The 14th and 21st of August 2013 are dates that deserve to live in infamy, they should be remembered not only by Egyptians and Syrians but by everybody around the world for the egregious crimes against humanity committed on these days.
The Rabaa Massacre gets its name from a now-renamed city square in Cairo, where nearly a thousand people were gunned down in a single day. Egyptian security forces systematically eradicated protests against the coup d'etat that overthrew President Mohamed Morsi and replaced him with General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi–who is still the incumbent President of Egypt at the time of this writing. It was the slaughterous ending of a revolution that began in 2011 and protests have rarely been seen in Egypt ever since.
This mass-murder of protestors, one of the highest body-counts since Tiananmen Square, was overshadowed only seven days later by a chemical attack in Syria that killed at least 1,429 people, including hundreds of children.
Rockets carrying a sarin nerve agent payload were fired from positions held by the Syrian military in Damascus into nearby suburbs held by armed opposition groups, areas that had previously been the epicenter of pro-revolution protests in the capital city. Eastern Ghouta was struck first around 2:30 AM local time–eight to twelve rockets landed in the Zamalka and Ayn Tarma neighborhoods, but did not explode. They instead dispersed aerosolized sarin, which spread through the streets and filtered down into basements where civilians slept while attempting to shelter from conventional bombs dropped randomly from planes and helicopters.
Western Ghouta was struck next around 5:00 AM, with at least seven rockets landing in Moadamiya.
People quickly realized that this was no ordinary massacre when video after video showed victims of all ages gasping for air and convulsing in agony in makeshift field hospitals while doctors, nurses, and volunteer medics attempted to save their lives. Men, women, and children who had been carried by their loved ones and neighbors lay immobilized on floors–residual amounts of sarin had to be rinsed off of their clothes and bodies with garden hoses before they could receive an injection of atropine, a nerve agent antagonist used as an antidote for sarin.
Pictures and videos from the Ghouta Massacre spread like wildfire across the Internet and the world once again focused on Syria in shocked but ultimately impotent horror. Hundreds of corpses with no visible wounds–not a single cut or laceration–indicated this was the worst case of mass-poisoning in decades, after Saddam Hussein’s chemical attacks against Iraqi Kurds. The gassing was followed up by several days of intense shelling as pro-regime forces attempted to storm rebel-held neighborhoods.
Investigations conducted by the United Nations and multiple intelligence agencies concluded that the Syrian military under Bashar al-Assad’s leadership was responsible for the Ghouta chemical attacks. But Russia and others allied with Assad insisted on an unevidenced alternative narrative that the rebels instead perpetrated a false-flag attack and targeted their own side. It was the Russians who provided a war-weary United States and United Kingdom with an excuse not to respond militarily, brokering a deal for the Syrian government to turn in their stockpiles to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).
The OPCW is tasked with enforcing the Chemical Weapons Convention, an arms control treaty prohibiting their production and usage since 1992. Nation-states who sign and ratify the convention are supposed to declare any existing stockpiles in their possession and hand them over to the OPCW, who destroy the chemicals in specialized facilities. The Assad regime signed the treaty one month after the Ghouta Massacre and handed over what they claimed was their entire stockpile of chemical weapons to the OPCW–the organization was later awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for destroying Syria’s chemical weapons.
It only took the Assad regime a few months to renege on their promises, produce new stockpiles, and resume their chemical attacks in opposition-held territory–mostly using chlorine gas to murder a few dozen people at a time, which attracted far less international attention compared to the times when hundreds of people were killed and injured by sarin. This one limit held out until 2017, when a sarin attack in the town of Khan Shaykhun provoked a punitive cruise missile strike by the United States military.
The rest of the world struggled to make sense of Assad’s barbarism and Syria’s peculiarities in 2013, with many people jumping to conclusions influenced by President Bush’s lies about the Iraq War and Russian propaganda denying the regime’s hand in the Ghouta Massacre. Meanwhile the Rabaa massacre went almost completely ignored by American media, due in some part to being overshadowed by Ghouta and also because Egypt is an ally of Western governments.
“Arabs can’t handle democracy.”
I was one of those people in 2013 who thought the United States should not respond militarily to the Ghouta Massacre, someone with a superficial understanding about Syria who thought we should just stay out because US-led interventions seemed to make everything worse. And this was after I had followed the Arab Spring since it began in early 2011, watching with fascination as protests, revolutions, and eventually civil wars spread across the region–I do not have mere ignorance to plead as a pitiful defense in my case, like a majority of US citizens.
