In the summer of 2013, Muslim Brotherhood members and supporters occupied Rabaa Square, eastern the capital city of Cairo to protest the removal of Morsi from power. The international media used the term “Rabaa Strike” as a reference to the gathering, which continued for 40+ days.
Around the 30th day on strike, news spread about weapons being smuggled into the strike and militias of Mojahdeen being recruited to use those weapons and train other protesters on using them. MB leaders, hiding inside the strike camp, told the media that they have no weapons and the strike is entirely peaceful.
Therefore, a delegation composed of eighteen representatives from local human rights organizations was formed to check the facts about whether there are weapons inside the strike. After taking the permission of MB leaders, the delegation went on a visit to Rabaa Strike camp on the first of August, i.e. only 13 days before the evacuation of the strike by police forces.
Ironically, the managers of the strike, namely Ahmed Elmoghier and Abdel Rahman Ezz, prevented the human rights delegation from entering the strike camp. They physically attacked members of the human rights delegation and forced them to leave before seeing anything! As a result, the issue about the existence of weapons in Rabaa Strike remained a matter of controversy.
Some of us, local human rights activists, who monitored the evacuation of the Rabaa Strike by police forces on August 14th, reported that there were several kinds of weapons and bombs in the strike. I saw them with my own eyes. As an eyewitness, I confirm that the evacuation of the strike was not a massacre against unarmed civilians, as some international media claims. It was a guerrilla war between illegitimate armed militias and the police forces, who were doing their job of protecting law and order.
The first person to fall dead on that bloody morning was not one of the strikers, but the young policeman who held a microphone asking the protesters to leave strike camp through the opened safe exits. Other 62 policemen were killed by direct shots in the head and chest during the day. For sure, they did not kill themselves! They were killed by the armed militias inside the strike. Those militias also led to the death of so many innocent mind-washed strikers, whom they used as human shields to confuse the policemen.
In spite of the aforementioned facts, renowned media outlets and well-known international human rights organizations (e.g. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International) promoted the big lie about being it a peaceful strike and that the police forces committed a massacre against innocent helpless and unarmed strikers. Even the White House in the US issued a statement calling the Muslim Brotherhood a “non-violent” political group. Ironically, neither Human Rights Watch nor Amnesty International had representatives or researchers monitoring the evacuation or even the strike.
On the third anniversary of that horrible day, this week, Ahmed Elmoghier, who once prevented human rights delegation from checking on weapons at the strike as I mentioned above in full details, made some shocking confessions on his Facebook page. He told the full story of how they armed the protesters in Rabea and trained them to form militias. He was there; he was one of the two managers of the strike. His confessions are non-negotiable.
Why did Elmoghier decide to make such a confession? Why reveal this shocking piece of truth about the weapons at Rabaa Strike? Why now? These are the questions that I have been trying to investigate, over the past week. I found out that Elmoghier's confessions are loaded by three main messages and objectives, as follows:
1. He tried to make a statement to the defeated affiliates and sympathizers about the skills of his MB generation.
By speaking about the glories of his militias in Rabaa, Elmoghier wanted to push away the many fingers inside the group pointing at the face of his generation. They accuse the current MB youth of being too weak to keep the legacy of the 80 years-old group.
Since it was formed in 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood followed the strategy of building small and widespread militias by recruiting teens with high religious piety and potential to respond to the group’s mind-washing programs. As they grow older and stronger, they form their own secret brigades and wait to be called on by MB leaders to implement some “holly” mission.
Those militias have been extremely weakened after the fall of the MB regime and the evacuation of the armed strike of Rabaa in 2013. They almost disappeared. One reason for their weakening is the inability of older MB leaders, either in prison or fleeing abroad, to continue funding the arming and training of young militias. Another reason is the inability of militia managers to communicate with their younger fellows, as most of them have been arrested while committing violent crimes, over the past two years, and many of them have traveled to join forces with ISIS in Syria and Hamas in Gaza.
2. He wanted to blackmail the leaders of the group, who long neglected him and his colleagues after fleeing Egypt.
The old leaders of the MB group, who made their way out of Egypt, got too busy with their own problems, to the extent that they totally forgot about Elmoghier and his colleagues in Egypt. There are strong conflicts among the old MB leaders, for more than a year now, over the leadership of the group and the decision-making process. The time-zone differences made proper communication among MB leaders, and between the leaders and younger members in Egypt, almost impossible. That magnified the feelings of disappointment among young MBs.
In that sense, Elmoghier’s confessions could be seen as a shout for attention; a rebellious message to those divided leaders, showing them that the young MBs are still an important factor in the equation. They still can make or break the international image of the group, with a single post on Facebook.
3. He wanted to give a message to regional terrorist organizations and their funders that the Muslim Brotherhood can join forces with them.
Egyptian military has been engaged in a brutal war with terrorist organizations in Sinai, including MB’s associate group of Hamas. Despite the running war, those terrorist groups can hardly stop or affect the economic development and political progress happening today in Egypt. That is because they do not have access to critical political and economic spots at the capital city of Cairo, or along the Nile Valley, where most citizens actually live a normal life.
The failure of terrorists to attack the central cities is the reason why Egypt has not been destructed as the case is in Syria, Yemen, or Libya. The one and only terrorist group with the ability to practice violence inside Cairo and governorates along the Nile Valley is the Muslim Brotherhood.
By openly bragging about the skilled militias of young MBs, Elmoghier is somewhat knocking the doors of regional terrorist organizations, whom are daydreaming committing attacks in the heart of Egypt. He wants to show them that the young MBs can do the job on behalf of them and, thus, get the funds he needs to revive and re-organize those militias.
Last, I wonder how media outlets and so-called human rights organizations, which defended the terrorist group of the Muslim Brotherhood for years, see Elmoghier’s confessions. How can they deal with the shame of spreading and supporting the lies of a terrorist organization? After these confessions, would they continue to support the terrorist group of the Muslim Brotherhood?