Abdel Fattah el-Sisi

Abdel Fattah el-Sisi: The Quiet General

In 2006 an Egyptian officer on the war course at the United States Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, submitted a term paper on democracy and its applications in the Middle East. His professor, Sherifa Zuhur, recalled that he argued in favour of it, citing past successes, and advocated a gradual movement toward pluralism. He occasionally led Friday prayers at the local mosque. Seven years later, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi removed Egypt's first freely elected president and, within thirteen months, was sworn in with 96 percent of the vote.

Gamaliya

He was born on 19 November 1954 in El Gamaleya, the dense medieval quarter of Cairo beside the al-Azhar mosque, the second eldest of eight children. His father kept an antiques shop in the Khan el-Khalili bazaar. Sisi has recalled a childhood among Muslims, Christians and Jews — church bells, and neighbours going to synagogue — an image he has returned to often as president. He married his maternal cousin, Entissar Amer, on graduating from the Egyptian Military Academy in 1977; they have four children.

His was a conventional infantry career of unusual breadth. Commissioned into mechanised infantry, he specialised in anti-tank and mortar warfare, and worked his way through battalion, brigade and divisional commands. He took staff courses in Egypt in 1987, at Britain's Joint Services Command and Staff College in 1992, at the Nasser Military Academy in 2003 and at Carlisle in 2006, and served as military attaché in Riyadh. In 2010 he became Director of Military Intelligence and Reconnaissance.

The Quiet General

The 2011 revolution found him the youngest member of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, the junta that governed Egypt after Mubarak's fall. It was in that period that he became the first council member to publicly acknowledge that the army had subjected detained female protesters to forced "virginity tests" — a procedure he told the state press was done to protect the women from rape and the soldiers from accusations of it.

On 12 August 2012, President Mohamed Morsi retired Field Marshal Tantawi and made Sisi Minister of Defence and commander-in-chief. The Muslim Brotherhood's own Freedom and Justice Party website welcomed him as a "defence minister with revolutionary taste." He was pious, discreet, and known throughout the officer corps as the Quiet General.

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Three Days in July

Morsi's presidency collapsed under mass protest. After enormous demonstrations on 30 June 2013, the army issued a forty-eight-hour ultimatum. On 3 July, Sisi removed him, installed Chief Justice Adly Mansour as interim head of state, and ordered the arrest of Brotherhood leaders. On 24 July, at a military parade, he asked Egyptians into the streets to give the army and police a "mandate" to confront what he called terrorism. His opponents heard exactly what it was.

Rabaa

On 14 August 2013 security forces cleared the two protest camps at al-Nahda Square and Rabaa al-Adawiya. Human Rights Watch spent a year investigating, interviewing more than 200 witnesses and examining satellite imagery, video and physical evidence, and confirmed 817 deaths at Rabaa alone, with strong evidence that the true toll exceeded 1,000. Nearly 19,000 people were arrested. The organisation named more than a dozen officials warranting investigation, among them the interior minister, the special forces commander, and Sisi himself, and concluded the killings "most likely amount to crimes against humanity." Its finding turned on premeditation: an interior ministry official had anticipated up to 3,500 deaths, and the interior minister had spoken of expecting to lose 10 percent of the more than 20,000 assembled. "This wasn't merely a case of excessive force or poor training," said Kenneth Roth. "It was a violent crackdown planned at the highest levels." No senior official has been prosecuted. In March 2014 a court sentenced 529 Brotherhood members to death in a single batch, which Amnesty International called the largest such group of simultaneous death sentences seen anywhere in recent years.

Sisi was promoted to field marshal on 27 January 2014, declared his candidacy in March, and won the May election with 96 percent of the counted vote. He was sworn in on 8 June 2014. He faced minimal opposition in 2018 and again in 2023, with rivals barred or withdrawing. A constitutional referendum in April 2019 extended presidential terms and opened the possibility of his remaining in office until 2030.

