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Egypt is facing what is shaping up to be the deadliest and most complex insurgency in its modern history. The military-backed ouster of Mohamed Morsi from the presidency in July 2013 fragmented Egypt’s Islamist landscape and set the stage for an unpredictable struggle between Islamists and the Egyptian state. In this environment, some Islamists, specifically the youth, have turned to violence, and the trend could continue. The pro-Brotherhood nonjihadi violent groups these youth have founded could evolve into an armed jihadi rebellion. There are steps, however, that the government and the Muslim Brotherhood can take to head off this long-term insurgency in the making.

Fragmentation and Violence on the Rise

• The state crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s largest Islamist group, in addition to divisions within the organization have weakened the Brotherhood leadership and have paved the way for its loss of control over a growing number of members.
   
• Various Salafists, ultraconservative Islamists, have rallied around the Brotherhood, framing the struggle with the regime as one between a secular state and Islam.
   
• Two increasingly distinct Brotherhood factions have emerged. One embraces confrontational tactics and violence while the other emphasizes nonviolence. In reality, however, many leaders tolerate escalating levels of violence, stopping short of endorsing murder.
   
• Brotherhood and Salafi radicals justify political violence as a legitimate tool of protest and encourage youth to adopt violence under the guise of self-defense, religiously justified retribution, and defending Islam.
   
• Nonjihadi violent groups mainly composed of Islamist youth began to rely on anarchic violence starting in late 2013. Two years later, these groups have not only persisted but have also grown more sophisticated, conducting armed ambushes and improvised-explosive-device attacks against security forces.
   
• Jihadi groups tirelessly attempt to tap into brewing anger and to recruit Islamist youth for their budding insurgency.

Lessons for Egypt and the Brotherhood

• Disavowing torture, investigating allegations of sexual abuse, ending forced disappearances, and generally improving prison conditions are critical steps the government should take to ensure that radicals cannot exploit such conditions for recruitment.
   
• Understanding the new, fragmented landscape of violent Islamists is necessary to adequately formulate strategies to combat these actors and better “divide and conquer” disparate cells and groups.
   
• Pragmatic senior Brotherhood leaders must rein in radicals who incite violence to ready their base for the eventual need for a settlement with the state. The current trajectory is eroding the group from the inside and may spell the end of the organization as it has long been known.

A Fragmented and Violent Landscape

Following mass demonstrations against his rule on June 30, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically elected president, was ousted in a popularly backed military coup in July 2013 by then defense minister General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who would later become president. In retaliation for planned protests against Morsi, the Brotherhood and its supporters had established camps in two squares in Egypt’s capital that grew considerably following the coup, believing that a show of force would somehow reverse Morsi’s ouster or at least provide them with a better bargaining position. By August 2013, negotiations had collapsed, and the security forces moved in to violently clear the two Islamist camps, resulting in nearly 1,000 deaths in one day. In the ensuing months, tens of thousands of Islamists and Brotherhood members and their supporters were arrested, and the Brotherhood’s organizational capacity in Egypt nearly collapsed as a result, setting the stage for an unpredictable conflict.

The Brotherhood and the Egyptian government have both adopted a zero-sum approach, offering no realistic political way to end the impasse. Instead, the government’s harsh crackdown on the Brotherhood and Islamist incitement have helped breed a cycle of violence with no end in sight.

The core Brotherhood leadership is scattered across Egyptian prisons and world capitals, with factions competing over the best strategic course. The leadership is losing control over younger members, many of whom are itching for outright confrontation. These youth, with other radical Islamist opponents of the government, are shaping events on the ground with or without the blessing of the senior leadership. There are advocates of true nonviolence in the Brotherhood leadership, yet they remain committed to their zero-sum strategy, while many other leaders are on a slippery slope leading to the justification of an increased use of violence.

The potential result of current trends is the creation of a haven of popular support for violence and jihadism in the Arab world’s most populous country.