Most of us back then paid little attention to events, “over there,” and those of us who did often conflated facts with stereotypes. The average American, prior to October 7th, was either a liberal who knew nothing about the Middle East or a pro-Israel conservative who casually made prejudiced comments about Arabs, Muslims, and just about every Middle Eastern ethnicity.
One could accuse me of overgeneralizing, but just know that every school teacher of mine who was willing to say anything about the Arab Spring other than, “I don’t know,” always denigrated it and ended their answer with some variation of, “Arabs can’t handle democracy.”
These teachers were addressing their curious students about events they were hearing about on the news happening in countries they had never visited. I was only a teenager at the time but it still felt disturbing to hear these adults, our so-called authority figures and role models, blithely dehumanize Arabs and other Muslim-majority peoples–this motivated me to search for proof that they were wrong.
I had silently supported from afar as people from Tunisia to Bahrain protested against authoritarian regimes, keeping up with events by surreptitiously reading BBC News articles on my laptop when I was supposed to be typing up notes at school. Researching the Middle East was my escape from a dull, unsatisfying adolescence while my classmates secretly watched muted Netflix or Hulu shows with the help of closed captioning text.
My interest in political developments and other news from the region also served as an escape in the anxious hours leading up to a surgical procedure on July 3, 2013, which just so happened to be the same day Mohamed Morsi was removed from power. I was put under general anesthesia during the tense afternoon when it was clear that a coup d'etat was imminent–the first thing I can remember upon regaining consciousness was being told by my stepfather that Morsi had been overthrown.
It took longer than usual for me to register the news, my brain was barely functioning until the following morning. That was when I realized that my routine procedure had resulted in some unusual complications, including a massive hematoma that sent ripples of excruciating pain through my body every time I so much as moved a muscle. These complications prompted an immediate second surgery to relieve my symptoms before I was released once again to recover at home and just hope for the best.
The rest of the summer slowly drifted on in a painkiller haze while I waited both for my incision to heal and to start my senior year in high school, distracting myself with books and keeping up with the news. Meanwhile protests in Egypt opposing the July coup continued to grow and spread throughout the country–nobody outside of a small circle within the new military junta knew what would happen on August 14, 2013.
It was impossible at first for me to comprehend the full scale of death and horror perpetrated by the Egyptian government at the Rabaa square, the opiates I had been prescribed at the time by my surgeon likely had a hand in my impaired cognition. I had kept a close eye on Syria and the frequent massacres of protestors over there, but this was far more efficient and all-encompassing than anything the Assad regime had done. The killing started and largely stopped in a single day, rather than being endlessly dragged out as we saw in Syria and years later in Sudan, Iran, and other authoritarian regimes challenged by people power.
I watched the Rabaa Massacre’s death toll increase day by day as the corpses were counted from five hundred to eventually more than nine hundred people.
Summer break ended the following week and I returned to school still wearing bandages underneath my clothing, hoping and praying that I could at least walk from the parking lot and up the stairs to homeroom without my legs buckling in agony–although at that point I was more afraid of arriving late to class and getting in trouble than the paralyzing sting from my surgical wound.
Two days later–on August 21, 2013–the chemical attacks in Ghouta became the top story for every media company. ABC, BBC, CNN, Fox News… Everyone was covering it, even comedians like Jon Stewart. This served as an abrupt, confusing introduction to Syria and the horrific crimes against humanity happening over there that most Americans and other Westerners had gone out of their way to ignore for more than two years. We all struggled to wrap our heads around it, even people like me who were equipped with a tiny bit of context about the Assad regime and the 2011 protests.
Shooting close to a thousand protesters dead in a city square, gassing nearly two thousand people to death in the middle of the night while they slept… How does one make sense of that? Especially when they both happen in the span of seven days.
Instead, myself and my fellow Americans obsessed over what the aftermath would be, how the United States could and should respond to this generational horror. There was hardly any talk of Assad’s previous crimes against humanity and the phrase “Syrian Revolution” was nowhere to be heard in American media. The discourse boiled down to whether or not the US should engage in yet another invasion, occupation, and regime change of a Middle Eastern country or just do nothing and let those weirdos on the other side of the world keep on killing each other.
Most of us assumed that events “over there” would never impact us Americans, we never foresaw the rise of ISIS or how reactionary prejudice against refugees from Syria and other war-torn countries would enable the far-right’s political resurgence in the near future.
