Egyptians and foreign observers were surprised as news emerged this week of a reshuffle in the leadership of the country’s powerful General Intelligence Service (GIS). 

President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the autocrat who has ruled with an iron fist since he led a coup in 2013 against Egypt’s first democratically elected president, removed Major General Abbas Kamel from his post as GIS director and appointed him as a presidential special envoy, and coordinator of security services. 

While the motives and timing for this decision remain unclear, this is not necessarily a demotion, contrary to conspiracy theories that have arisen on social media. Rather, it is an institutionalization of two roles Kamel has been playing for a long time. 

Kamel, a former military intelligence officer, headed a department that handles foreign military attaches before becoming Sisi’s right-hand man and office director. Since then, he has become known as “Sisi’s shadow” and the president’s “special envoy”.

Kamel has long been a yes-man who is “always ready to serve Sisi loyally without questioning the wisdom of his orders,” said Hisham Kassem, a prominent Egyptian liberal pundit. “These are the only qualifications of Abbas Kamel. This is why he has been the only one to remain by Sisi’s side all along. He has been Sisi’s mastermind/facilitator.”

Kamel was given the GIS directorship in 2018, aiming to put the house in order after a flood of leaks filled the dissident and international media about Sisi and his generals, in what were likely the actions of disgruntled GIS officials. 

The modern Egyptian security sector was fragmented to coup-proof the regime, after an eclectic group of nationalist army officers seized power in July 1952, overthrowing the British-backed monarchy. The dominant perceived threat of successive rulers has always been a military coup. This meant the GIS, police and military were in competition, with overlapping mandates, and hardly shared information.

Chief enemy of the state

Before 2011, Egyptian rulers and their security services “never thought a revolution could happen”, said historian Khaled Fahmy. “They thought some disturbances could occur every now and then, but not a revolution. The state’s view has always been that the people don’t have agency, which is also a colonial outlook.”

The 2011 uprising, to the horror of Egypt’s generals, showed the people were the chief enemy of the state – and for the first time since 1952, the dominant perceived threat became popular unrest. This meant Sisi had to work on unifying the security sector, fostering cooperation and information-sharing after 2013.

An unofficial body has overseen this coordination, dubbed al-Khaliyya (the Cell) or al-Lajna al-Amniyya (the Security Committee). 

Kamel’s new appointment as general coordinator of Egypt’s security services simply gives an official name to this administrative hub, which coordinates the actions of the state’s agents of coercion. 

The new GIS director will be Kamel’s deputy, Major General Hassan Mahmoud Rashad, a name many Egyptians have never heard, and little is known about him. He graduated from Egypt’s Military Technical College before joining the intelligence services, where he served for roughly 34 years, including a long career at the National Security Agency that handles intelligence-gathering inside Egypt. 

Rashad is the son of an army major general from the Swalem village in Damietta. His wife, Marwa, is the daughter of Egypt’s former deputy interior minister, Mohamed Taalab, who casually admitted in a 2016 BBC documentary that the notorious former interior minister, Zaki Badr – who was in office from 1986 to 1990, and whose aggressive policing was credited with igniting a full-scale Islamist insurgency – had encouraged police to engage in assassinations and field executions. 

“I don’t want a ‘defendant,’” Badr told his men, according to Taalab’s recollection. “A defendant would have to be presented to the prosecutor and might complain about having been tortured and so on. Enough. If he [the terrorist] is attacking you, finish him off. It is a war.” 

Unexpected appointment

The GIS reshuffle comes on the heels of a shake-up in the army’s senior brass this past summer, in which General Mohamed Zaki was removed as defense minister. While Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated media sensationally whipped up conspiracy theories about Zaki’s departure, Mada Masr confirmed what I had heard from other sources: that his removal was due to health reasons.

Zaki was a long-time friend of Sisi’s and a classmate who graduated from military college in 1977. He led the paratroopers in their infamous crackdowns on the revolutionaries in Tahrir Square throughout 2011, before former President Mohamed Morsi appointed him commander of the Republican Guard. 

Zaki played a central role in the 2013 coup and personally arrested Morsi. One of his sons is a GIS officer and a close friend of Sisi’s powerful son, Mahmoud, also a GIS officer. 

Although it was widely expected that Zaki would be succeeded by his chief of staff, Lieutenant General Osama Askar, Sisi surprised the public (and his own officer corps) by instead appointing General Abdel Majeed Saqr, the former governor of Suez, to the position. 

Finding Zaki’s successor reportedly caused a month-long delay in announcing the new cabinet last July, and Saqr appears to have been a last-minute choice. The backstory remains unclear, but the move was unexpected for several reasons, including that Saqr was initially touted in leaks by regime publicists as a candidate for the local development ministry, and the fact that he had already retired from service to take on the governorship of Suez.

Appointing a retired officer to head the defence ministry has happened only once before in Egypt’s history, when former President Hosni Mubarak appointed Youssef Sabri Abu Taleb, who was serving as Cairo governor, to the role amid a rivalry with the man who held the role previously, Abdel Halim Abu Ghazala. Abu Taleb served for only two years in office.

Like Zaki and Sisi, Saqr was a graduate of the 1977 military college class that led the 2013 coup, after which he went on to command Egypt’s military police.

Although the regional turmoil resulting from Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon has fuelled concerns across the capitals of global powers and their proxies in the Middle East, Sisi has managed to play the Egypt-is-too-big-to-fail card well, cashing in $57bn this year alone from regional and international donors to navigate the economic crisis he has inflicted upon the country, where people are grappling with soaring inflation.

While observers might quickly point to foreign affairs as the instigator of Egypt’s recent security reshuffles, they more likely resulted from concerns over potential domestic unrest for a regime whose leader’s raison d’etre is suppressing any social dissent that could topple the state. 

This is why Sisi needed to install his former classmate as defense minister who, thanks to his military police background, is most qualified to quell civilian dissent. This is why he needed to appoint a veteran national security officer to run the GIS. And this is why he needed to institutionalize his right-hand man’s role as the coordinating czar of all his security agencies. 

This commentary first appeared on the Middle East Eye website.