A violent backlash broke out across the country as soon as the assault on the sit-in began. As the soldiers and policemen moved into Rabaa al-Adawiya Square, mobs of Muslims in other towns attacked dozens of churches, blaming Christians for supporting the coup. Kerdasa, a town west of Cairo, had been a hub of Islamist militancy for decades. Gunmen stormed its police station, executed fourteen officers, and left their bodies strewn on the floor.
Graffiti calling Sisi a murderer sprang up all over Cairo, even in the affluent blocks surrounding our villa. CC qatil. Sisi is a killer, written using the two English Cs to stand for his name.
The streets were deserted on Friday morning, August 16, two days after the massacre. The army stationed soldiers and a tank at the entrance to our neighborhood. Laura and the boys planned to spend the day in the safety of Maadi House, the club run by the American embassy. They were virtually the only Western family who had returned to Cairo after the summer. They had the place all to themselves. Work crews were raising the exterior walls and adding barbed wire.
I picked up Mayy, for safety in numbers, and we drove downtown together. We did not get far. A dozen men in civilian clothes carrying Kalashnikovs had closed the elevated highway over Bassetine, just northeast of Maadi. At first I thought that they might be Islamists, or maybe carjackers.
Then I saw some lean over the edge of the roadway and point their guns at the Bassetine police station. No one was shooting back, so these were the police, or at least working for them. But that was no relief. The police had already detained several journalists. With an American in the car, they might take us for spies. Our driver made a U-turn and drove back against the direction of traffic—if there had been any traffic. That day, we had the whole road.
Mayy and I got out on the Nile corniche, planning to catch up with an Islamist march protesting against the coup and the massacre. We heard nearby gunfire almost as soon as the driver pulled away. Two men with bandanna masks over their beards came running around a corner, carrying long guns. One berated passersby to join the Islamist protest. Had the “Brotherhood militias” we had heard so much about finally appeared?
We hid behind a sycamore tree near the river. Two women in head scarves and a bearded man holding a Morsi poster were hiding behind another tree next to us, and one of the women called to Mayy. “Who are these men? Are they with us or with them?”
“We are journalists!” Mayy told her. “We should be asking you!”
One of the two masked gunmen appeared out of nowhere from the other side of the tree and moved his gun barrel across the five of us, like an outlaw at a holdup.
“They are journalists!” the woman spat out. She was throwing us in to protect herself.
The gunman aimed at Mayy. After a long moment he appealed for sympathy. “They have been shooting at us all day,” he said. I had no idea who he meant.
“We were trying to cover the demonstration. We are just trying to leave!” Mayy pleaded.
The gunmen would let us escape if we walked south by the Nile, away from the Islamist march we had planned to cover. Mayy and I were convinced that the men were police provocateurs in disguise. It was becoming hard to know who was who.
As we walked, we followed reports and videos on social media of gunfire all around Cairo. In one video, a Morsi supporter was firing a rifle near the entrance to the Four Seasons Hotel opposite the zoo. In others, pedestrians fleeing gunshots jumped or fell from bridges over the Nile. We saw an empty office tower burn unchecked and unattended.
The Muslim Brothers were still trying to organize street demonstrations, and all came under withering assault by the military and police. Amr Darrag had handled the eleventh-hour negotiations with Western diplomats to try to avert the massacre. He walked with his wife and three daughters that Friday in a protest march across a bridge from Zamalek toward downtown. Gunmen started shooting from the top of a hotel. Plainclothes thugs cornered them on the roadway, and the police smothered the march in tear gas. (There were non-Islamist witnesses, too.)
“We are dealing with vampires,” Darrag told me when I caught up with him that afternoon. “My analysis is that they would like to force people to go to violence.” (Darrag was among the lucky few Brotherhood leaders who eventually managed to escape Egypt—mainly to Istanbul, Doha, or London.)
By afternoon, thousands of Islamist demonstrators gathered in Ramses Square, the open plaza about a half hour’s walk northeast of the Tahrir traffic circle. Ramses Square was where the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood had been assassinated decades earlier by agents of the king. Young Islamists hurled rocks and Molotov cocktails at a police station, and the police shot back. A thirty-year-old grandson of the Brotherhood’s founder was killed. So was the thirty-eight-year-old son of the Brotherhood’s general guide, Mohamed Badie (who coined the slogan “Our peacefulness is stronger than their bullets”).
