Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has been keen to set himself apart from toppled Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad over the past month.
During a meeting with a host of his country’s journalists on 15 December, he distinguished himself from the ousted Syrian president by claiming that his hands were not stained with anyone’s blood and that he did not steal anyone’s money.
He reiterated the same message on 7 January when he addressed thousands of Coptic Christians who congregated for Coptic Orthodox Christmas inside the gigantic Cathedral of the Nativity in the new administrative capital.
Nonetheless, Sisi’s keenness to differentiate himself from the drummed-out Syrian dictator begs the question of how his administration views the changes taking place in Syria.
Cairo was caught off guard by Assad’s downfall and is apprehensive about the repercussions it could have both domestically and in the wider region.
Egypt has been cautious about engaging with the new authorities and it took nearly three weeks for the Egyptian foreign minister to contact his new Syrian counterpart over the phone.
During the call with Syrian FM Asaad al-Shaibani, Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty urged that the political process in Syria adopt an inclusive approach, calling on all parties to “preserve Syria’s national institutions, its unity and sovereignty”.
But Cairo’s antipathy towards the new Syria goes far beyond the transitional phase, with ideological, security, and geostrategic considerations for not welcoming the monumental changes taking place in the country.
Unwanted return of political Islam
Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s (HTS) rise to power in Syria after toppling Assad is viewed by Cairo as giving political Islam the kiss of life. This is particularly worrying for Egypt’s state, which has been trying to eliminate the Muslim Brotherhood for the past decade.
“The revival of this ideology in Syria agonises Egypt which is afraid of the Islamists’ comeback, not only here, but also in other regional states,” political expert Ibrahim Rabie told The New Arab.
“Egypt respects the will of the Syrian people, but it will likely practice caution in dealing with the new administration in Syria for some time to come,” he added.
Sisi came to power in Egypt after leading the Egyptian army in ousting Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in a military coup in 2013.
Shortly afterwards, the military killed up to 1,000 people in Rabaa al-Adawiya Square after Morsi’s supporters set up sit-in camps to protest his ousting.
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What followed was a widespread campaign to eliminate the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, including imprisoning most of its leaders, confiscating its assets, and freezing the group’s funds.
In late 2013, Egypt designated the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist group, followed shortly afterwards by Saudi Arabia in March 2014 and the UAE in November that year.
Egypt was happy to see the waning influence of the Brotherhood in the region, notably in Tunisia and Morocco, where the group won elections and formed governments before losing power.
The rise of HTS in Syria shows that political Islam is still very much alive, analysts say, with a potential ripple effect across the region, particularly if Syria’s new rulers implement a successful model of governance.
Fears of insecurity
Assad’s downfall has brought the brutal 13-year war in Syria to an end. There are, however, still possibilities for new fronts to open inside the country, especially concerning Turkey and Kurdish groups in the northeast.
The Islamic State (IS) could also potentially exploit any power vacuum in the country, something that Cairo greatly fears.
The group tried to centre its North Africa caliphate in the Sinai and Egypt’s war against them has been long and costly, both in human and financial terms.
In March 2023, Sisi revealed that counterterrorism operations in Sinai had cost around a billion Egyptian pounds each month ($20 million in today’s exchange rate, but the equivalent of around $125 million in the exchange rate of 2014 when counterterrorism operations started).
These operations have been criticised by some international organisations for serious rights abuses and even war crimes.
The conflict also witnessed a large number of deaths of soldiers, policemen, and civilians, including a deadly attack on a North Sinai Mosque in November 2017 that killed 235 people.
Egypt fought for almost ten years against the Islamic State before it managed to eradicate it.
“Egypt is afraid that IS terrorists will sneak into Sinai once more with help from some regional and international players,” security expert Fouad Allam told TNA.
“Unrest in neighbouring countries, including Libya and Sudan, makes this scenario possible,” he added.
Such fears are probably behind the raft of regulations Egypt has introduced to stem the entry of Syrians into the country since Assad’s downfall on 8 December.
It first made the entry of Syrians from the US, Canada, and Europe conditional on the obtainment of security approval from Egyptian consulates in these areas. Egyptian authorities then banned the entry of Syrians into Egypt altogether.
Regional power dynamics
The way Egypt views the changes taking place in Syria is not limited to fears about political Islam’s revival or the reawakening of IS in Sinai.
Cairo also views Assad’s downfall and the subsequent destruction of the Syrian military from a geostrategic angle, especially when it comes to regional power dynamics and the balance of power.
While Syria’s 13-year civil war wore out its army and depleted most of its arms stockpiles and some of its brigades, Syria nonetheless constituted an important component of the regional balance of power against Israel, having possessed a trained and professional army.
This fact was probably not absent from the minds of military planners in Tel Aviv, who closely watched the HTS-led coalition advancing towards Damascus in early December on the road to bringing Assad down a few days later.
Having shelved the ‘wait-and-see’ tactic it employed during Syria’s civil war, Israel decided to act by destroying what remained of Syria’s military capabilities.
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As HTS advanced to depose Assad, the Israeli air force staged hundreds of airstrikes against targets belonging to the Syrian military, including arms warehouses, airbases, research centres, intelligence headquarters, and naval assets off the Syrian coast.
“The destruction of the Syrian army is catastrophic by all measures,” Hamdi Bekheit, a retired Egyptian army general who now acts as an advisor to the head of the Egyptian army-affiliated Command and Staff College, told TNA.
“It will take the Syrians tens of years and tens of billions of dollars to rebuild this army, supposing that Israel will let them do so,” he added.
Apart from destroying what remained of the Syrian army, Israel has also occupied the buffer zone in the occupied Gola Heights, claiming that the 1974 Disengagement Agreement was null and void after Assad’s fall.
Israel also occupied Mount Hermon, the highest point in southwestern Syria, overlooking Damascus and other parts of the country.
In its past confrontations with Israel, Egypt has heavily depended on the Syrian army, most notably in 1973 when Cairo launched an offensive on Israeli occupation forces in Sinai to liberate the Egyptian territory.
During the war, the Syrian army had tried to regain control of the Golan Heights, which were occupied by Israeli forces in 1967.
In recent days, several former senior Egyptian army officials have expressed shock at the destruction of the Syrian army’s assets and the Israeli occupation of new lands.
“The occupation of Mount Hermon is the heaviest catastrophe to befall Syria in the last 50 years,” Samir Farag, who was an Egyptian Military Operations Authority major at the time of the 1973 war, told a local television channel last month.
Saleh Salem is an Egyptian journalist