Other Islamists have stepped into the void created by the near-absence of pragmatic Brotherhood leadership. Antigovernment Salafists have framed the current struggle as a war against Islam, and some Brothers who wish to rally Salafi support have opportunistically used the same rhetoric, pushing angry and violent youth closer to Salafi jihadism. The potential result is the creation of a haven of popular support for violence and jihadism in the Arab world’s most populous country. Indeed, since July 2013, a number of new violent actors who do not subscribe to Salafi jihadism—including members of the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists that target the security forces and infrastructure—have emerged.

These groups are all part of Egypt’s changing insurgent landscape. It is made up of three broad categories: Sinai-based jihadists affiliated with the self-proclaimed Islamic State and with a limited operational presence in the mainland (the populous heartland of Egypt along the Nile valley), mainland-based Salafi jihadists who tend to be supporters of al-Qaeda or affiliated with al-Qaeda, and a new category of non-Salafi-jihadi groups made up of Islamist supporters and some members of the Muslim Brotherhood.

What distinguishes this last category is that its members fashion themselves as “revolutionaries” or “resistance fighters,” thus justifying the often-anarchic violence they deploy. Their objectives are also narrower than those of the jihadists, encompassing only retribution against security forces and toppling President Sisi's government in order to reinstate Islamist rule in Egypt.

These nonjihadi violent groups are often overlooked because they are made up of amateurs with no combat experience and have inflicted fewer losses than established jihadi groups. But their continued growth and resilience represents a significant challenge to Egypt’s security; they are embedded in their local populations along the Nile valley, a proximity that will compound the damage they can inflict if their numbers continue to increase. Furthermore, as such groups become more sophisticated, the likelihood of cooperation with established jihadi factions that can provide both training and weapons increases.

Jihadi groups, in turn, are actively seeking to connect with this deep reservoir of potential recruits and link up with their violent efforts in order to gain a foothold in the Egyptian mainland. If the jihadi groups succeed in establishing such a foothold by recruiting as-yet nonjihadi Islamists, the scenario of armed insurgency spreading to pockets of Islamist grievance in the mainland becomes increasingly likely.

The conclusions made here about the new insurgent dynamics in Egypt are drawn from dozens of interviews conducted with Brotherhood members and leaders, other Islamists, and Egyptian government officials from 2013 to 2015. To study the newly formed violent groups, the authors relied on tracking their social media activity and tabulating violent incidents and reported deaths to quantitatively analyze patterns that help shed light on the opaque current landscape.

The Precedent of Islamist Insurgency in Egypt

Islamist insurgency in Egypt is not unprecedented. A low-level jihadi insurgency against then president Hosni Mubarak played out in the 1980s and 1990s in the mainland along the Nile valley. Then, the government’s counterinsurgency efforts were complicated by the proximity of the violence to the major population centers and the fact that one of the major insurgent groups at the time had deep roots in Upper Egypt. It took the government more than a decade to put down the insurgency completely.

There is no guarantee that the government will achieve even that slow success this time, particularly in view of young Islamists’ strong grievances and the rapid spread of jihadi groups in the Middle East. Many Islamists have vowed revenge against the government for the harsh crackdown and the toppling of their rule.

Further complicating efforts to quell the insurgents, the levels of violence since 2013 and the diverse composition of the groups taking part are unprecedented in Egypt's modern history. Over the course of the thirteen most active years of the previous insurgency—from 1986 to 1999—an estimated minimum of 1,300 Egyptians lost their lives as a result of terrorist activity. Of those, approximately 391 were members of the security forces, 385 were civilians, and the rest were insurgents (see figure 1).¹ Although far fewer civilians have been killed at the hands of the jihadists in the current insurgency, the state killed nearly as many Islamist protesters during the camp dispersals of August 2013 as all Egyptians killed during the decade-long previous insurgency. And as of August 2015, jihadists and other violent actors had killed approximately 700 members of the police and armed forces in just two years,² nearly double the number of security personnel killed in the previous insurgency (see figure 2).

