Egypt — about to erupt?

The Trumpet carries an article about Egypt which relied on bailouts from the Gulf Cooperation Council and the International Monetary Fund, but this aid is unlikely to last, Caliber.Az reprints the article.

What will happen if Egypt explodes? The Arab Spring erupted in 2010, sweeping Hosni Mubarak away in 2011 and allowing the radical Muslim Brotherhood to seize power in 2012. The military overthrew the radicals and installed the current president, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, in 2014, but radicalism continues to churn beneath the surface. Will 2024 be the year of another political earthquake among the Egyptians?

If so, the balance of power in the Middle East could change, and much more significantly than in the aftermath of the last revolution.

Add to the crisis zones in Gaza, Israel, Russia, Ukraine, Ethiopia, Sudan and Yemen an emerging crisis in one of the most important nations in the Middle East.

“The economy is in an extremely fragile state, damaged by years of borrowing and the effects of the pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine,” said Mirette F. Mabrouk, a Middle East Institute senior fellow. Inflation hit a record high of 39.7 percent in August. The regime funding expensive projects, such as a $58 billion new capital city owned by the government and military, has not endeared it to millions who are struggling for bread.

Egypt has relied on bailouts from the Gulf Cooperation Council and the International Monetary Fund, but this aid is unlikely to last. The Gulf states want something in return, and Egypt has little to give.

Russia-Ukraine

With less than 3 percent of its territory habitable, most of Egypt’s 115 million citizens live along the Nile River, and that number grows about 2 million per year. Across the nation’s deserts, enormous amounts of food are imported. Last year, about 54 percent of all food was imported, up 14 percent from the previous year. Much of the nation’s crucial wheat supplies come from Russia and Ukraine, which are locked in a bitter and destructive conflict that prevents crops from being grown in the first place, let alone harvested and exported.

Sudan

The civil war in Sudan has increased the number of migrants in Egypt and strained the food supply further. According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, as of December 31, 2023, around 473,000 registered refugees were in Egypt; 207,833 were Sudanese.

Alessia Melcangi, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, said, “Egypt may be left with no alternative but to counter national security threats by intervening militarily or providing full support and backup to [the Sudanese Armed Forces], which carries the risk of a potential escalation of the conflict.”

Ethiopia

Sixty per cent of Egypt’s water from the Nile comes from Ethiopia. When Ethiopia tried to dam the river upstream in 1978, President Anwar Sadat threatened war: “We are not going to wait to die of thirst in Egypt. We’ll go to Ethiopia and die there instead.”

But now Ethiopia finished the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam in 2021 and has begun to fill it, which threatens Egyptians’ water supply and agriculture, as well as the capacity for filling Egypt’s own Aswan High Dam. This could cause an estimated $28 billion in lost agricultural output and force Egypt to spend its dwindling foreign currency reserves to import electricity.

Most Egyptian jobs are agricultural, and one in five Egyptians ages 20 to 24 are already unemployed. Large numbers of restless military-age youth in an unstable environment equates to an explosive compound that lacks only a spark.

Ethiopia, meanwhile, is drawing Sudan’s allegiances away from Egypt. With pressure building, the Egyptian regime is looking for options. Due south of Egypt and west of Ethiopia, it might have one.

The Horn of Africa

Ethiopia is landlocked and has been pushing for a port on the Red Sea. But it is struggling with its own pressures. The Tigray War in Ethiopia ended in late 2022, but not after two years of destruction and an estimated death toll of as many as 600,000 lives. And now Ethiopian and Eritrean troops are reportedly massing on their shared border. Some Eritrean troops remain in Ethiopian territory gained while fighting the war, and both forces are vying for the Afar people, which live on both sides of the border.

Another path from Ethiopia to the sea passes through Somalia. In return for a port on its coast, Ethiopia recognized Somaliland, a breakaway area that most of the rest of the world recognizes as Somalian. A conflict between Ethiopia and Somalia could break out, giving Egypt the opportunity to weaken or potentially topple the Ethiopian regime. (It allegedly already attempted to do so during the Tigray War.)

Hamas

When Hamas terrorists massacred Jews and other people living in Israel on October 7, the Egyptian regime tried to intervene as a peacemaker. In the months since, it has toughened its rhetoric against Israel. Why? Israel Defense Forces have invaded Gaza, and large numbers of Palestinians living there, including terrorists, could possibly cross the area’s southern border into Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. Egypt is so serious about blocking these people from entering that it has upgraded security in the Philadelphi Corridor, to the point of deploying approximately 40 tanks and armored personnel carriers.

Egyptian soldiers building wall after wall.

They want to make sure that a million Palestinians can’t cross the border once Israel launches its offensive against the city of Rafah pic.twitter.com/ar5Ix8rt7F

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) February 24, 2024

Satellite imagery shows Egypt is building another wall and a fortified military buffer zone in the path of the potential Gaza refugee influx. But this situation introduces another point of pressure and conflict—with Israel. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has stated that the corridor “must be in our hands. … It is clear that any other arrangement would not ensure the demilitarization that we seek.”

But this is a “red line” for Egypt’s Sisi, because if Israel controls the corridor, the possibility of blocking Palestinians from Egypt would be out of Egyptian hands.

Meanwhile, on December 9, the Yemen-based Houthi terrorist group began attacking ships in the Red Sea, causing many shipping companies to send their ships around Africa instead of through the Suez Canal. This week, a United Kingdom-flagged ship sank after being previously struck by Houthi missiles, another strike on another ship killed three crew members, and international undersea data cables were severed.

In a February 19 conference, Sisi reported that in January 2023, 2,155 vessels passed through the canal, generating $804 million. In January this year, only 1,362 passed through, generating $428 million. He said transit through the Red Sea “used to bring Egypt nearly $10 billion per year,” and despite the economic hit, Egypt “must continue to pay companies and partners.”