I met Abdullah al-Fakharany on the first day of the Egyptian uprising against President Hosni Mubarak in January 2011. It was afternoon in Tahrir Square, and the police were attacking. The tear gas canisters arced high into the air before falling into the crowd. I ran, but not fast enough. The gas left me doubled over, tears streaming down my face. As I gasped for breath, a young man appeared beside me and helped me away from the smoke. He handed me his black and white kaffiyeh, motioning for me to wrap it around my head to cover my nose and mouth. When I could speak again, I asked him why so many people had answered the call for protest. “This is the result of the pressure that has built up inside us from the corruption, from the repression, from the lack of freedom,” Fakharany shouted, partly to make himself heard above the shouts swirling around us and partly out of excitement. More tear gas landed near us, and we jogged away from it. Fakharany’s hair was thick and curly, and he had dark stubble on his cheeks. He told me he was studying medicine at Ain Shams University but found it unfulfilling. I was reporting on the protests, and before I left to write my story, I returned his kaffiyeh. Fakharany found me on Facebook the following day, and over the next few months we saw each other often. I usually found him in the field hospital during protests, using his medical training to patch up the wounded. Consumed by a desire to be a part of the change sweeping his country, he began working with a budding citizen journalism initiative called Rassd. It started as a Facebook page in 2010 as an attempt to challenge the Mubarak regime’s narrative that dominated the media, and grew rapidly into a news service, with millions of followers and branches in other countries. Six years later, Fakharany sits in a cell north of Cairo. He was sentenced to life in prison in 2015 and is now undergoing a retrial on charges of spreading false information, belonging to a banned organization, and “forming an operations room to direct the Muslim Brotherhood to defy the government.” He has grown despondent after more than three years behind bars and now faces the possibility of decades in prison. He’s being held in Wadi Natrun penitentiary, where his health is deteriorating. Fakharany is one of at least 25 journalists currently imprisoned for their work in Egypt, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). After President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi ousted the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi in a military coup in 2013, he launched the harshest crackdown on the press that Egypt has seen in decades. Authorities raided and shuttered television channels, censored newspapers, and arbitrarily detained reporters. Seven journalists have been killed — six were shot while covering demonstrations, almost surely by security forces, and army soldiers shot a seventh at a checkpoint, according to CPJ’s tally. Yet the reporters behind bars receive scant attention. Those like Fakharany, who worked for media sympathetic to Morsi and the Brotherhood, receive even less. Unlike the formerly jailed Al Jazeera English journalists, two of whom have foreign citizenship, there is no worldwide campaign for his release, no celebrity lawyer, no statements by diplomats on his behalf. “I was naïve — at least in the first days after I was arrested,” Fakharany wrote in a letter from prison published in 2015. “I thought that the world would rise up to defend me.”

Thousands chant anti-government slogans in Tahrir Square on Feb. 1, 2011 in Cairo. The massive protests would eventually lead to the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak. (Photo by Chris Hondros/Getty Images)

A generous heart

In the months after the uprising, Fakharany and I ran into each other often at protests and sometimes met at cafes to talk about the state of the Egyptian uprising. He was ebullient and optimistic, despite increasing signs the military junta that had replaced Mubarak was uninterested in democratic reform in Egypt.

We had only known each other for about four months when I experienced Fakharany’s generosity for the second time. In May 2011, a mob attacked a church in Imbaba, a warren of narrow alleys on the west side of Cairo. The mood in the area was still tense the next day, and as I reported with two colleagues, two men began following us. We sensed the situation was turning dangerous, but before we could find a safe place, the two men had multiplied into a crowd — and the crowd was turning violent. Just as they began shouting and grasping at us, we turned a corner and found a cordon of soldiers deployed to secure the area. They allowed us to squeeze past, and we were safe — for the moment.

But I was still trapped in Imbaba, and it would be difficult to get out alone. I called Fakharany and explained my situation. “Stay there,” he said. “I’m coming right now.” Within half an hour, he arrived and escorted us to safety.

Most of Fakharany’s friends have similar stories. His magnetic personality gave him a wide network, which was useful to a young news organization like Rassd. Fakharany’s key role at Rassd was in connecting it to outside groups, like Turkish and German news agencies, that worked with and trained the budding journalists. He often traveled to conferences and trainings abroad.

Fakharany at Ain Shams University in Cairo, where he studied medicine. Fakharany during a trip to Washington DC in 2012. Fakharany visited the offices of the Associated Press on a trip to New York in December 2011. Fakharany visited the United Nations on a trip to New York in December 2011.

He also sent in updates on protests or other developments in Egypt, which were published across Rassd’s platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, and text messages to subscribers. Fakharany quickly became a member of Rassd’s core team even as he continued his medical studies. He worked with intensity and, usually, a wide smile. “He was always taking the initiative, pushing ahead, knocking on doors,” said Khaled Noureldin, one of Rassd’s founders and CEO.

Rassd was growing rapidly. By the 2011 uprising, it had a core team of 22 people who were publishing updates from volunteers around the country and had accumulated between 300,000 to 400,000 followers on Facebook. That rose to nearly 4 million by the July 2013 coup, according to Noureldin. The page currently has more than 10 million followers and operates underground in Egypt — Noureldin lives in Turkey, and reporters in Egypt don’t use their names. Noureldin said at least nine Rassd journalists are currently in prison, though only five have been publicly associated with the network.