I wish I could say I was the one among my classmates who spoke up, tried to provide context for people, and gave a nuanced position as opposed to the simplistic “do nothing or risk starting World War III by invading and occupying Syria,” debate–but I was not. I fell feet-first into that false choice and picked what seemed like the least-worst option: opposing US intervention in Syria while simultaneously, rather irrationally, calling for Assad’s prosecution at The Hague.
Nowadays it is beyond obvious to me how wrong I was about many things at that time, and I do indeed say something when I see others fall for the same misconceptions I once held.
Military action in Syria against the Assad regime would not inevitably result in a carbon copy of the 2003-2011 Iraq War. That idea was disproven after the Trump Administration responded to further chemical attacks in 2017 and 2018 with two short bombing campaigns–the strikes did not escalate out of control into either a full-scale invasion of Syria or an apocalyptic confrontation between the US and Russia as many had feared in 2013. Several skirmishes between the US and Syrian military skirmishes–including, in some cases, mercenaries from Russia’s Wagner Group–have not sparked either a world war or regime change.
I was wrong about many things in the past, and will always regret my callow response to the Ghouta Massacre, but I never doubted that the Assad regime was responsible for the chemical attacks. Even during my ignorant past I still felt compelled to push back when I saw or overheard people repeating Assadist talking points online or in real life, especially when they tried to sow doubt about the regime’s complicity.
This gave me the idea to start a podcast about Syria, in an attempt to set the record straight with historical context and offer Syrians a platform where they can tell their stories. Devoting most of my twenties to research for this podcast forced me to reckon with what I had gotten wrong in the past, such as when I had hoped my country would not respond to the chemical attacks with military action.
Nowadays I have a small following online in large part thanks to my podcast about Syria, even though I failed to advocate for Syrians when it probably mattered most during the dark days of August 2013. Sure, I was a teenager at the time–but is that any excuse?
Transnational Corruption and Repression
Nowadays it is more important than ever to remember the massacres at Rabaa and Ghouta, not only to set the record straight for history but to prevent their perpetrators from enjoying undeserved acceptance and impunity from the international community.
Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and Bashar al-Assad are still currently serving heads of state, at the time of this writing. Sisi has managed to maintain his reputation and good standing despite the mass-murder of dissidents and torture of thousands more under his leadership, overseeing a level of oppression unprecedented for Egypt. Assad became a global pariah after overseeing a genocidal campaign against the Syrian Opposition, during that bygone era when supporting Free Syria was a popular initiative across the world. This changed when the revolution did not succeed overnight, giving Assad an opportunity to rehabilitate his image amid a stalemated conflict while the world focused on the threat posed by ISIS and other extremist groups.
Neither of these men deserve the prestige and respect customarily extended to a president, a prime minister, or even a hereditary monarch–they are illegitimate despots who have never won a single free and fair election. They maintain their hold on power by arresting, intimidating, and torturing anyone who openly voices dissent–when those methods fail, they resort to massacres.
This is what we need to remember when politicians and other so-called pragmatists praise Sisi for being a stalwart Western ally and justify normalization with the Assad regime after previously supporting his opponents. It should be the first thing out of our mouths when we hear someone credit them with “stabilizing” their countries. Sisi’s seizure of power and trampling of Egypt’s nascent democracy fomented an ISIS insurgency in the Sinai Peninsula after moderates were disillusioned into nihilistic extremism. Assad’s corrupt, incompetent, and needlessly cruel leadership was the root cause for protests by Syrians against his regime–to which he responded by slaughtering hundreds of thousands of people for having the gall to openly oppose him, dragging the Syrian Revolution into the Syrian Civil War.
Dictators, contrary to popular belief, do not bring stability to their nation-states. They are a root cause of future instability.
The Egyptian government, despite constantly touting their close diplomatic and military relationship with the United States, has also recently been accused of conducting espionage against the US and even bribing American politicians to influence policy decisions. Long-serving Senator Robert “Bob” Menendez was criminally charged in 2023 with providing “nonpublic information to Egyptian officials” and failing to register as a foreign agent–his wife and three other associates were named as co-defendants in his indictment. The FBI found more than $100,000 in gold bars and $480,000 in US dollars hidden in closets, clothing pockets, and a safe while executing a search warrant at the Senator’s home.