Data analysis shows that in the spring and early summer of 2014, the proportion of casualties in North Sinai dropped as other groups in the mainland rose to prominence. However, after the Sinai-based Ansar Beit al-Maqdis (ABM) jihadi group pledged allegiance to the Islamic State—and Islamic State training and funds were shared with the affiliate—North Sinai once again experienced the lion’s share of casualties.

Origin: The Muslim Brotherhood’s Loss of Control

The turn to violence by some members of the Muslim Brotherhood and the proliferation of nonjihadi violent groups can be explained in part by the Brotherhood’s loss of control over members and deep internal rifts over strategy in the wake of an unprecedented government crackdown. Today, various antigovernment Islamist actors form a fragmented Islamist opposition with no one leader or overarching strategy.

The Muslim Brotherhood remains the dominant antigovernment Islamist actor, and while its senior leaders have publicly decried the steady march toward armed rebellion, some of them have openly endorsed “creative nonviolence.”³ This innovation attempts to justify any violent actions that do not involve killing, but it represents a slippery slope at best and has understandably resulted in serious, damaging organizational rifts and strategic dissonance. The effect is that the Muslim Brotherhood, which previously stood as the model of—and drew its strength from—unquestioning loyalty and strict hierarchical discipline, finds itself increasingly marginalized as its established leadership loses control of a violent, rowdy new generation of so-called revolutionary Brothers cooperating with like-minded Islamist actors.

Internal rifts in the Brotherhood both caused and continue to foster a chaotic state of affairs. The group had to restructure to adapt to the government’s crackdown.⁴ It had to decentralize to allow for greater dynamism and to replace the crop of detained or exiled senior leaders. Over the last two years, a series of internal elections gradually granted new powers to junior leaders and members who were already in a position of strength due to their protests on the ground and occasional use of violence, many of whom also resented the old leadership’s ineffective strategies.

The internal conflict following this shift was foreshadowed in an interview with a senior leader in exile in mid-2014: “Those inside have complete freedom in decisionmaking without following orders from the outside . . . some of our base are now looking to what is more effective beyond protesting, especially to non-Brothers.” In the summer of 2015, the cumulative impact of these changes exploded into the open when a number of senior leaders tried to check the rising influence of a largely youthful faction armed with “revolutionary strategies.” This attempt ultimately translated into more internal rifts, and the division in the group has helped the revolutionary wing further assert its position and decry its adversaries in the senior leadership as out of touch and irrelevant.

Some of the leaders in the revolutionary camp argue not only that retribution against the police and the army is justified as a tactic but also that the possibility of an armed insurgency is unavoidable if the current regime stays in power. To them this justifies a strategy of “managing and containing” radical elements as opposed to ostracizing them. But in reality this has meant not seriously challenging radicals’ positions head-on. As the strategy stands, it is more a policy of reckless appeasement than of smart containment.

The senior leadership may be seen by outsiders as more pragmatic, but only slightly. The real sin in the eyes of the revolutionary faction is that senior leaders continue to focus on street protests with little change in tactics, while hoping for some kind of deus ex machina (like a countercoup) to rid them of Sisi. They refuse to accept the political reality and exonerate themselves from any blame for the turn to violence—seeing no link between their zero-sum politics and the continued escalation.

At least initially, most Islamist youth who embraced violence did so as a means of exacting revenge against the state.

What has further exposed the Brotherhood to rifts is the leadership’s early decision to operate under the guise of the National Coalition to Support Legitimacy (NCSL), an ambitious but weak coalition of smaller Islamist factions that later broke down. This coalition building started before the July 2013 coup as hardline Salafists were on the front lines defending Morsi’s regime. The sit-in at Rabaa al-Adawiya Square, set up on June 28, was in fact a preemptive protest camp to demonstrate the Islamists’ strength before mass protests on June 30 and Morsi’s ouster on July 3. The Salafists helped rile up the crowds at the protest camps with incendiary, sectarian, and uncompromising rhetoric. The decision to align with these factions had the unintended consequence of granting outsiders the power to lead and speak for the Brotherhood’s base at a very critical moment.⁵ Many of these Salafists have long held more radical views than the more mainstream Brotherhood, and they have helped strengthen the hand of the Brotherhood’s revolutionary faction as they both seek confrontation.

