Shortly after Islamist rebels overthrew Syria’s authoritarian president, Bashar Al-Assad, a hashtag steaming in Egyptian social media: “It’s your turn, dictator.”
The message for President Abdel Fattah El-sisi of Egypt was unquestionable. But he almost didn’t need warning.
Since the removal of the long -term dictator of Syria on December 8, Egyptian leaders attended the events in the Syrian capital of Damascus, with gloomy vigilance, knowing well that the revolutionary fire tends to spread.
Both countries had a hectic history of the Arab uprisings of Spring that began in late 2010 and spread throughout the Middle East.
The Syrian uprising culminated almost 14 years later with the fall of Mr Al-Assad. The Egyptian revolution rejected the country’s long -term authoritarian president, Hosni Mubarak, and saw an Islamic political party coming to power in the country’s first free elections. Mr El-sisi seized power two years later in a military acquisition, and he and the like-minded leaders in the Persian Gulf and beyond the stay remain cautious by Islamic groups gaining any power in the region, just as they did in Syria.
Days after Mr Al-Assad abandoned Syria for Russia, Egyptian security forces arrested at least 30 Syrian refugees living in Cairo who were spontaneously celebrating his fall, according to the Egyptian initiative for personal rights.
The Egyptian authorities have also made it more difficult for the Syrians to travel to Egypt after the overthrow of Mr Al-Assad, demanding first safety.
Mr El-sisi has given unusually frequent addresses in recent weeks to defend his file.
“My hands had never been colored with someone’s blood and I never got anything that wasn’t mine,” he said in December a week after Mr. Al-Assad.
In this way, he appeared to contradict the remote Syrian leader, while brushing his own human rights records, including the slaughter of Egyptian military forces that led to which groups of rights say that at least 817 people were They complain about Mr El- the acquisition of Sisi’s power in 2013.
Since the rebels in Syria occupied power, Egypt caught or began to persecute several people who considered political opponents, including the director of a prominent group of rights, the wife of a prisoner of a politician and a Tiktok user . Egypt already held about tens of thousands of political prisoners, many of them Islamists.
“Two thousand and eleven are just 14 years away,” said Mirette F. Mabrouk, an Egyptian expert at the Middle East Institute in Washington, referring to the year of the Egyptian revolution. The Egyptian authorities, he said, “you know that things of avalanche”.
After years of deepening economic misery throughout Egypt, Mr El-Sisi was already in a strongly vulnerable position. Any hint that the Egyptians could catch the revolutionary courage of the Syrians that cause problems – not because the Egyptians want armed uprising, Ms Mabrouk said, but because it might take very little to their unhappy to explode.
The most visible attempt to benefit at the moment comes from Ahmed Al-Mansour, an Egyptian who left the country to fight with Syrian rebels years ago. After the abolition of Mr Al-Moster, he repeatedly ran against Mr. El-sisi online by Damascus.
“It is worth a sphere,” Mr Al-Mansour said about Mr El-Sisi in a video published in X. was considered 1.5 million times.
The threat sent Egypt’s anchors, which often reinforce the over-government speech points in their night broadcasts in a turmoil. A host, Ahmed Moussa, called on the new Syrian leaders to act.
“They have to tell us if it’s with what is happening in our country or not,” he warned.
Shortly after his turmoil in mid-January, the new Syrian authorities arrested Mr Al-Mansour along with several associates. He was used on his way to a meeting with the country’s provisional Minister of Defense, according to a statement by the movement against SISI, Mr Al-Mansour founded.
It is not clear whether the Egyptian authorities had pushed for his arrest.
Mr Al-Mansour’s team urged the Syrian authorities to release him, saying that the Egyptian people are exercising their rights against Mr El-Sisi as the Syrians against Mr Al-Assad did. His current status is unknown.
But even with Mr Al-Mansour silently for now, other Egyptians are unlikely to stop complaining.
Many have turned to Mr El-Sisi after years of financial crisis, the most recent of which were caused by the successive vibrations of the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. But the problems are also rooted in the mismanagement of government and overcrowding, including magnificent megaprojects.
With Egypt deep debt and loss of revenue, the currency has collapsed, some goods have become difficult to find and inflation has increased.
Such hardships have had a population of about 111 million, where almost one in three lived in poverty, according to official statistics.
Mr El-Sisi tried to protect himself from criticism, saying in a recent speech that the country was already in poor economic form when it took over in 2013 and that the rapid growth of the Egyptian population had difficulty securing its citizens. But years had passed with the prosperity he would bring to Egypt – prosperity that never came, even when he inaugurated a costly new capital with a glamorous presidential palace.
“People are seriously unhappy and so they try out there to throw things down,” Ms Mabrouk said.
At first, many welcomed the president as a hero and Savior for the use of the military force to eradicate the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamic Political Party that won the presidency after the Egyptian revolution of 2011, but continued to alienate much of the population.
Mr El-sisi spent the following years, sealing the fraternity in Egypt, considering it a threat to his power. The Egyptian authorities were being persecuted by thousands of members of the fraternity and suspicious compatriots, pointing out the terrorists, while others have left the country.
Even weakens, political Islamists remain a popular goal for Mr El-Sisi and his supporters, who often rely on the dangers of political Islam.
Therefore, it was no surprise when the Egyptian authorities were heard a warning note on the rise of Lightning by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the Islamic guerrilla group that took over Syria. The team was once associated with al -Qaeda, but rejected its extremist origin.
Egypt may have had little love for Mr Al-Assad, analysts said, but had preferred the fragile stability he represented in chaos and conflicts that surround Egypt in Libya, Sudan and Gaza.
Therefore, it has carefully approached relations with New Syria.
Unlike other Arab countries, Egypt has not yet held high -level meetings with Syrian officials.
Diplomats in Cairo say Egyptian officials have privately urged other governments to remain cautious about the new Syrian leadership and not to raise sanctions in the country very quickly. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they had not been authorized to speak publicly.
Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty has called on regional and international partners to ensure that “Syria is not a source of regional instability or shelter for terrorist groups”.
Mahmoud Badr, an Egyptian super-government activist who helped promote the protest movement for the anti-Muslim Brotherhood that paved the way for Mr El-Sisi, told X shortly after Hayat Tahrir al-Sham at Damascus that the group and the Brotherhood of the Brotherhood were indiscriminate.
“It is all part of a network and no one can convince us differently,” he said, saying widely circulated photos showing the leader of the Syrian meeting with a prominent Egyptian member of the Brotherhood.
And although anti-Islamic feeling remains strong among the Egyptians, the same applies to anti-sisi.
“It is coming to a very bad time for Sisi,” said Broderick McDonald, a partner at the Kings College International Study Center in London.
