Sisi’s Regime: An Insatiable Ghoul

Statement by the Revolutionary Socialists

Arbitrary arrests, relentless torture, indefinite pretrial detention, and courts that have lost their way to justice—alongside hundreds of death sentences that either claim or threaten the lives of opposition figures—all without the regime so much as blinking. Meanwhile, its leader roams the world, boasting of achievements visible only to himself, accompanied by his media entourage, hoping their voices will overpower the opposition and the millions of Egyptians deprived of bread, freedom, social justice, and human dignity.

But the regime’s arsenal of repression extends far beyond these crimes. Since June 30, the country has witnessed an alarming rise in cases of enforced disappearance. Families, exhausted from searching government offices and pleading with officials, have spent months—sometimes years—looking for their abducted sons, husbands, fathers, and friends, taken from their homes, workplaces, or even the streets. The outcry has become deafening, making it clear that these are no longer isolated incidents but rather a systematic and widespread practice.

A cowardly crime committed by a cowardly regime. Not content with the darkness of prisons and state security facilities, the regime now seeks even more privacy to break bodies and crush souls—ensuring that no news escapes about the whereabouts of the forcibly disappeared. Young men are kidnapped by security forces, only to reappear years later, some with long beards, their bodies scarred by torture—electric shocks, brutal beatings, and abuses even more horrific than what is known. By then, the torture machine has already extracted the “confessions” it seeks, sending victims off to trial and, in many cases, to the gallows.

As usual, the Interior Ministry’s spokesperson denies the existence of any forcibly disappeared individuals. He goes even further, insisting that there are no political detainees in Egypt at all—so much so that one might expect his next move to be denying the existence of prisons altogether.

Yet, some of the disappeared do resurface—not in their homes, but in the very institutions that have become the state’s three main instruments of violence: prosecution offices, courts, police stations, and prisons. From them, we hear the names of those still left behind in Lazoghly. At this notorious state security headquarters in 2011, revolutionaries tore down its sign in defiance of the deep state’s terror. Others remain in Azouli, the secret military prison in Ismailia, or scattered across state security branches in every province.

However, these arms of oppression are not equal in brutality. The most ruthless and dominant of them is State Security, which does not stop at abductions or fabricating charges. In rare cases where the prosecution grants detainees release, security forces abduct them again—crushing any hope of freedom by subjecting them to torture further, extracting new “confessions,” and fabricating fresh charges while they remain behind bars.

The counter-revolutionary regime has succeeded in turning the country into a nation of cries—cries of hardship, cries of grief for the dead, cries of fear for the tortured, and cries of despair for the disappeared. These cries far exceed the voices that mourned Khaled Said in June 2010. Soon, they will merge into one unified roar, rising once again from the same streets and squares that revolted in 2011 before falling silent under the brutal crackdown of the counter-revolution.

A regime that flaunts its security might against all opposition is merely exposing its weakness—its fear of even the faintest dissent. A government incapable of meeting even the most basic needs of people experiencing poverty has nothing left but repression, persecution, and the silencing of all who expose its failures. But the past two years have proven that the opposition, once weak against the counter-revolution, is growing stronger. The illusions the regime once sold to the masses no longer hold, with deserted ballot boxes as evidence of its failure.

Between the counter-revolution’s failure to deceive the people and its failure to meet their demands, the revolutionary opposition rises once more—to return to the streets the chants of Bread, Freedom, and Human Dignity.