Ground Truth Project: “Egyptian citizens, journalists face worsening restrictions on expression under Sisi regime”
A Sisi banner hangs in Cairo for the presidential election. After a democratic election in 2012 that put the Muslim Brotherhood in power, Sisi, then a military leader, led a coup that overthrew the democratically-elected president, and banned the Muslim Brotherhood and pro-democracy demonstrators. (Roger Anis/GroundTruth)
(Ground Truth Project) In 2011, when Egypt was pulsating with post-revolution possibility, I received a grant from the Pulitzer Center to report on “The Country Outside the Square” — an exploration of Egypt’s oft-neglected provinces, hundreds of miles from the nerve center of Tahrir Square. There, schools look like penitentiaries. Hospitals are understaffed and underfunded. Roads are barely navigable.
Over the past seven years, in a somewhat vain attempt to track how a revolution went terribly wrong, I have followed a Muslim Brotherhood family in the Upper Egyptian city of Assiut.