Bob Menendez refused to resign from office or suspend his reelection campaign before and during his federal trial, which sparked widespread calls for his expulsion, and he was forced to step down as Chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. He was found guilty of all charges on July 16, 2024 and finally resigned from the US Senate the following August 20, ending a fifty-year career in politics while awaiting sentencing.
Menendez is not the only high-profile US politician accused of taking bribes from the Egyptian government. The Washington Post recently reported that $10 million in US dollars were withdrawn from the National Bank of Egypt by an account owned by the country’s General Intelligence Service in January 2017–this happened just a few months after then-candidate Donald Trump donated the same amount to his presidential campaign. Trump had reportedly resisted pleas from his campaign manager to donate more of his own money, believing he would lose the 2016 election, then suddenly reversed course without explanation in October.
The US Department of Justice (DOJ) opened an investigation into allegations of election interference after a CIA informant in the Egyptian government reported that Abdel Fattah el-Sisi ordered the General Intelligence Service to covertly support Trump’s candidacy in late 2016. They allegedly convinced Trump to spend more money on his campaign by promising to illegally reimburse him for the expense.
The DOJ investigation into this matter was abruptly halted in 2019 by then-Attorney General William Barr, who bizarrely claimed the case lacked solid evidence after blocking investigators from accessing President Trump’s bank records. This was around the same time that Trump was overheard calling Sisi, “my favorite dictator,” at the 45th G-7 summit.
Victims of the Egyptian government’s oppressive practices–ranging from surveillance and intimidation to arrest, torture, and lengthy prison sentences or the death penalty doled out by a show trial–include US citizens. Those who were fortunate enough to either flee the country or have American diplomats successfully lobby for their release have found themselves pursued abroad by Egypt’s intelligence services.
Pierre Girgis, an Egyptian-American dual citizen, was charged with spying on opponents of the Sisi regime living in the United States and lobbying for Egyptian security forces to be invited to New York for law enforcement training without registering as a foreign agent in early 2022. He recently pled down to a misdemeanor in federal court and is currently facing a maximum sentence of six months in prison. Intelligence agencies commonly recruit freelance sympathizers to serve as deniable proxies for particularly sensitive operations, such as stalking and harassing dissidents on US soil.
One man targeted by the Sisi regime was Mohamed Soltan, a dual citizen who took a break from his university studies in 2011 to participate in the revolution against Hosni Mubarak and spoke out about his experiences as a protestor upon his return to the United States. He eventually moved back to Egypt the following year when his mother was diagnosed with cancer, working at a petroleum services company while staying in touch with activist circles.
Soltan later quit his job to join the thousands who protested in 2013 against Sisi’s coup d'etat and eventually participated in the Rabaa square demonstrations, where he was shot in the arm by a sniper during the August 14 massacre. He avoided going to a hospital out of fear of being handed over to the authorities and spent two days with a bullet lodged in his shattered bone until a doctor willing to secretly make a house call treated his gunshot wound. But Soltan was unfortunately tracked down and arrested at his family home in Cairo after twelve days on the run.
Prisons in Egypt are notorious for their well-documented human rights violations, ranging from systematic torture conducted via a plethora of perverse methods and denial of medical care to inmates. Soltan suffered both over the next two years while being interrogated about his father, Salah Soltan, a firebrand scholar of Islamic jurisprudence who served as a deputy minister in Mohamed Morsi’s short-lived government. Salah had famously, at times controversially, supported the now-proscribed Muslim Brotherhood but his son has denied being a member or supporter of the fundamentalist organization.
Mohamed Soltan responded to this inhumane treatment by smuggling letters out of prison that were later printed in newspapers around the world and later embarked on a hunger strike to protest his unjustified incarceration for 489 days. This coincided with Soltan being found guilty by an Emergency State Security Court–essentially a show trial designed to expedite the mass-incarceration of dissidents, even when evidence is completely lacking–after which a judge sentenced him to life in prison. He ended up losing at least a third of his body weight and an online campaign for his release took off after The Guardian and CNN published stories about his emaciated condition.
The US State Department kept a close eye on Soltan’s case, sending diplomats to visit him in prison and spectate at his court hearings as they do for most Americans who get detained abroad. A #FreeSoltan campaign also influenced the Egyptian government to make sure their prisoner stayed alive, out of fear that his death would spark a resurgence in protests. Eventually he was released in May 2015 after a deal was reached between the Obama Administration and the Sisi regime.
