"The environment is not good for dialogue or initiatives," he adds despondently. He has returned to being a university professor and only sees his political counterparts during periodic meetings with diplomats. "If you have most of the leaders in jail how can the party function? At the moment there is no point bringing people together."ĭarrag, once a central player in the Morsy administration, says he now has no contact with most of his colleagues, who are either hiding or in jail. "As an organization, I don’t think is functioning," admits Amr Darrag, a former minister under Morsy and one of the few Brotherhood leaders not on the run.
The hunted 2013 tv#
Four TV stations seen as sympathetic to the Brotherhood were also shut down this week, a state-run newspaper reported that the government would dissolve the Brotherhood’s registered non-governmental organization. Hundreds of leaders are now behind bars, including Supreme Guide Mohamed Badie and Mohammed al-Beltagy, the head of the movement’s Freedom and Justice Party. A number of police stations across the country have come under fire, while some protesters have been caught on camera wielding guns and swords.Ī wave of arrests of top Brotherhood officials has left the famously hierarchical organization without a functioning leadership. Egypt’s interior minister was the target of an assassination attempt on Thursday, Sept.
The Friday protests are now just hundreds or thousands strong, and demonstrations are frequently cancelled as security forces block off access to key roads and squares.īut even as the mass demonstrations shrink, there is increasing evidence that some individuals are turning to violence. 14, at the cost of hundreds of lives, the crowds that have protested the military-backed government have become dramatically smaller. Since the movement’s two Cairo sit-ins were violently dispersed on Aug. Though Fathy and young activists like him are determined to press on, there is no doubt that the crackdown has been successful at breaking the Brotherhood’s vaunted ability to organize street protests. He adds that she checks in with him every couple of hours, to make sure that he’s safe. In the middle of our conversation, his wife calls in a panic: "She saw me on TV and hadn’t heard from me in half an hour, and so was calling to make sure I hadn’t been taken," he explains. The hit that doesn’t kill you makes you stronger."įathy’s tone may be defiant, but those closest to him fear for his safety. "If someone gets arrested, you’ll find others replacing him. "We are not going to accept negotiation unless it’s about getting back our president and constitution," he says. But he pledges to continue his activism until the bitter end. It’s dangerous work: He has had to change his mobile number and email address frequently to evade the domestic intelligence agents that he believes are monitoring his communications.
The hunted 2013 series#
He worries that if he returns home, he will become the latest victim of the most sweeping crackdown on the Islamist movement in almost a half-century.įathy had just been speaking in a downtown Cairo press conference that announced a series of fresh protests in support of ousted President Mohamed Morsy. CAIRO - For the last two weeks, Islam Fathy, a 27-year-old member of the Muslim Brotherhood youth, has been sleeping in a different house each night.