February 3, 2015 | Policy Brief

Egypt Nears the Brink

February 3, 2015 | Policy Brief

Egypt Nears the Brink

The political turmoil roiling Egypt since the military’s 2013 ouster of President Mohamed Morsi is starting to bubble over.

On Tuesday, a bomb exploded on Qasr al-Nil Street, a famed and bustling downtown boulevard. The same day, two more bombs were found in the city’s international airport, and another went off in Alexandria, killing a bystander. Meanwhile, in the Gaza Strip, an explosive charge detonated next to the border fence with Egypt in an apparent attack on an Egyptian army convoy. Last week, Islamic State-allied jihadists killed 32 troops and security officers in the country’s bloodiest, most coordinated anti-state violence since the revolution against Hosni Mubarak four years ago.

The battle is also being played out in the courts. This week an Egyptian court named the Hamas military wing a terrorist group, and another court sentenced 183 Muslim Brotherhood supporters to death over the 2013 killings of policemen.

In its campaign to marginalize and degrade the Brotherhood, there is little left for Egypt’s government to do. The Brotherhood is already banned, and thousands of real and perceived Islamists remain imprisoned. Troops and security forces are already waging unprecedented counter-terror operations against Sinai jihadists, whom the regime accuses of being in league with the Brotherhood despite the latter’s protestations.

For its part, the Brotherhood has departed from its stated commitment to nonviolence, and issued a statement declaring a “jihad.” The declaration did not name the regime as the target, but its meaning was clear. “We are at the threshold of a new period,” it said on its Arabic website, “in which we recall our strength that has been lying in wait, in which we evoke the meanings of jihad and prepare ourselves…for a long, relentless jihad.”

With the Brotherhood’s nonviolence now in doubt, and with jihadists determined to wreak havoc in the Sinai, Egypt once again stands on the brink of an unprecedented level of religious and political violence.

Oren Kessler is deputy director of research at Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where he is also a research fellow focused on Egypt.

Issues:

Egypt