But Soltan would remain a target of the Egyptian government even after he was sent back to the United States to receive medical treatment after two years of torture. This was made clear in 2021, when the director of the General Intelligence Service visited Capitol Hill and claimed the US government had promised to lock Soltan up in an American prison for the rest of his life. The indignant director scolded politicians and staffers for allowing Soltan to live free in Virginia, even though such an agreement–if it ever existed–would not be enforceable under US law.
This was a stunningly blunt and out in the open display of transnational oppression from an ally of the United States, demanding the US government arrest and imprison an American citizen for activities protected under the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights–yet somehow Egypt and Sisi’s reputation have sustained little if any damage as a result of the Rabaa Massacre and the subsequent decade of unprecedented authoritarianism.
The Assad regime meanwhile at least remains a pariah state, but this has been starting to change in recent years with the reestablishment of diplomatic relations with governments who had once openly or at least covertly supported the Syrian opposition. The United Arab Emirates began this trend in 2018 and most Arab-majority countries have followed suit by the time of this writing. This paved the way for Bashar al-Assad’s controversial return to the Arab League summit last year after being expelled in 2011.
A simultaneous effort by Assadists, isolationists, and racists is currently pushing a narrative that “Syria is safe, now,” as an excuse to stop granting asylum to Syrian refugees fleeing from the Assad regime. Far-right and far-left politicians in Europe and elsewhere have adopted this narrative in an attempt to deceive the public into believing that there is no more ongoing conflict in Syria, that there’s no industrial-scale torture, that Assad is the least-worst option. This is why educating the public and having honest conversations about the Ghouta Massacre is more important than ever, now.
Both the Assad and Sisi regimes are attempting to bribe the world into overlooking their crimes against humanity and coerce the survivors of said crimes into silence. We need to set the record straight about their conduct as heads of state, particularly their involvement in the massacres, mass-arrests, and torture of their political opponents.
Loved, Feared, and Hated
Why is it that Abdel Fattah el-Sisi continues to get away with his repression while Bashar al-Assad’s reputation around the world took a nosedive and will almost certainly never fully recover? The answer may be found in a centuries-old treatise on the nature of political power and state violence, The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli. Perhaps the most famous quote from this book is the oft-repeated misquote, “It is better to be feared than to be loved.”
What Machiavelli truly wrote was that a ruler should attempt to be both feared and loved at the same time, but if that is not possible then relying on being feared to stay in power is more reliable than being loved by the people because people are fickle with their affections–whereas fear can deter an angry or otherwise disappointed crowd from externalizing their grievances.
But the most detrimental outcome for a ruler is being hated, becoming someone whose cruelty and self-aggrandizement becomes so frequent that it loses its shock value and their subjects’ anger starts to override their fear.
Machiavelli writes, “In seizing a state, the usurper ought to examine closely into all those injuries which it is necessary for him to inflict, and to do them all at one stroke so as not to repeat them daily. And thus by not unsettling [people] he will be able to reassure them, and win them to himself by benefits. He who does otherwise, either from timidity or evil advice, is always compelled to keep the knife in his hand. Neither he can rely on his subjects, nor can they attach themselves to him, owing to their continued and repeated wrongs. For injuries ought to be done all at one time, so that being tasted less, they offend less.”
This passage describes what Abdel Fattah al-Sisi accomplished with the Rabaa Massacre and what Hafez al-Assad accomplished with the Hama Massacre thirty years earlier, as well as what Bashar al-Assad has failed to do since 2011.
Sisi came up with a plan to suppress all political opposition immediately upon seizing power, to swiftly crush everyone who opposed him within a matter of days. He and other successful dictators knew that the less often one engages in bloodshed, the more it tends to frighten their populations into submission. Assad the younger meanwhile became the epitome of Machiavelli’s hated ruler, engaging in crimes ranging from petty to heinous on a daily basis and alienating his people to the point where even regime loyalists personally despise him. The latter despot became widely reviled that his people’s anger largely replaced their fear, resulting in the Syrian Revolution.
The best we can all do right now for Egyptians and Syrians who are suffering under the rule of Sisi and Assad, for those who either survived the Rabaa and Ghouta Massacres or tragically did not, is to remember what happened there and inform people about the perpetrators. August 14, 2013 should be the first thing people think about when they hear the name “Sisi,” just as August 21, 2013 should be the first thought in their mind as soon as they hear “Assad regime.”
This will include being honest with ourselves about the times if and when we have failed to do this, when we have fallen for authoritarian obfuscation and shared it to others without knowing any better, in order to never repeat these mistakes and help others avoid them.
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