CAIRO: When President Mohammed Mursi swept aside the ageing commanders of Egypt’s military a year ago and named a soft-spoken, deeply religious younger general to head the armed forces, it was a demonstration that the military was now subordinate to Egypt’s first freely elected leader.
Fast forward one year, and now it is the general, Abdel Fattah Al Sisi, who sweeped aside the president. At the time of his appointment last August, the choice of Sisi, 58, seemed to suit both Mursi and the younger generation of army commanders seeking promotion after years under older generals, like 78-year-old Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi, Mubarak’s defence minister for two decades.
The army had produced the autocrats that had ruled Egypt for the previous 60 years. It had run the country itself during the tumultuous 16 months after the revolution that toppled the last general to serve as president, Hosni Mubarak. And it had seemed reluctant to hand power to Mursi until the new president briskly dispatched Tantawi and a host of other commanders into retirement.
Egyptians wanted their soldiers back in barracks, and the charismatic, chisel-jawed Sisi spoke like a man who would keep them there. Over the course of the next year, Sisi warned of unrest and political divisions, but repeatedly held firm in asserting that the army should not return to politics.
“The armed forces’ loyalty is to the people and the nation,” Sisi said in November when Mursi’s supporters and opponents clashed on the streets over plans to introduce a new constitution. Sisi finally ditched his refusal to pick sides on Monday, announcing a dramatic ultimatum that gave Mursi, the man who had chosen him, just 48 hours to agree on a power-sharing deal with his rivals.
A career military man, Sisi was groomed for a leadership role after serving in top roles in the command, intelligence and diplomatic branches of the armed forces. Among his previous postings were a stint as defence attache in Riyadh, and command positions in the Sinai Peninsula which borders Israel and in the Northern Military Region which includes the second city of Alexandria.
In a military known for its secularism, Sisi is a devout Muslim, whose wife is said to wear the niqab full-body covering. And after a year at the U.S. Army War College in Pennsylvania in 2005-2006, he was comfortable with the United States, which funds Egypt’s military with $1.3bn a year.
Sisi has carefully nurtured public support for the army in recent days, sending aircraft to drop thousands of Egyptian flags on crowds of cheering protesters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square.
Egyptian military sources say Mursi’s call last month for foreign intervention in Syria was a turning point. Mursi’s Brotherhood went further, backing calls for holy war, rhetoric that alarmed a military that had spent decades hunting down radical militants.
Reuters
