3,000 Foreign Jihadis to Terrorize Egyptian Opposition?

The title of a recent Al Khabar News report declares: “Morsi summons 3,000 jihadis from Afghanistan, Chechnya, Bosnia, Somalia and Iran to be an Islamic army to strike the police and army forces” of Egypt.

According to the report, Ibrahim Ali, a lawyer of various Islamic groups, said that 3,000 leaders and members of the Jihad Groups and the notorious Islamic Group—including the brother of Khaled al-Islambouli, the army officer who planned and participated in the assassination of President Anwar Sadat—will arrive in Egypt in a few days.

Ali added that most of these leaders are coming from Afghanistan, Chechnya, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Somalia, Kenya, Iran, and even London. Similar reports had appeared earlier, in November: these seasoned jihadis may already be in Egypt. Moreover, back in August, days after Morsi assumed Egypt’s presidency, he released jihadi convicts from the nation’s two most notorious terrorist organizations, Islamic Jihad and the Islamic Group—including several held under tight security and on death row for committing especially heinous acts of terror in Egypt.

It is often forgotten that Morsi himself, Egypt’s president, was a former convict in Egypt, imprisoned for his designs to impose Sharia on the social order—precisely what he is doing now unfettered, including by summoning and releasing jihadis to subdue his fellow Egyptians who oppose the Islamization of Egypt—which has millions of Christians and liberal Muslims.

At the very least, one can argue that, at the time of the elections, half the nation was against Islamization, as the vote between Morsi and the secularist Ahmed Shafiq was split down the middle (some authoritative sources even say that Shafiq won). Now, even more Egyptians are going against Morsi, as evinced by these popular revolts. A recent talk show on El Balad TV expressed the popular resentment being felt by the average Egyptian, when a Muslim woman called in saying to the MB official on the show:

You people [Muslim Brotherhood] must give people and their ideas some room, you can’t always get angry and fight—it’s unacceptable…. Come on you guys, what’s the deal? We have come to hate the world. I swear to God, if there is an empty mountain for me to live in, I would take my children and go there! You’ve made us hate our lives! Let me tell you something: I voted for Morsi. May God have paralyzed my hand! May a car have run me over when I went to the voting booth!

In other words, Morsi needs all the help he can get, and it is certainly not far fetched to believe that he would summon the aid of foreign jihadis. For example, here is a list circulating on twitter by the jihadi organization Ansar Al Sharia—"the Supporters of Sharia"—indicating who it will kill should Muhammad Morsi fail; among the names is new Coptic Pope Tawadros.

Moreover, the amount of violence inflicted so far on Egyptian protesters certainly can be described as terrorism. Aside from those killed by Brotherhood forces, here are some pictures of those beat and tortured. Many of these victims tell the same story: they were threatened to admit publicly that “outside” sources had hired them to protest otherwise they were severely beat and tortured.

In typical Islamist projection fashion, the Muslim Brotherhood, which is enlisting the aid of fellow but foreign jihadis, is trying to portray the grassroots revolts against it as a foreign conspiracy.

Nor is there any doubt that the Muslim Brotherhood was always more interested in empowering Islam over improving Egypt—a natural consequence of the Islamist mentality, which sees the triumph of Islam and Muslims, the collective Umma, more important than the triumph of one’s nation and immediate neighbors.

A couple examples: Brotherhood representative Safwat Hegazy—who earlier predicted the group would be “masters of the world"—is more interested in seeing Jerusalem become the capital of the Islamic caliphate than Cairo prospering for Egypt; and the former General Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, Muhammad Akef, when pressured to talk more about Egypt and less about Islam, declared “the hell with Egypt,” clearly indicting that the interests of his country are secondary to Islam’s.

Speaking of the General Guide, only recently, more evidence emerged demonstrating that Morsi is little more than a tool of Islamization: although many accused Morsi of simply being a stooge to the General Guide—currently Muhammad Badie, who, as head of the Muslim Brotherhood, has one goal, the enforcement of Sharia in Egypt—Morsi brushed aside such talk, saying he was his own man, that his policies for Egypt would have nothing to do with Brotherhood interests, that he was a president for all Egyptians, etc., etc.

Amazingly, however, a couple days ago on Egyptian satellite TV, a Muslim Brotherhood official actually admitted that “Yes, the General Guide rules Muhammad Morsi,” to a flabbergasted host, who in resignation, said, “Well that’s it; it’s over. What else is there to say?”

Indeed, what else is there to say about an Egyptian president who terrorizes Egyptian citizens into accepting Sharia law?

Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and an Associate Fellow at the Middle East Forum.

Raymond Ibrahim, a specialist in Islamic history and doctrine, is the author of Defenders of the West: The Christian Heroes Who Stood Against Islam (2022); Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West (2018); Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians (2013); and The Al Qaeda Reader (2007). He has appeared on C-SPAN, Al-Jazeera, CNN, NPR, and PBS and has been published by the New York Times Syndicate, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, the Weekly Standard, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Jane’s Islamic Affairs Analyst. Formerly an Arabic linguist at the Library of Congress, Ibrahim guest lectures at universities, briefs governmental agencies, and testifies before Congress. He has been a visiting fellow/scholar at a variety of Institutes—from the Hoover Institution to the National Intelligence University—and is the Judith Friedman Rosen Fellow at the Middle East Forum and the Distinguished Senior Shillman Fellow at the Gatestone Institute.
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