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CAIRO \u2013 Soon after Islamist rebels overthrew the authoritarian president of Syria, Bashar Assad, a hashtag gathered steam on Egyptian social media: \u201cIt\u2019s your turn, dictator.\u201d<\/p>\n
The message for President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi of Egypt was unmistakable. But he hardly needed the warning.<\/p>\n
Since the ouster of Syria\u2019s longtime dictator on Dec 8, Egyptian leaders have watched events in the Syrian capital, Damascus, with grim-faced vigilance, knowing well that revolutionary fire has a tendency to spread.<\/p>\n
Both countries have had a turbulent history since the Arab Spring uprisings that started in late 2010 and spread across the Middle East.<\/p>\n
The Syrian revolt culminated almost 14 years later with Assad\u2019s fall. The Egyptian revolution deposed the country\u2019s longtime authoritarian president, Hosni Mubarak, and saw an Islamist political party come to power in the country\u2019s first free elections. El-Sissi seized power two years later in a military takeover, and he and like-minded leaders in the Persian Gulf and beyond remain wary of Islamist groups gaining any power in the region, as they just did in Syria.<\/p>\n
Days after Assad fled 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, a rights group.<\/p>\n
Egyptian authorities also made it harder for Syrians to travel to Egypt in the aftermath of Assad\u2019s overthrow, requiring most to obtain security clearances first.<\/p>\n
El-Sissi has given unusually frequent addresses in recent weeks to defend his record.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy hands have never been stained with anyone\u2019s blood, and I have never taken anything that wasn\u2019t mine,\u201d he said in December, a week after Assad fell.<\/p>\n
In doing so, he seemed to draw a contrast with the deposed Syrian leader while brushing aside his own human rights record, including a massacre by the Egyptian military forces that he led of what rights groups say were at least 817 people protesting el-Sissi\u2019s takeover of power in 2013.<\/p>\n
Since the rebels in Syria seized power, Egypt has arrested or began prosecuting several people considered political opponents, including the director of a prominent rights group, the wife of a detained political cartoonist and a TikTok user who had been posting videos critical of el-Sissi. Egypt already was holding an estimated tens of thousands of political prisoners, many of them Islamists.<\/p>\n
\u201cTwo thousand and eleven is only 14 years away,\u201d said Mirette F. Mabrouk, an Egypt expert at the Middle East Institute in Washington, referring to the year of the Egyptian revolution. The Egyptian authorities, she said, \u201cknow that things snowball.\u201d<\/p>\n
After years of deepening economic misery across Egypt, el-Sissi was already in an acutely vulnerable position. Any hint that Egyptians could catch Syrians\u2019 revolutionary fervor spells trouble \u2013 not because Egyptians want armed revolt, Mabrouk said, but because it could take very little for their disgruntlement to explode into protest.<\/p>\n
The most visible attempt to capitalize on the moment has come from Ahmed al-Mansour, an Egyptian who left the country to fight with Syrian rebels years ago. After Assad\u2019s ouster, he repeatedly ranted against el-Sissi online from Damascus.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re worth one bullet,\u201d al-Mansour said of el-Sissi in a video posted on the social platform X. It was viewed 1.5 million times.<\/p>\n
The threat sent Egypt\u2019s TV anchors, who often amplify pro-government talking points on their nightly broadcasts, into an uproar. One host, Ahmed Moussa, called on Syria\u2019s new leaders to act.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey must tell us if they are with what is happening in the targeting of our country or not,\u201d he warned.<\/p>\n
Shortly after his tirade in mid-January, the new Syrian authorities arrested al-Mansour along with several associates. He was detained on his way to a meeting with the country\u2019s interim defense minister, according to a statement from the anti-Sissi movement al-Mansour founded.<\/p>\n
It is unclear whether Egyptian authorities had pushed for his arrest.<\/p>\n
Al-Mansour\u2019s group urged the Syrian authorities to release him, saying that the Egyptian people were exercising their rights against el-Sissi just as Syrians had done against Assad. His current status is unknown.<\/p>\n
But even with al-Mansour silenced for now, other Egyptians are unlikely to stop complaining.<\/p>\n
Many have soured on el-Sissi after years of economic crises, the most recent of which was triggered by the successive shocks of the wars in Ukraine and the Gaza Strip. But the problems are also rooted in government mismanagement and overspending, including on grandiose megaprojects.<\/p>\n
With Egypt deep in debt and losing revenue, the currency has crashed, some goods have become difficult to find and inflation has soared.<\/p>\n
Such hardships have suffocated a population of about 111 million where nearly 1 in 3 already lived in poverty, according to official statistics.<\/p>\n
El-Sissi has tried to shield himself from criticism, saying in a recent speech that the country was already in bad financial shape when he took over in 2013 and that Egypt\u2019s rapid population growth had made it difficult to provide for his citizens. But he had spent years boasting of the prosperity he would bring to Egypt \u2013 prosperity that never came, even as he inaugurated a costly new capital city complete with a gleaming presidential palace.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople are seriously discontented, and therefore he\u2019s trying out there to just tamp things down,\u201d Mabrouk said.<\/p>\n
In the beginning, many hailed the president as a hero and savior for using military force to oust the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist political party that won the presidency following the 2011 Egyptian revolution but went on to alienate much of the population.<\/p>\n
El-Sissi spent the ensuing years stamping out the Brotherhood in Egypt, viewing it as a threat to his power. Egyptian authorities prosecuted thousands of Brotherhood members and suspected sympathizers, labeling them terrorists, while others have fled the country.<\/p>\n
Even weakened, political Islamists remain a popular target for el-Sissi and his supporters, who frequently invoke the dangers of political Islam.<\/p>\n
So it was unsurprising when Egyptian authorities sounded a note of caution about the lightning rise of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the Islamist rebel group that has taken charge in Syria. The group was once affiliated with al-Qaida but has disavowed its extremist origins.<\/p>\n
Egypt may have had little love for Assad, analysts said, but it had come to prefer the brittle stability he represented to the chaos and conflict that surround Egypt in Libya, Sudan and Gaza.<\/p>\n
It has therefore approached relations with the new Syria gingerly.<\/p>\n
Unlike other Arab countries, Egypt has not yet held high-level meetings with Syrian officials.<\/p>\n
Diplomats in Cairo say Egyptian officials have privately urged other governments to remain wary of Syria\u2019s new leadership and not to lift penalties on the country too quickly. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.<\/p>\n
Egypt\u2019s foreign minister, Badr Abdelatty, has called on regional and international partners to ensure that \u201cSyria does not become a source of regional instability or a haven for terrorist groups.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mahmoud Badr, an Egyptian pro-government activist who helped foster the anti-Muslim Brotherhood protest movement that paved the way for el-Sissi\u2019s ascension, said on X soon after Hayat Tahrir al-Sham swept into Damascus that the group and the Brotherhood were indistinguishable.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s all part of one network and no one can convince us otherwise,\u201d he said, citing widely circulated photos that showed the leader of the Syrian group meeting with a prominent Egyptian member of the Brotherhood.<\/p>\n
And though anti-Islamist sentiment remains strong among Egyptians, so does anti-Sissi sentiment.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt comes at a very bad time for Sissi,\u201d said Broderick McDonald, an associate fellow at Kings College London\u2019s International Center for the Study of Radicalization.<\/p>\n
This article originally appeared in The New York Times<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n