The Radicalization of Islamist Youth

At least initially, most Islamist youth who embraced violence did so as a means of exacting revenge against the state for the deaths of Islamist protesters in Rabaa Square and other areas in the months following Morsi’s ouster rather than as a result of an overnight conversion to Salafi jihadism or bitterness over the loss of Morsi. While Human Rights Watch reported the number of deaths in Rabaa to have been around 1,000,⁶ some Islamists have inflated the figure to between 2,500 and 5,000 or even more.⁷ Islamists recount the details of that day with a focus on the most gruesome aspects, such as charred bodies and gaping bullet wounds. These perceptions, as well as the fact that tens of thousands of Islamists were detained in the months after the coup and held in terrible prison conditions, have left thousands of families angry at the government.

Some of those wishing for what they perceived as justified revenge against security forces began to organize on social media sites, hoping their nonideological approach would reach a broader audience. Groups like the Molotov and Wala (Arabic for “set fire”) movements launched their mission of chaos and revenge with activities like setting police cars on fire.⁸ They encouraged others to do the same, with the clarification that any target without a “soul” was permissible: police cars and stations, and officers’ private property, were considered fair game. But predictably, this rang hollow. Some of these groups took credit for killing people they claimed were thugs hired by the regime early in 2014 and attacked businesses they alleged were helping these thugs.

Egyptian university campuses were the incubators for this type of revenge violence. As other avenues of protest were closed off following the regime’s 2013 crackdown, Islamist students and their supporters started antigovernment protests on campuses. The authorities responded with greater violence,⁹ and soon university protests were a near-daily occurrence. Out of political expediency, the Brotherhood instigated and supported this campus action. The youth were encouraged to hold their ground and were lionized for their steadfast resistance to the authorities.

Young Islamist women also joined the protests, instigating sit-ins and sometimes starting riots. Many were arrested, and inflammatory images of young girls in hijabs and niqabs being manhandled soon spread online. Subsequent accusations of sexual abuse helped fuel the violence as male students were further motivated to fight for what they believed to be the honor of their female classmates.

According to a rights group tracking student casualties, police across Egypt killed 191 students and arrested 1,671 from July 3, 2013, to April 25, 2014.¹⁰ Nearly 84 percent of deaths were of students enrolled in campuses in greater Cairo, 39 percent of which were students in the religious al-Azhar University, the university with the most active protests during the 2013–2014 school year. The 2014–2015 school year started with a rash of violence, with students rioting against a private security firm hired by the government to police campuses.¹¹ However, campus activism soon died down as the proliferation of new groups once more made the streets the epicenter of protests.

Nonjihadi Violent Groups and Brotherhood Violence

As violence on university campuses escalated in the fall of 2013 and spring of 2014 following the mass killing at Rabaa, groups of Brotherhood members and their supporters were ramping up the operations of new anarchic groups. The new violent activists learned from experiences elsewhere and employed tactics garnered from online literature on violent resistance. The Molotov Movement, for instance, was clearly influenced by the tactics of militant Shia youth groups in Bahrain. The young Bahrainis’ impressive videos of mobbing security forces with barrages of Molotov cocktails were widely shared and studied.¹² In January 2014, the online activity of Egyptian pro-violence activists increased; they began sharing documents such as an instructional paper titled “Organizing Resistance,” which gave clear instructions on how to form clandestine networks and how to use Molotov cocktails and other homemade devices as weapons.¹³

Soon there were “martyr brigades” with the aim of escalating the violence to armed operations against officers. A group calling itself the Execution Movement vowed to target police officers and thugs suspected of killing protesters or sexually assaulting female prisoners. According to one young Islamist interviewed, groups such as the Execution Movement began killing thugs as previously indicated and burning government property. Another young Islamist, who is a former Muslim Brother and an advocate of violent insurgency, explained that the groups justified the targeting of officers as a way to deter the police from the most abusive forms of torture against Islamist detainees. They believed that the most hardline of jihadists received relatively better treatment in prison due to the fear of retribution.

