ABSTRACT
The Egyptian security apparatus was preoccupied with multiple threats throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s. We have already seen how the Libyan challenge waxed and waned, but the mukhabarat was also focused on Israel – despite the peace treaty; revolutionary Iran and its support for militant Islamist groups; and a new regime in Sudan that began harboring Egyptian extremists. Another regional threat was Iraq, whose 1991 defeat in Kuwait by a multinational coalition helped facilitate Egypt’s reintegration into the Arab world. But victory against an external adversary like Iraq did not buy Egypt more security at home. In 1986, the regime was badly shaken by a mutiny within its premier civilian police force. This was followed a few years later by the socalled ‘Arab Afghan’ phenomenon which involved attempts by Egyptian veterans of the Afghan jihad to ignite a Nile Valley revolt. By 1992 Egypt faced an unprecedented urban and rural insurgency that fed off growing discontent over social and economic inequalities, official corruption and the embarrassing inability of the authorities to provide basic social services. To combat this insurgency, the Egyptian government turned to the SSIS whose brutal interrogation tactics proved controversial in human rights circles. But secret police torture and intimidation were matched by militants who showed no hesitation in systematically killing government informers and police officials. Even so, the regime began gaining the upper hand by the mid-1990s, and its success was based on mukhabarat informers, the arrest of key militant leaders and a growing public backlash against militant excesses.
