Egypt Security Sector Report

This week’s dispatch includes reports on the US presidential election, the war in Palestine and Lebanon, the Red Sea maritime crisis, Nile diplomacy, prisons, security crackdowns, Sinai, repression tech, military cadets, and migration.

📁 The US Presidential Election

Egyptians followed the 2020 US presidential race between Joe Biden and Donald Trump more closely than Americans themselves, several fellow journalists and activists joked at the time. There was certainly a grain of truth in this. After all, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi — the former minister of defense who led a military coup against the country’s first democratically elected president in 2013 and has since ruled the country with a fearful security apparatus — was Trump’s “favorite dictator.”

Egyptians rightly felt their autocrat could not have gotten away with such repressive practices without international support, especially from the leader of the “Free World.” Meanwhile, in the run-up to the 2020 election, Biden had promised to hold Sisi accountable and end such preferential treatment. When he was elected, the hopes of desperate Egyptians skyrocketed. Rights campaigners expected a good number of incarcerated regime critics to be released. A former political prisoner told me there was jubilation among political detainees who thought there would finally be international pressure to release them.

Their hopes were soon dashed.

The outbreak of fighting in Gaza in 2021 created an opportunity for Sisi to present himself to the new US administration as a force of stability in the region. He helped to mediate a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel. Biden, a deeply committed self-described Zionist, fell back on the same old pragmatic model: backing dictators as long as they served the US’s national security interests. Last month, the Biden administration approved $1.3 billion in military aid for Egypt, despite the concerns raised by some US lawmakers and rights groups about the country’s human rights violations. 

The current US election has been met with broad apathy from Egyptians, who hardly discuss it on social media or in informal chats. Whatever its outcome, business will remain as usual. The election is seen as a competition between a fanatic racist pro-Israeli Islamophobe and Biden’s vice president, who has enabled the destruction of Gaza and the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians, and helped Sisi consolidate his military dictatorship.

This piece first appeared in The Dial Magazine.