Bitter Medicine

What he did with the economy was the most genuinely daring thing about him. Fuel and food subsidies consumed nearly a quarter of the state budget, and no Egyptian leader since the deadly 1977 bread riots had dared touch them. Sisi raised fuel prices by 78 percent, added taxes on alcohol, tobacco and property, and later allowed the pound to devalue — from £E7.83 to £E8.95 to the dollar in early 2016, with prices climbing behind it. He called it "bitter medicine" that was "50 years late," halved his own salary, and asked Egyptians to sacrifice. Egypt paid over $6 billion of arrears to foreign oil companies in two months; external debt fell 13.5 percent by March 2015; Moody's and Fitch both upgraded the country in 2015.

He spent the credit on concrete. A parallel New Suez Canal was dug in a single year for £E60 billion and opened on 6 August 2015, projected to double daily transits from 49 to 97 ships. He signed a $9 billion contract with Siemens and a $12 billion energy deal with BP, and by June 2015 announced a 2.9-gigawatt power surplus in a country that had suffered a national blackout nine months earlier. Then came a new administrative capital east of Cairo, over 4,400 kilometres of new road, the New Delta agricultural scheme, and a pledge to clear every unsafe slum.

The Prisons and the Region

The political price is documented. Human Rights Watch says he "relies on naked coercion and the military and security services as his main vehicles of control," and has accused his government of torture, enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings during the campaign against the Islamic State affiliate in North Sinai, and the arrest and torture of children as young as twelve. International rights organisations estimated some 60,000 political prisoners in Egypt as of January 2020. Freedom House concluded in 2021 that meaningful political opposition is virtually nonexistent. When protests broke out in September 2019 over a contractor's corruption allegations, more than 4,000 people were arrested.

Abroad he has been indispensable to almost everyone. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the UAE supplied more than $20 billion after Morsi's fall; in 2016 Egypt agreed to transfer the Red Sea islands of Tiran and Sanafir to Saudi control, provoking a rare public backlash. He deepened ties with Moscow — arms, wheat, a nuclear reactor deal signed in December 2017, an industrial zone on the canal — while remaining a major non-NATO ally of Washington, where Donald Trump called him his "favorite dictator." The Economist has called him the most pro-Israeli Egyptian leader ever; in October 2023 he said Israel's bombardment of Gaza had "gone beyond the right to self-defence, turning into collective punishment for 2.3 million people."

Why Abdel Fattah Is Called a Genius

The case for Sisi rests on timing, and it is not nothing. He was appointed defence minister by the man he removed, and appointed precisely because the Muslim Brotherhood believed him to be the safe, pious, unambitious officer in the room. Within eleven months he had used a genuine popular uprising against Morsi as the platform for a military takeover, secured a mandate for it by asking the public for one in advance, and converted the whole sequence into 96 percent at the ballot box. Reading a fractured society that precisely — and being underestimated by everyone in it — is a real political faculty.

So is his economic nerve. Cutting fuel subsidies by 78 percent in a country whose last such attempt produced the 1977 bread riots is the kind of decision Mubarak avoided for thirty years. That Sisi made it, halved his own pay, and survived it says something about both his risk tolerance and his grip.

But the label should be resisted, and Sisi's own version of it is instructive: he has described himself as "a doctor whose diagnoses are sought after by top philosophers and prominent world leaders." No independent evidence supports that self-portrait. A 96 percent result is not proof of political brilliance but of the absence of a contest — candidates barred, a party outlawed, tens of thousands imprisoned. And the foundational act of his rule was not a masterstroke but, in Human Rights Watch's finding, a killing of at least 817 people "planned at the highest levels" and most likely amounting to crimes against humanity. What Sisi has is the competence of a career staff officer applied to a state: patience, opacity, an accurate read of who will move and when, and a willingness to spend lives to keep a plan on schedule. That is coldness and control, not genius.

Legacy

A decade on, Egypt has new roads, a second canal, a capital rising in the desert, an unpayable-looking debt load, and almost no politics. Sisi has stabilised the state by hollowing out everything that might contest it, and the arrangement's durability is untested against the thing that ended his two predecessors: a crowd. On the tenth anniversary of Rabaa, Amnesty International wrote that impunity for the killing of over 900 people had "enabled an all-out assault on peaceful dissent." That sentence is the ledger of his rule, on both sides.