Egypt

The new campus of the American University in Cairo is experiencing some growing pains as students and teachers complain of unfinished buildings and incomplete facilities.  All this is to be expected as a major institution relocates its entire operation.  A decade from now I anticipate a fully functioning university attracting Arab students from all over […]

The International Herald Tribune has posted a rather strange account from the Associated Press about how the hostages were freed. Apparently after ten days of driving around the desert to escape detection from Libyan, Chadian, Sudanese, and Egyptian security forces the kidnappers told the tourists to pile into an SUV and drive. According to some […]

AP is reporting that the Sudanese Military killed six and captured two kidnappers after a high-speed desert chase on Sunday. According to the two captured kidnappers the tourists are being held hostage in Chad. The interesting part of the article is that the Sudanese Government linked the eight kidnappers to a rebel group in Darfur. […]

Absent of any near-term threats to natural security from a land invasion, the Egyptian military continues to strengthen its conventional land forces to deter long-term threats and bolster its reputation as a powerful, or perhaps the most powerful, fighting force in the Middle East and Africa. But Egypt does have a significant national security threat […]

Yesterday's kidnapping of a dozen tourists and their Egyptian guides in southern Egypt raises three important questions whose answers have serious consequences: 1. Who did it and why? Al Jazeera English has compiled a helpful lift of attacks against tourists in Egypt since 1992. The attacks that were not isolated incidents were politically motivated, mostly […]

Most news articles and blog posts deal with Egypt on political terms. Mubaraks’ succession and the role of Islam in politics is no doubt important, but the great attention paid to these issues can sometimes make us forget that Egypt is more than a topic in political science. This is all to say that yesterday […]

Tarek Shahin, a mid-twenties Egyptian graduate from the American University in Cairo, is a financial analyst by trade and a cartoonist by heart.  He pens the Al Khan comic strip in Daily News Egypt, the country's leading independent English daily.  Tarek excels at showing how different groups in Egypt react to the world around them.  […]

Policymakers and opinionmakers in Washington and the Middle East would do well to pay careful attention to today's article in the New York Times about Egyptians and other Arabs not believing claims by the United States that Osama bin Laden was responsible for the attacks of September 11. Some reasoning goes like this: – A […]

The pool of possible successors to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak became smaller today with the death of former minister of defense Abdel-Halim Abu Ghazala. The Associated Press is reporting that Abu Ghazala died late Saturday at age 78 (President Mubarak is 80). Field Marshal Abu Ghazala would not have been a real contender for the […]

Jeffrey Azarva at the American Enterprise Institute argues today that as Egyptian President Husni Mubarak continues to block democratic reform a new U.S. administration would do well to “send Mubarak and the one-in-three Arabs he rules the message that U.S. aid cannot be taken for granted.” Since the early 1980s the United States has provided […]

Though Egypt and Israel signed a lasting peace treaty thirty years ago the two countries have yet to normalize their relations by exhibiting trust and friendship between governments. Israeli officials interested in enhancing their legitimacy in the Middle East are typically more concerned over this than their Egyptian counterparts. At Israel's urging American officials often […]