Sisi gathers Eritrea, Sudan and Somalia at El Alamein for a declaration aimed at Ethiopia

Abdel Fattah El-Sisi convened Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki, Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud and Sudan’s Transitional Sovereignty Council chairman Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan in New El Alamein City on Sunday 4 October, on the margins of the eighth African Union Mid-Year Coordination Meeting. The four issued the El-Alamein Joint Declaration, whose text — carried by the Eritrean state platform Shabait and reported by Daily News Egypt — holds that Red Sea governance is “the exclusive responsibility of littoral states,” affirms freedom of navigation in the Gulf of Aden and Bab el-Mandeb, rejects unilateral measures on the Nile and invokes the no-harm principle on transboundary rivers, and commits the four to a periodic joint mechanism for regional security coordination. On Sudan it rejects “parallel entities” and, in kulu-media’s reading of the text, support for mercenaries. Sisi had met all three leaders bilaterally on 3 and 4 October before the four-way session.

Ethiopia is named nowhere in the declaration and nowhere in Sisi’s own words. Addressing the AU meeting, he said, per The National: “I would like to emphasise the importance of dealing with transnational issues as ones that require co-operation, not competition; dialogue not confrontation.” The National, published in Abu Dhabi, nonetheless describes the summit flatly as consolidating an anti-Ethiopia alignment “through wider military co-operation,” and notes that Addis Ababa has accused Egypt, Eritrea and Sudan of backing a Tigray-led rebellion, which all three deny. Arab News ties the timing to renewed fighting inside Ethiopia. The Addis-based Horn Review, an interested party rather than a neutral one, published on 4 October an argument that Cairo lacks the demonstrated capacity to destroy the GERD by air and has therefore substituted “peripheral coercion” — alignments and pacts around Ethiopia’s perimeter — for direct confrontation.

The summit landed three days after the AU Commission, on 1 October, called on Ethiopia, Eritrea and Egypt to “exercise maximum restraint and refrain from actions or statements that could further escalate tensions” and to use established diplomatic channels. The aggregator Rio Times reported on 3 October that Cairo pushed back on that appeal; what the pushback said, and at what level, is not established in anything this desk could retrieve. Nor are the specifics of the reciprocal diplomatic expulsions between Egypt and Ethiopia that The National reported on 2 October: the story exists, the names, numbers and sequence do not. Separately, Sudan Tribune reported the Sisi–Burhan bilateral produced no deliverable beyond a standard readout; Sudan Horizon’s delegation list includes General Intelligence Service director Gen. Ahmed Ibrahim Mufaddal alongside Foreign Minister Mohieddin Salem.

Assessment: The whole weight of this sits on one phrase. The declaration says coordination; The National says military co-operation. Until the mechanism meets, has a secretariat, or publishes anything, treat the stronger reading as an interpretation from a Gulf outlet with its own view of the Horn, not as a reported fact. What is harder to read past is the choreography: Cairo hosted the AU’s own coordination meeting on the same ground where it reportedly rebuffed the AU’s restraint appeal three days earlier, and assembled Addis Ababa’s two most exposed neighbours plus Mogadishu in a single room. That is the message, whatever the communiqué says. Hold the expulsions story until a foreign ministry — either one — puts names to it.