Violent groups were at first largely unorganized and believed to be a transient phenomenon. The reality is that they have not only persisted but also grown more sophisticated.

These violent groups were at first largely unorganized and believed to be a transient phenomenon. The reality is that they have not only persisted but also grown more sophisticated. As the prevalence of these groups increased, so did the involvement of some Brotherhood leaders and members in violence. Interviews with Brotherhood members and even midlevel leaders indicated that youth members began resorting to violence in late 2013 to early 2014. At first, they carried firearms to protect their demonstrations against police dispersal and thugs allegedly hired by the regime^,14 but this appears to have escalated into active violence on the one-year anniversaries of Morsi’s ouster and the massacre in Rabaa, when several small bombs went off around the country. There is currently little doubt among those familiar with the conflict that some Brotherhood members played a part in these attacks and other attacks on infrastructure, though whether they were acting on their own or with instructions from the senior leadership is unclear.

As the leadership of the organization does not officially sanction armed resistance, it is difficult to assess the extent of the Brotherhood’s involvement in violent acts. The Ministry of Interior alleges that Brotherhood members have been responsible for destroying electric lines and similar attacks, but the affiliations of the perpetrators of numerous other attacks that the ministry alleges were carried out by Brotherhood members cannot be definitively identified. The ministry alleges, however, that all nonjihadi violent groups are simply cells created by the Brotherhood. Although there is no hard evidence of this, and it is unlikely that there will ever be proof of a clandestine directive, the reality on the ground indicates that the leadership is either unwilling or unable to stop members from engaging in acts of violence, like using small explosives against infrastructure or collaborating with violent groups that were not necessarily formed with the Brotherhood’s blessing or approval.

The attacks allegedly committed by Brotherhood members have also included targeting less-guarded police installations and courts with so-called sound bombs, which are nonlethal and cheap to make but have the effect of keeping police on edge and locals feeling unsafe.¹⁵ Another method of attack has been arson targeting infrastructure. While the attacks themselves do not bring the government closer to collapse, they send a message of resistance and disrupt daily life. The perpetrators believe that the government and police officers are collectively guilty of murder or other abuses and that their attacks are therefore justified.

Though the ministry’s allegations are difficult to prove, one incident that more clearly pointed to Brotherhood involvement occurred in July 2014, when at least four Brotherhood-affiliated men died when small explosives accidentally detonated at a farm in Fayyoum Governorate where they were being stored by a local Brotherhood leader, Ahmad Arafa Abdel Qader.¹⁶ That same month, a small explosive device targeting a train car killed a child in Alexandria. The suspects, shocked by the unexpected result, gave a specific confession noting that at least one of them was a member of a Brotherhood usra (family), the basic local unit of the organization.¹⁷

Much of the violence perpetrated by these Brotherhood-aligned groups falls within the definition of so-called creative or defensive nonviolence.

Much of the violence perpetrated by these Brotherhood-aligned groups falls within the definition of so-called creative or defensive nonviolence. Brotherhood leader Ashraf Abdel Ghafar said in a television interview that there are “levels of nonviolence,” and targeting infrastructure can be considered part of one of those levels.¹⁸ Another Brotherhood leader admitted that Islamist youth do indeed target officers, but only “the major criminals,” and clarified that he counsels patience instead.¹⁹ Even if the Brotherhood does decide to embrace violent action, it will never declare so publicly, and the history of the group shows its preference for clandestine operations and violence by proxy.²⁰