Some of the Rassd team belonged to the Muslim Brotherhood. Fakharany told me he was not a member of the group, which Noureldin confirmed. He said Rassd has no connection to the Brotherhood beyond the personal affiliation of some members. But Rassd’s coverage was unabashedly sympathetic to Islamist parties, which dominated elections in Egypt after the uprising, and to Morsi.

Morsi was the first freely elected president in Egypt’s history, winning by a thin margin in 2012 over a candidate associated with Mubarak’s deposed regime. His win came just after a major power grab by the military that included dissolving the Islamist-led parliament. But the Brotherhood leader-turned-president governed with an overreach and incompetence that was compounded by hostility from state institutions and the mainstream press. His rhetoric, and the often sectarian language of some of his top supporters, alienated many non-Islamists. By the summer of 2013, he was deeply embattled, and Egypt’s media was as polarized as the public.

Egyptian riot policemen point their guns toward protesters as security forces moved in to disperse supporters of Egypt's deposed President Mohamed Morsi in a huge protest camp near Rabaa al-Adawiya mosque in eastern Cairo on Aug. 14, 2013. (MOHAMMED ABDEL MONEIM/AFP/Getty Images)

Love in the firing line

As the country was choosing sides around him, Fakharany was falling in love. In a Rassd workshop on social media strategy in May 2013, he met a young woman who had traveled to attend the course from her home in another Arab country.

The pair quickly became enamored of each other. She found Fakharany smart, open-minded, respectful of women, and loved how he was “always smiling.” Fakharany was “infatuated,” said Mohamed Soltan, an activist who was imprisoned alongside Fakharany for more than seven months. The two bonded over their love of the intricacies of the Arabic language, he said, and their youthful passion for democratic change in Egypt. Soon they were having long conversations every day after the course sessions, said the woman, who asked to remain anonymous because her family doesn’t yet know about their relationship.

The day before she left Cairo, Fakharany surprised her with a marriage proposal. She didn’t give him an answer at the time. But after she flew home, they continued to talk every day and made plans for Fakharany to come and meet her family in August 2013, a necessary step for him to ask her father for her hand in marriage.

It was a meeting that the course of Egyptian politics would not allow him to keep. At the end of June, hundreds of thousands of Egyptians marched throughout the country, calling for Morsi’s resignation. Days later, Sisi, then Morsi’s defense minister, seized control of the country.

Many Egyptians welcomed the military takeover with celebration, calling it not a coup but a revolution and describing Morsi’s supporters as terrorists. Fakharany considered it a devastating blow to democracy in Egypt, and Rassd’s coverage was strongly critical of the coup. Two large protest camps formed in the capital, each teeming with thousands of protesters who vowed to stay until Morsi was reinstated. Many, though not all, of the protesters were Islamists, and rhetoric from the stages set up at the sit-ins was often fiery and sectarian, at times blaming Christians for the coup and hinting at violence if the president was not restored. Members of the Brotherhood’s political party, which was under siege from the new regime, were mainstays at the sit-ins.

Fakharany helped man a video feed from the larger camp, in Rabaa al-Adawiya Square. Both he and Soltan felt the foreign media were wrongly portraying the protesters as angry Brotherhood supporters, instead of Egyptian citizens protesting an undemocratic power grab by the military. Soltan, a dual Egyptian-American citizen who grew up in the United States, was not a member of the organization, though his father was a senior leader. Fakharany spoke with the foreign journalists he knew and urged them to cover the protests fairly, said Soltan.

On Aug. 14, 2013, security forces launched an assault on the Rabaa al-Adawiya camp that lasted 12 hours and likely killed more than 1,000 people, most of them unarmed protesters, according to a Human Rights Watch report. Fakharany was present for the assault and made it out late in the day with a light shrapnel wound to his arm. He had seen the worst of the carnage, his brother Abdulrahman said — the hundreds of bodies piling up as those in the square frantically sought a way out, only to find all exits under fire from the security forces.

The new regime had essentially declared war on the Brotherhood and anyone who spoke out against the coup. It embarked on a massive arrest campaign, detaining Brotherhood leaders and members, pro-Islamist journalists, protesters, and activists. Fakharany and Soltan spent 10 days away from their homes trying to avoid the dragnet. They and two others — Samhi Mustafa, also of Rassd, and Mohamed al-Adly, of Amgad TV — stayed together in apartments they believed were safe. Fakharany was gathering footage and information on the killings in Rabaa for the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor.

They were eventually undone by Soltan’s quest for clean underwear.

Whereas the others in the group bought new clothes while on the run, Soltan didn’t know his size in Egypt, as he grew up in the United States and had only been in Egypt for the summer. The four ventured to Soltan’s parents’ apartment to pick up some clean clothes. They had bad timing: While they were there, police raided the home looking for Soltan’s father. He wasn’t home, but the officers were satisfied with their bounty of the four young men.

When Fakharany’s fiancée saw the news in a Facebook post from one of Fakharany’s friends — about a week before he was scheduled to meet her family — at first she didn’t believe it. “And then I started to think, how many days will it be? I was thinking, did he go behind the sun?” she said, using an Arabic phrase that describes those disappeared by the state who vanish without a trace.

A few days before, Fakharany had given her the passwords to his social media accounts in case of just such a situation. It was evening. She opened her laptop and started deactivating his accounts one after the other to prevent police from using statements he made on those pages against him. “And then I started crying until the sun rose,” she said.