The official reports concluded that more than a hundred civilians had been killed, but my colleague Kareem Fahim counted at least thirty dead bodies in another makeshift morgue inside a mosque near the square. I doubted the Health Ministry counted them in its total.
I wondered if this was how Algeria felt as its civil war started. Laura and the boys evacuated the next day, Saturday, to Tel Aviv, but she brought them back a few weeks later, with some trepidation. We did not want to miss the start of the school year. Many expats stayed away. Our sons’ classes at the Maadi British International School shrank to half the size they used to be.
Michael Morrell of the CIA and other American intelligence officials had worried under Morsi that Al Qaeda might find a foothold in the North Sinai—the loosely governed strip of rocky desert between the Suez Canal and Israel, about 120 miles east of Cairo and 200 miles north of the biblical mountain. Now the backlash against the takeover expanded that initial foothold into a nascent insurgency. Within hours of Morsi’s arrest, militants released an online video of a crowd of thousands in the North Sinai rallying under the black flag of jihad. “The age of ‘peacefulness’ is over, no more peacefulness after today,” the speaker declared, mocking the Brotherhood slogan.
“No more elections after today,” the crowd chanted back.
The jihadist group Ansar Beit al-Maqdis—whose murder of sixteen Egyptian soldiers in the summer of 2012 had scandalized the country—was reborn as the main armed opposition to Sisi. After the Rabaa massacre, Ansar Beit al-Maqdis shifted from attacking Israel to attacking the Egyptian security forces. It claimed responsibility for near-daily attacks on police and soldiers. The militants shot one or two here and there, executed them by the busload, or set off bombs that killed dozens at a time. Killing sixteen soldiers at once became almost routine.
Within weeks, the militants started carrying out bombings and assassinations inside Cairo. A car bomb blew a crater in a Nasr City street but failed to kill the interior minister. An improvised explosive device took out the top prosecutor. On the third anniversary of the uprising—January 25, 2014—an explosion demolished a security headquarters and damaged an Islamic art museum. And so on. By the spring of 2017, thousands of members of the security forces had died and the numbers were still growing.
Ansar Beit al-Maqdis was almost as hostile to the Muslim Brothers as it was to Sisi. Jihadists everywhere had long faulted the Muslim Brothers for eschewing violence, for demanding democracy, for befriending Washington, and most of all for trusting the generals. Ayman al-Zawahiri of Al Qaeda compared the Brotherhood to “a poultry farm” that “breeds happy chickens pleased with what they are given and ignorant of the thieves and monsters around it.”
In a video taking responsibility for a bombing in Cairo that October, a narrator for Ansar Beit al-Maqdis mocked “this farce called ‘democratic Islam.’” The voiceover told the Muslim Brotherhood it would have lost nothing by joining a puritanical jihad. “Would they have prevented you from reaching power? Now they have ousted you. Would America have been upset with you? Now it is upset. Would they have detained you? Now they are detaining you. Would they have shed your blood? Now they are shedding your blood and burning your headquarters and assaulting mosques.” Sisi’s battalions “found only chants and shouts and bare chests. So you were easy prey for him—to be murdered, captured, tortured, and harassed.”
“Armed confrontation” was the only response, the narrator concluded. “Iron must be fought with iron and fire by fire.” Jihadists across the region proclaimed their vindication.
Egypt was the pivot. Until the coup of July 3, 2013, journalists, scholars, and diplomats all talked without apology about an Arab Spring, a democratic opening. Tunisia’s Islamist party had won parliamentary elections, then formed the region’s first Islamist-liberal coalition government. The Syrian uprising was still more or less centered on democracy—not revenge or theocracy. Only a small faction of the rebels had pledged allegiance to Al Qaeda, and they dared do so in public only as recently as April. Libya had held credible parliamentary elections and chosen a liberal prime minister. The State Department held up Yemen as a model transition to democracy.
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.
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.
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.”