An ironfisted campaign by authorities initially helped curb violence by these new nonjihadi actors. When Islamist activists protested on January 25, 2014, the third anniversary of the revolution, by burning dozens of police cars and engaging in other acts of sabotage, many of them were killed. As participants had released a great deal of identifying information on social media websites, police were able to track and arrest activists who had escaped initial arrest. Many of them were sent to secret prisons in which suspects were held and tortured.²¹ An Islamist activist who had been involved in these nonjihadi violent groups and was arrested confirmed that the arrests and systemic torture did temporarily curtail antigovernment violence. He said, “The torture inside prisons is horrific; some tell on their colleagues as a result of the torture.” Though this deterred activists for a short time, new groups have emerged that more openly encourage violent action and armed resistance. The data support that this violence has happened and will likely continue to come in waves, with periods of intense activity and others of dormancy as security forces gain the upper hand.

The Evolution of Non-Salafi-Jihadi Violent Groups

In August 2014, coinciding with the first anniversary of the Rabaa dispersal, a new crop of more brazenly violent groups emerged in the mainland. The anarchists throwing Molotov cocktails had evolved into distinct groups urging armed resistance, the first of which was the Popular Resistance Movement. The group’s slick website showed videos of improvised-explosive-device (IED) attacks targeting police stations and claimed credit for police assassinations.²² Some of the core members were arrested, but the group persisted, and existing lone-wolf-type groups across the mainland adopted the name and found a new sense of purpose in the message of armed resistance.

Some Brotherhood and Islamist youth have indicated their desire to form local Popular Resistance groups to put pressure on the Muslim Brotherhood to “reform itself to become a resistance movement,” as one interviewee put it. A Brotherhood youth leader explained the “difficulties facing anti-coup forces in executing this plan of Popular Resistance groups. The most important of which is protecting these groups from state infiltration as well as ensuring their administrative and ideological cohesion. . . . [Such steps are necessary to increase] the ability of the groups to put forward a serious plan to subjugate the state apparatuses and possibly collaborate with leftist groups [to achieve this]. The other challenge is financing these groups, and finally the extent to which the Brotherhood . . . will support this revolutionary body.”

Around the same time, the Helwan Brigades, another armed group, briefly popped up. The group itself may have failed to deliver much of a blow if any to the government, but it provided the first clear example of the possession of sophisticated weapons when it posted a short video online of ordinary young men from the Helwan neighborhood, who spoke simple Arabic and did not appear to be hardened criminals or jihadists, dressed in all-black and ski masks brandishing assault rifles. Many observers dismissed the video due to its amateur nature, but it was precisely the fact that amateurs were starting to carry rifles that should have been worrying. Islamist activists from Helwan said that it was not surprising that such weapons would show up in the area, a mainly working-class region that has seen an increasingly tense relationship develop between police and local antigovernment Islamists.

The newest of the groups is also the deadliest thus far: the Revolutionary Punishment group, which announced its existence in January 2015 to coincide with the fourth anniversary of the January 2011 revolution. This is a common theme among these groups as they attempt to present themselves as extensions of the popular 2011 revolution to further legitimize their actions. The first operation by the group was a drive-by shooting that signaled its embrace of machine guns. As of September 2015, the group had carried out about 150 attacks across sixteen governorates. It claims to have killed at least 157 security forces, although this could not be independently verified.²³ The attacks have ranged from planting IEDs targeting infrastructure and police convoys, to conducting armed ambushes of police checkpoints, to assassinating top police officers. The group has also claimed credit for the execution of at least two alleged informants and the bombing of the home of former mufti and prominent pro-government preacher Ali Gomaa in Fayyoum Governorate. Although the group continues to refrain from adopting overt Islamist discourse, one of its videos showcasing the execution of one of the alleged informants had jihadi nasheeds (hymns) in the background and an editing style obviously inspired by Islamic State execution videos. Revolutionary Punishment is also the most highly organized among the new mainland-based groups and has meticulously recorded every attack it has carried out, signaling the possibility of a central command and, more importantly, access to a logistical network and financing.

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