interests of stability.
The officer, identifying himself as Ashraf el-Kholi, told the hosts that the Palestinians could make do with their current headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah. “How is Jerusalem different from Ramallah, really?” Kholi repeated.
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Because “Rabaa” means fourth in Arabic, Brotherhood-style Islamists from Istanbul to Manila adapted a four-fingered salute as a symbol of solidarity. A logo of a black hand holding up four fingers against a bright yellow background became the new icon of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Sisi government criminalized the gesture. Anyone caught making it could be punished. A professional soccer star was suspended from his team, students were expelled from schools, vacationers were arrested for taking selfies at a train station. We told our sons never to hold up four fingers in school or on the streets, even as a joke—a hard lesson for a four-year-old.
Gehad el-Haddad, the Brotherhood spokesman and the son of Morsi’s foreign policy adviser, was thirty-two years old. He had been educated in Britain and previously worked for the Clinton Foundation on Middle Eastern and energy issues. Members of his family told me that he was a personal friend of Chelsea’s. Haddad had met Prime Minister David Cameron at 10 Downing Street, and he became a liaison to Western diplomats and journalists. I knew Haddad as a flak: he did public relations for the Brothers. But he was bright and well read. I enjoyed his company.
After the Rabaa massacre, that history made him a wanted man, and he escaped underground. I reached him six days later by Skype. He was staying off phones or email, sneaking from apartment to apartment, hiding his face in public, and spending no more than one night in any one place. “State security is
very aggressive and I’m a recognizable face.”
The Brothers had stopped calling for street protests or “martyrs.” Too many were dying. Islamists “joke about ‘the good old days of Mubarak,’” Haddad said. “We came close to annihilation once under Nasser, but this is worse,” he told me. “This is the worst ever.”
He was captured on September 17. Both Gehad and his father, Essam, were sentenced to life for inciting violence. Soon, almost every Muslim Brother I knew was in jail or exile. In 2017, American officials would put the number of political prisoners still behind bars in Egypt at more than thirty thousand. Some said as many as sixty thousand. The Interior Ministry built new jails to hold them. But there were nearly half a million dues-paying Muslim Brothers in Egypt. The ministry could not jail them all.
Would young Muslim Brothers accept the logic of violence, as the jihadists argued? On May 27, 2015, more than a hundred Muslim scholars signed an open letter, “The Egypt Call.”
“The aggrieved party has the right to fight back against the aggressor,” the letter declared. “A murderous regime” ruled Egypt, and its collaborators—“rulers, judges, officers, soldiers, muftis, media professionals, and politicians”—should be punished as “murderers” under Islamic law. A death sentence.
A spokesman for the Brotherhood’s leadership-in-hiding—now writing online under a pseudonym—endorsed the Call the next day. The Egyptian government had executed a handful of Brothers, and the spokesman proclaimed that “retribution” was the only response to such “murderers”—“a revolution that reaps heads from atop rotten bodies.”
Into the Hands of the Soldiers: Freedom and Chaos in Egypt and the Middle East Page 34