Satellite television networks linked to the Egyptian Brotherhood and broadcasting from Istanbul seethed with demands for revenge. “Now, it’s not ‘Our peacefulness is stronger than bullets,’” a man on the edge of a riot in greater Cairo told an interviewer in a phone call to one of the networks. “Our peacefulness is stronger with bullets.... Their women for our women. Their girls for our girls. Blood for blood.”
“That is what I was just saying!” the interviewer, Mohamed Nasser, agreed. “I sent a message to the wives of the officers and told them that revolutionaries will kill their husbands!”
The Egypt Call was too much for some elders of the movement. Sticking to nonviolence may feel like “grasping a burning coal,” one elder, Mahmoud Ghozlan, wrote in an open letter posted on the internet from an undisclosed location. But Brotherhood history had proven that “violence is the reason for defeat and demise.”
A revered senior scholar sometimes referred to as the mufti of the Brotherhood, Abdel Rahman al-Barr, seconded the reprimand. “Peacefulness is not a tactic or a maneuver,” he wrote in his open letter from a hidden location. “It is a fundamental choice based on religious jurisprudence” and “a correct reading of history.”
Online messages from angry young Brothers drowned out their warnings. “What you’re describing isn’t called ‘peacefulness,’ it’s called ‘shame and humiliation.’” “Bloodshed has overrun the meaning of prone ‘peacefulness.’”
Within days, the police arrested both elders. A court had already convicted them in absentia of inciting violence despite their public efforts to stop it. Their death sentences were waiting.
The Brotherhood, the grandfather of Islamist movements, had presented itself for decades as a bulwark against violence and extremism. Now it was too internally confused and divided to play any such role. By 2017, the Brotherhood had collapsed into endless debates about what went wrong, how to move forward, and most of all about who should take over. Had they moved too fast or too slow? Should they retreat into separatism or embrace confrontation? Could there be such a thing as “defensive violence”? Individual cells were split by loyalties to rival leadership teams.
For two years after 2011, Western journalists in the Middle East wrote about debates over the compatibility of Islam and democracy. After the summer of 2013, we wrote about whether Islam was inherently violent.
For the first few months after Rabaa, the army deployed heavily around the city each Friday morning to crush any protest before it got going. Occasionally supporters of the Brotherhood would hold Friday marches in or near our neighborhood, Maadi, and we had a couple of close calls. But most marches were quickly scattered by police. We always managed to keep our sons away. Then the pattern of street protests gradually faded.
The months of demonstrations were followed by an unnerving period of nocturnal explosions, sometimes in earshot of our bedroom. One night in October, a bomb destroyed a satellite dish that we passed each day driving our sons to their school. But over time it became clear that, unlike the jihadists, these attackers were targeting infrastructure or empty shops, not trying to kill civilians. Laura commended their restraint and breathed a little easier. The boys’ lives were now circumscribed by the few blocks between our home, their school, and the pool club, but they did not seem to mind. There were school plays and swim meets. Laura was working at the American University in Cairo. Most of her elite, Anglophone Egyptian colleagues were delighted to be rid of the Muslim Brothers.
One day a few weeks after Rabaa, my phone rang as I was ducking into a restaurant in Zamalek for dinner. “Hey, David, this is Mohamed Soltan . . .”
It was the Egyptian American Ohio State grad who took a bullet in his arm at the Rabaa sit-in. He was calling me from a lightless, overcrowded dungeon in the Tora prison complex.
The police had arrested him in a raid on his apartment a few days after the massacre. He had been inducted into prison with a ritual initiation known as the tashreefa, or honoring ceremony. He and the other new inmates were stripped to their underwear, then forced for two hours to run between two rows of guards beating them with whips, belts, and batons.
Provided no medical attention, Soltan relied on a prisoner with a medical degree to remove two thirteen-inch pins from his injured arm, using pliers and a straight razor, without anesthetic or sterilization. Then Soltan’s jailers threw him into an underground cell. Prisoners screamed and begged to get running water turned on for a few hours a day. Soltan had paid the equivalent of forty dollars to a street criminal for an hour’s use of a smuggled mobile phone. He called me and Abigail Hauslohner, my counterpart at the Washington Post.
I was terrified that he would be caught talking to me (was my phone under surveillance?) and endure more beatings. But Soltan knew his only hope was his American passport. He wanted to tell Americans that a fellow citizen was in jail for defending democracy. He bet that his midwestern accent would stir in me a feeling of connection, and in that he was right.
