| October 6 |  |
Editor says, what if Egyptian President Anwar Sadat had survived his 1981 assassination? muses Eric Lipps. Please note that the opinions expressed in this post do not necessarily reflect the views of the author(s). This story was published in the February 2011 edition of Changing the Times Magazine.
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In 1981, an assassination team led by army lieutenant Khalid Islambouli attacked Egyptian president Anwar el-Sadat during the annual victory parade held in Cairo to celebrate Operation Badr, the code name for the Egyptian military operation to cross the Suez Canal and seize the Bar-Lev Line of Israeli fortifications on October 6, 1973.
Sadat LivesThe assassins, who attacked with grenades and rifles, failed to take out their target but did manage to kill eleven others, including Vice President Hosni Mubarak and Cuba's ambassador to Egypt.
Ringleader Islambouli was tried for treason, found guilty and executed in April 1982. Over three hundred prominent Islamic radicals were arrested along with him in connection with the attack, including Ayman al-Zawahiri and Omar Abdel-Rahman, both of whom were sentenced to life in prison.
A new story by Eric LippsSadat would become a mortal foe of the Islamists after his near-assassination, pursuing them aggressively until his death from heart failure on May 1, 1990. His harsh treatment of Islamic radicals would further alienate Iran and other hard-line states already angry at him for his peace overtures to Israel, and would cast a shadow over his efforts at domestic political reform, damaging his reputation in the West. Nonetheless, at his death he would be eulogized as "the indispensable man" in U.S. efforts to defuse the wider Arab-Israeli conflict. It would be Sadat, for example, who would finally persuade the Saudis to recognize Israel in 1989.
Ironically, that achievement would have a dark sequel, when in 1993 Islamist fanatics calling themselves "Al Qaeda" attacked Riyadh, killing Saudi king Fahd bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud and many other members of the Saudi royal family, plunging the country into chaos and presenting U.S. President Bill Clinton with his first major foreign-policy crisis. A reluctant Clinton found himself forced to assemble an international coalition to use military force to stabilize Saudi Arabia in order to keep its oil flowing, barely two years after President George H. W. Bush had done the same to force Iraq's dictator Saddam Hussein to end his armed occupation of neighboring Kuwait. Al Qaeda's leader, the wealthy Saudi-born Osama bin Laden, would be killed in the subsequent fighting and would become a martyr in the eyes of would-be anti-American jihadis.
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Eric Lipps
© Eric Lipps,2007-.Story Tags
Permalinks: Post, Day. Browse Thread: Politicians Source: Wikipedia Labels: Sadat, Mubarak, Egypt, Cairo, Assasination. Editor says, in our history, of course, Sadat was killed and Vice-President Mubarak, who was only wounded in the attack, took power, remaining in office until now as a dictatorial but mostly pro-American leader. Mubarak has shown little enthusiasm for building upon the 1979 Camp David accords between his country and Israel, and has been less than determined to rein in the Islamists to whom he essentially owes his position. And in 1993, of course, Al Qaeda launched its first attack on the World Trade Center rather than going after the Saudi royal family. Zawahiri and Abdel-Rahman would receive lesser sentences and go on to infamy for their roles in anti-American terrorism.
Comment from Amy Waters Yarsinske on Facebook: My college entrance essay was written about President Sadat and his role in the Middle East peace process; he was killed in the fall of my freshman year. Fast forward 20 years and I got to sit next to Jehan Sadat at dinner at my alma mater,... where she was honored with the Pearl Buck Award. It was there that I told her about the essay and how impactful it had been in securing me a place in the freshman class all those years before. She was really quite extraordinary and her view of her husband was probably more important to me than anyone else that night.
~ I don't know that al-Qaeda would be able to do much in Saudi---the security services there are on the ball, and they've had lots of problems with people of that stripe before (see the attack on the Grand Mosque in Mecca, for example.)
~ I'm curious to know what happens to Mubarak in this timeline.
~ Interesting. I've thought of this one myself, but the al-Qaeda subplot is unique. However, I have to agree that it is highly unlikely, given that the organization came about as a merger with Zawahiri's group, and the Saudis' security is tight. Even so, the country wouldn't have been plunged into civil war by an assassination -- they have a long succession list, and the National Guard would put down any dispute. That's what it's there for.
~ There's a missing phrase right after "Over three hundred prominent Islamic radicals,"--the next words should be "were arrested along with him in connection with the attack". My bad. Fixed - no problem. Ed
~ Re Mubarak: as noted in the post, he is killed instead of Sadat. In our history, he was wounded but, of course, lived on and took power--until now, anyway.
As for Al Qaeda, it might still exist. the name simply means "The Base," and is used by more than one group in our world: for instance, "Al Qaeda in Iraq" (or "Mesopotamia") is not simply a branch of bin Laden's organization but a distinct entity. It's not hard to imagine the name still being used by ObL.
~ Difficult to tell whether it'd end up with more or less anti-American sentiment in the Middle East.
© Today in Alternate History, 2013-. All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
