DAMASCUS (Reuters) -Syria’s new authorities have detained an Egyptian Islamist militant who fought against Bashar al-Assad’s rule over threats he made to the government in Cairo, a Syrian interior ministry source and an Arab security source told Reuters on Wednesday.
The move could help ease concern in Cairo over the rise to power of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham rebels, who led the overthrow of Assad last month, in light of the Egyptian government’s crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood at home.
The militant, Ahmed al-Mansour, has posted several videos saying Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi would meet the same fate as Assad.
He also posed in front of a banner for a group calling itself the “Revolutionaries of January 25,” a reference to the uprising that toppled Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in 2011.
“Neither the tall gates nor tunnels will save you, because it’s your turn, dictator,” he said in one video.
Mansour was arrested on Wednesday and is currently in a detention centre, the sources said.
Egyptian security sources said that while they did not directly request the arrest, Cairo had expressed its anger at the re-emergence of militant dissidents in Syria via intelligence contacts with third-party countries.
Egypt feels the upheaval in Syria could help such Islamist factions to regroup, the sources said.
On Sunday, Egyptian foreign minister Badr Abdelatty said Egypt supported Syria’s security and sovereignty, but stressed that the international community needed to work to prevent Syria from becoming a safe harbor or hub for terrorist groups, “which may pose a threat to any of the countries in the region,” speaking at a summit in Riyadh.
Egypt’s interior and foreign ministries did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Egyptian state-linked media have been more explicitly critical of the change in power in Damascus and expressed fears about the resurgence of the Brotherhood encouraged by Syria’s rulers, who are led by HTS.
The Brotherhood, one of the Arab world’s most influential and oldest Islamist movements, is banned in several Arab countries including Egypt and was banned in Syria under Assad.
“Syria is free to do what it wants…but when Damascus is used as a platform to attack the Egyptian state, the Egyptian state must speak. This is unacceptable,” said television host Amr Adib on Saturday.
“This (arrest) is a signal to Cairo, which sees this issue as extremely important.”
Thousands of Sunni Muslim foreigners joined Syria’s rebels early in the 13-year civil war to fight against Assad’s rule and the Iran-backed Shi’ite militias who supported him.
Another of them, Alaa Mohammed Abdelbaqy, who Egypt sentenced to life in prison in absentia over terrorism charges in 2016, was given a military rank in the Syrian armed forces late last month.
In December, a photo of Syria’s de facto leader Ahmed al-Sharaa meeting Mahmoud Fathy, another wanted Egyptian militant, was spread widely by Egyptian regime-aligned personalities, though the government did not comment.
(Reporting by Maya Gebeily and Ahmed Mohamed Hassan,Writing by Nafisa Eltahir,Editing by Peter Graff, Angus MacSwan, William Maclean)