Egyptian prisons make the harshest American supermax look like the Four Seasons. The tens of thousands rounded up after the coup were deprived of decent food, sanitation, health care, or bedding. They slept on crowded floors infested with bugs. They were beaten and occasionally tortured. None of that was a surprise.
It was difficult, in a perverse way, to empathize. Their stories blurred together: a regional marketing executive for a Danish pharmaceutical company who was arrested at the airport on his way to a sales conference; the genial physician-turned-parliamentarian paraded before cameras still in his bedclothes; the septuagenarian general guide led off without his dentures. How could Egyptians do that to one another?
One memorable day two years after Rabaa I received three separate phone calls about three other friends who were all locked away in Egyptian jails—two Islamists and a liberal. The brother of one, the son of another, and the fiancé of the third all wanted to know: was there anything I could do to call attention to their cases?
No, I gently told them, there was nothing I could do. One more Egyptian political prisoner was hardly newsworthy.
Soltan was charged with inciting violence, just like so many others. But he knew his Americanness made him different. It was his slang, his profanity, his zeal for the Ohio State Buckeyes, his work knocking on doors for the 2008 Obama campaign. When he turned twenty-six on November 16, 2013, I helped arrange for the website of the New York Times to publish an open letter to Obama that Soltan had written that day and smuggled out of prison.
“Mr. President, all I long for is the opportunity to get together this Thanksgiving with family and friends and enjoy some turkey and pie. I keep dreaming about watching my Buckeyes winning it all this year after beating Michigan. Counting down the clocks on New Years. Watching the Super Bowl in my Tom Brady jersey (hopefully he isn’t a disappointment this past season!) and eating a good ol’ cheeseburger with a side of fries . . .”
On his twenty-seventh birthday, he smuggled out of prison a letter to his mother. He was surviving, he told her, on the lessons in determination and perseverance he learned playing high school basketball, from a coach he called Slappy.
Soltan had entered prison at five eleven and weighing 272 pounds. Over three months that fall, he gradually stopped eating protein or meat (what little there was in prison), then carbohydrates, and then dairy products. On January 26, 2014, he began a hunger strike, consuming only water, salt, and vitamins provided by his family.
After about fifteen days, he began losing consciousness occasionally. Sometimes he was taken to a prison hospital for intravenous infusions of glucose and saline. He was locked in solitary confinement and briefly broke down, banging his head against the door until he bled and needed a bandage. He later told me that guards had slipped razors under the door and exposed electrical wire inside his cell, to tempt him with suicide. “Relieve us and you of this headache,” one told him.
He was kept awake by screams of pain from other cells. He was put under a twenty-four-hour-a day spotlight and then a blinking strobe. When he refused to let prison doctors take his vital signs, he was handcuffed to a wheelchair and beaten into submission.
Then an ailing prisoner named Rida was wheeled into Soltan’s hospital room. His new roommate screamed in agony and died in front of him. But no one answered Soltan’s cries for help. When someone finally came in at 3:00 P.M. the next day, Soltan had spent half a day alone with the corpse.
After eleven months on water and vitamins, Soltan had lost one hundred sixty pounds. United States diplomats in Cairo pleaded with the Egyptians to deport him. In September 2014, Obama met Sisi for the first time, during the United Nations General Assembly, and made a face-to-face push for Soltan’s release. Sisi murmured about the independence of the Egyptian judiciary. Soltan stayed in jail.
In January 2015, Soltan acceded to his family’s wishes and began accepting milk and yogurt, to keep his organs intact. They said Obama’s intervention might win his freedom. On May 30, 2015—after twenty-one months in prison and sixteen months on a hunger strike—he was finally deported to the United States.
I met Soltan at his sister’s home in northern Virginia the next winter, and he told me that the three friends arrested with him were all still in prison. So was his aging father. Unlike him, they were only Egyptians.
Islamic State jihadists, he said, had been recruiting avidly in the prison. “They say, ‘These apostates will never respect anything but violent resistance. They only understand the language of weapons,’” Soltan said. “The one thing that everybody in the prison had in common—the ISIS guys, the Muslim Brotherhood guys, the liberals, the guards, the officers—is that they all hated America.”