‘Peaceful’ Rabaa sit-in claims debunked by Brotherhood leaders

CAIRO – 15 August 2017: Taking a look back at the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood leaders’ claims of a “peaceful” sit-in at Rabaa dispersal in 2013, Egypt Today cites statements proving otherwise by a group member stating the massive armament of the protest that was later dispersed by security forces.

Ahmed Elmoghir, a staunch supporter of the outlawed group, admitted that protestors were heavily armed following the dispersal of the sit-in. According to several news outlets in August 2016, Elmoghir said in a Facebook post that is no longer available, that “we possessed large amounts of arms that were totally enough to deter interior ministry forces, varying from firearms, Kalashnikov bullets, Molotov cocktails and grenades.”



Ahmed Elmoghir Facebook post


Elmoghir, who is dubbed as “Khairat el-Shater’s boy,” has long plied social media platforms to incite violence against the armed forces and has repeatedly called on Brotherhood members and supporters to launch what he called an “armed revolution” to establish the state of “Islam.”



Ahmed Elmoghir – Courtesy of his official Twitter account


On the other side, Amr Darrag, who served as the Brotherhood’s “Freedom and Justice” Foreign Relations’ committee, announced during a talk show on Al Jazeera in August 2014, that the then army chief Abdel Fatah al-Sisi “preferred dialogue over force to put an end to the sit-in,” but they have chosen to go different ways, he added.





Assem Abdel Maged, a prominent leader of Al-Gama'a Al-Islamiyya, said in a video conference with CBC channel on August 2015, that his group has received leaked information that said that the army would get weakened from within only if people came out in droves to support ex-President Mohamed Morsi.






He also confessed that the aim of the sit-ins was mustering sprawling crowds of people that support Morsi so the army would get divided up; this is what we only thought of for survival, he added.

Morsi was sworn in as the President of Egypt in June 2012; he faced mass protests against his ruling and the domination of the Brotherhood group over high governmental positions.

While the Rabaa sit-in actually disturbed the lives of any of the district residents, the Brotherhood and their supporters did not seem to care; with prominent salafist preacher Yasser el-Borhami’s confessing that “the sit-in was actually an attempt to impose a new reality, even on Rabaa residents.”

The protests at Rabaa sit-in used to remove the tiles of the pavements to forge barricades to block the roads surrounding the sit-in.

The leader of Salafi ‘Al-Nour’ Party Younes Makhyoun said that the Brotherhood leaders are the direct cause of their youth’s bloodshed, saying that while they inciting them to come out, they are fleeing abroad and “pretended all the heroism.”