2017: 1500 Egyptians put on 'terrorist list' in Egypt!

Why would a super star footballer with an international reputation become on a terrorist list?

 Welcome to Egypt!

Mohamamd Abu Treka is one of the Egyptians who're recently put on a terrorist list.

January 17th, 2017:

In another attack on civil rights and liberties in Egypt, 1500 Egyptians were put on a terrorist list, most of them without any prior investigations and solely based on political foundation.

Among the names are Mohammad Morsi, the first civilian democratically elected president of Egypt as well as Mohamamd Abu Treka, one of the most popular Egyptian and Arab footballer and an icon for Al Ahly football team. 

The list has over 100 women, political prisoners, hundreds of youth, journalists, and Egyptians from all walks of life. There are also names of persons who are already dead. 

Some of these individuals have already been imprisoned for several years since the military coup ( over political charges), while the others who're outside will now face a serious threat of their rights being violated, assets being frozen, and passports taken away from them as well as several other restrictions on their travel, movement, and business in Egypt. 

Some of the individuals on the new terrorist list:

Samhy Mostafa is a journalist who's been in prison for 3 years and is serving a life sentence.

 Abu Bakr Mashali, a young Egyptian enginner who left Egypt after the military coup

 Hesham Gaffar, a leftist journalist and academic who's been in prison over political basis.

Sondos Asem, an Egyptian academic in Britain is one of the women who are put on the terrorist list recently and has received a death sentence. You can read her story here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-34721589 

Who is a terrorist in Egypt since 2013?

The Egyptian state's definition of who is a terrorist was really stretched since the July 3rd military coup in 2013. Since then it includes anybody who opposes or criticizes the Egyptian state/government. 

It's important for the western policy makers as well as any non-Egyptian reader and follower of the situation in Egypt to understand the motivations behind these decisions made by the Egyptian state. 

UPDATED: Extrajudicial killings of innocent civilians in Sinai

These are six of the ten young Egyptian citizens from Al Arish city in Sinai who were killed today by the Egyptian security forces after being kidnapped and disappeared for several months.

In this photo are Abdel Atty, Bilal, Ahmed, Muhammad, Ahmed, and Mansour. All ten were between the ages of 18 and 27!

The official Egyptian government statements and their subservient media accused the ten young men of being Takfiri terrorists. The young men were mostly students, taxi drivers, and poor unemployed folks - your average people from Sinai. 

We couldn't find any English coverage for the story but the Egyptian Facebook feeds are flooding with accounts from families, supporters, and citizen journalists reports in Arabic only. We are trying to shed some light over the continuity of human rights violations against innocent Egyptians in Sinai.

The Egyptian security forces killed Ahmed Yusuf Muhammad Rasheed and nine other young men today in Sinai.

Ahmed was married three months ago. As the Egyptian security forces kidnapped him from his apartment, they kicked his pregnant wife in the stomach, killing her child.

Now she has not only lost her child because of the Egyptian military, but she has lost her husband as well.

Mohammad Ibrahim Ayyub was 22 years old. He was a taxi driver in Al Arish in Sinai. He was disappeared for two months and was among the victims of the Egyptian security forces today.

Bilal Al Naggar, a student who lived in Beer Al Abd in Sinai, was also disappeared for two months and was killed today in the same case.

The families of the 10 young Egyptian men who were kidnapped and then killed today by the Egyptian security forces in Al Arish Sinai after being falsely accused of terrorism. The Egyptian state is covering up on its failure to maintain security on the peninsula by arresting, kidnapping, and killing innocent Egyptians.

UPDATE 1/15/2017:
In response to these extrajudicial killings the community in Al Arish gathered to plan their response:

As we reported, there is almost no English media speaking about these young men, their families, and their millions of Egyptian supporters in English. The only other fair portrayal of events is from Al Jazeera:
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/01/sinai-residents-accuse-state-extrajudicial-killings-170115201441920.html

Today there are thousands of people out in the streets of Al Areesh, Sinai, holding funeral prayers for the young men and protesting against the continued killing of innocent Egyptians by the Egyptian military, all in the name of the War on Terror.

