Eyptian dictator General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi received a royal welcome from King Salman upon landing in Saudi Arabia. The key agenda of Sisi’s visit to fix the recent friction between Saudi Arabia and Egypt, after Sisi voted in favour of Bashar al-Assad in Russian drafted UN Security Council resolution on Syria in Oct’16. In retaliation, Saudi Arabia stopped supplying oil to Egypt for few months, until it was restarted recently.
Saudi Arabia has supported Sisi’s regime with billions of dollars in aid to suppress any sort of uprising from the supporters of Mohamed Morsi, after Sisi toppled the democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt. Since 2014, Saudi Arabia has listed Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organisation, as it sees Muslim Brotherhood as a threat to the Al-Saud’s family rule over Saudi Arabia.
Earlier, in the emails released by Wikileaks, Hillary Clinton has claimed that, Egypt will indefinitely remain under Sisi’s military rule as Arab countries like Saudi Arabia and UAE want it to be. Hilary Clinton mentioned in a talk at Jewish United Fund Advance & Major Gifts Dinner:
… So it’s, right now, playing itself out. The military [in Egypt] is going to remain in charge for as long as they choose to, really. They are going to face more internal threats that they are going to have to be very tough in dealing with, and they are going to try to, in as much as they can, squash the Muslim Brotherhood and their political arm. And they are getting a lot of help from the Saudis to the Emiratis—to go back to our original discussion—because the Saudis and the Emiratis see the Muslim Brotherhood as threatening to them, which is kind of ironic since the Saudis have exported more extreme ideology than any other place on earth over the course of the last 30 years.
Sisi is well aware that, Saudi regime doesn’t have much options other than him in Egypt. Backing a a compromised dictator works in favour of Saudi regime than tolerating a democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood government, which could potentially inspire Saudi Arabian citizens to demand democracy.