We have photos and video of these protests below:

In the below video protesters are calling for justice, and saying that the young men did not die in vain:

Zainab Al Mahdy: When trauma and revolution kill

This story resonates so much with whatever happened to the Egyptian movement.
I see myself so much in her. I see reflections of my past and present in her.

Her name was Zainab Al Mahdy. Her angelic face looks like so many Egyptian and Muslim young women from the Arab world, but not the ones you see in the media.

Her friends said that she suffered from sever depression and fear due to working for the years post the revolution on female political prisoners cases and reading horrific accounts on what's taking place in the Egyptian prisons specifically the torture, sexual assault, and rape cases against Egyptian female prisoners. 

Zainab Al Mahdy, a young Egyptian revolutionary was found hanged in her apartment in Cairo today (November 2014). She is a survivor of the Rabaa massacre and had done a great effort in establishing all the grassroots work around the post-coup female political detainees that we benefited from. I just found out that Zainab and I have so many mutual friends in common and her death caused quite a stir in the movement here. 

Zainab who looks like many of us went from being a socially and politically active organizer from before 2011 to being a neglected/isolated suicidal depression and PTSD victim in post-coup Egypt, dealing with spiritual/mental confusion and disillusionment on her own, and with very little hope left for bettering this situation, and this is where she ended. 

That's what militarism has been doing here in Egypt in addition to killing and imprisoning, this is not the first case but it's quite shocking given how ordinary Zainab was.

#Jan25 youth committing suicide in apartments and prison cells or living as Zombies half alive half dead as the 4th anniversary approaches is quite a transition now. 

This is her last message to one of our friends before she deactivated her Facebook and stopped doing the work she was doing:

"I'm tired. I'm wasted. There is no use in all of that. It's like we are digging in water. We won't get anybody's right through any laws here, but we are doing what we ought to do. Just saying a word of justice to save our faces and not spit on it when we look at the mirror. 
There is no justice here. And I'm fully aware of this. There is no victory coming.
But we are just fooling ourselves to continue to live"."

Ordinary youth like myself are being killed by police violence in 2010.
Ordinary youth like myself are being imprisoned in 2011. 
Ordinary youth like myself are being killed, imprisoned, and exiled in 2013.
Ordinary youth like myself are committing suicide in 2014. 

Zainab’s end was both a slap on the face and a wake up call. Zainab was too sensitive, innocent, and fragile for all what she had to deal with at this age, at this historical moment, and in this society, where young women and women in general have to fight to survive without expecting too much support. This is happening on a large scale to many young people and young women her age in countries like ours. 

The revolution-or what used to be so- has killed and continues to kill its own children in so many ways besides the police and army's bullets. Things like depression, PTSD, lose of hope, extreme unbearable psychological and emotional stress, and other issues are among the ways young Egyptians are losing their lives-literally. 

Unfortunately, there's very little that has been done to deal with the consequences of the movement on an emotional and psychological levels. People in Egypt either don't have awareness or knowledge of these things, or if they do know, they don't give it enough consideration. 

At the same time, I also believe people in Egypt don't have the privilege or the choice to be taking care of their inner well-being considering the overwhelming amount of tragic events they have to continue to deal with on a regular basis.

5 years is quite a long time, and these 5 years were especially long.

So many youth including myself went through dramatic spiritual and intellectual shifts, and they don't feel very supported or encouraged. I think people need to stick to one another very firmly and stop being judgmental about how their friends and family members might be going through. 

Zainab's story needs to be read and shared. 


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Zainab giving a lecture in 2012 about the definition of "Theocracy" and "The Theocratic State" as a part of a political educational initiative inside Sultan Hassan mosque, Cairo. May her soul rest in peace.