CAIRO (Reuters) – Egypt’s revolutionaries did not take to the streets to replace Hosni Mubarak with another military strongman or to put an Islamist ideologue in charge, but that is the choice they woke up to after a first-round vote for the presidency.

The youths who put national pride before religion when they protested against Mubarak’s autocratic rule last year have increasingly despaired, saying the revolution they initiated has been hijacked by generals and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Their worst fears were confirmed on Friday, when initial results from Egypt’s first free presidential election sent the Brotherhood’s Mohamed Mursi and ex-air force chief Ahmed Shafiq, Mubarak’s last prime minister, into a June 16 and 17 run-off.

“I am in shock. How could this happen? The people don’t want Mursi or Shafiq. This is a catastrophe for all of us,” said Tareq Farouq, 34, a Cairo driver. “They are driving people back to Tahrir Square.”

With moderate candidates now out of the 12-man race, the run-off pits the two most polarizing figures against each other, reviving the decades-old power struggle between Egypt’s secular-led military elite and its powerful Islamist opposition.

The protesters of Tahrir Square are shocked that the run-off has boiled down to a member of the “feloul”, the derisory Arabic term for “remnants” of Mubarak’s old guard, and an “Ikhwani”, or a Brother, from the conservative Islamist group that has battled the authorities for most of its 84-year-old history.

“Ahmed Shafiq will mean the old regime – the revolution is liquidated – and with the Muslim Brotherhood it means we are too near to some kind of religious state,” said Hassan Nafaa, a political scientist who sided with the street against Mubarak.

CAIRO (Reuters) – Egypt resumes its first free presidential election on Thursday after voting passed off mostly calmly on the first day apart from a stone-throwing attack on candidate Ahmed Shafiq, who was premier for a few days before Hosni Mubarak fell.

The race broadly pits Islamist candidates against secular ones like Shafiq and Amr Moussa, the former Arab League chief who previously served as Mubarak’s foreign minister.

Long queues formed at polling stations early on Wednesday, and some were packed late into the evening. But turnout, so far, seemed lower than an earlier parliamentary vote when Islamists swept up most seats. The scorching sun deterred some.

“I’ll vote on Thursday to avoid the crowds. I’m backing Amr Moussa. He knows the country and has the experience. I chose the Muslim Brotherhood’s party in the parliamentary election but we didn’t get anything from them,” said 57-year-old Fouad Mahmoud.

The vote marks a crucial stage in a turbulent army-led transition racked by protests, violence and political disputes. The generals who took charge when Mubarak was ousted on February 11, 2011, have pledged to hand over to the new president by July 1.

Even then, the army, with its privileges and vast business interests, is expected to wield influence for years to come. A tussle over who should write the constitution also means the new president will not know his own powers when he is elected.

Whoever wins faces daunting tasks of mending a broken economy and re-establishing security, both big public concerns.

CAIRO (Reuters) – As election rallies go it was spectacular. No organisation in Egypt is better at mobilising the masses than the Muslim Brotherhood – or at stirring up the frenzy that suggests to all observant Muslims it is almost a duty to vote for its candidate in the country’s first free presidential election this week.

The vote on Wednesday and Thursday will give Egyptians their first real opportunity to decide who and what should replace the dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak, overthrown in February last year.

For Egypt’s 50 million voters, the choice is a tough one: do they want a republic governed by Islamic Sharia law, a liberal state, or even a guided democracy with the military as guarantor, wielding power behind the throne?

Egyptians have relished their newly won rights, tuning in to an unprecedented television debate, packing into campaign rallies and discussing politics on every street corner. It will be the first time in history that ordinary Egyptians, ruled by pharaohs, kings and military officers, will pick their leader.

Yet, whatever the outcome and whether or not the Brotherhood’s man wins, the group that inspired Islamists around the globe and which dominates parliament will remain a powerful force alongside the army, which has ruled for decades and shows no imminent sign of retreating quietly to barracks.

The result looks wide open and there may well be a second round run-off in mid-June. But those who witnessed the Islamic revivalism of its closing rallies in the heart of Cairo and 24 other provinces on Sunday were left in no doubt about the Brotherhood’s political reach, as well as its determination to secure the top post in the Arab world’s most populous nation.

In the square outside Abdeen Palace – where Mubarak and rulers going back to King Farouk would receive world leaders – the Brotherhood bussed in thousands to cheer for its lacklustre candidate, Mohamed Mursi, who took the stage amid flames, fireworks and frenzy whipped up by youths in white T-shirts and red headbands.

CAIRO, May 20 (Reuters) – Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood showed off its ability to rally support with choreographed campaign events throughout the nation on Sunday in a final push to clinch victory for its candidate in this week’s presidential election.

Well-known Islamic preachers and soccer celebrities took to the podium in Cairo to endorse Brotherhood candidate Mohamed Mursi, a relative latecomer to the race. His main rivals include Islamists and ex-officials of former President Hosni Mubarak.

With official campaigning ending on Sunday, fireworks cracked in the night air and flames flared from the front of the stage as Mursi arrived to address the audience of several thousand gathered in central Cairo, outside Abdeen palace.

One poll published last week in al-Masry al-Youm newspaper put Mursi behind three other front-runners but also said 37 percent of those surveyed had not made up their minds.

The reliability of such polls are untested in a nation that until Mubarak was ousted by a popular uprising in February last year had not had a free election for decades. The large cohort of undecided voters also makes it difficult to pick a winner.

But Mursi has the backing of the Brotherhood’s broad grass-roots network of supporters which proved its ability to get out the vote when it won the biggest bloc in a recent parliamentary poll.

Youths wearing Mursi t-shirts gathered at the front chanting “Mursi, Mursi” to the beat of drums. “God willing, Mursi will be president after the first round,” they chanted,

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Surrounded by aides, including one whose only task seems to be light his cigarettes, Mahmoud Abbas sits in a vast presidential office and speaks of his ambition to create a Palestinian state.

But outside his sprawling compound on the hills of the West Bank town of Ramallah reality on the ground is different – his dream is being built over by ever-expanding Jewish settlements.

From Ramallah to the sacred city of Jerusalem 20 km (12 miles) away, and all across the West Bank, the sprawling new communities, perched on hilltops that dominate the landscape, are testament to a shifting political geography and a reminder of the 64-year-old conflict and its winners and losers.

As Abbas resists pressure to resume talks on statehood until Israel halts construction, some Palestinians say he is too late to secure a viable national territory – partly because Yasser Arafat, his predecessor, failed to grasp the challenge of the settlements when he agreed an interim peace nearly 20 years ago.

“There will be no Palestinian state,” said Khalil Tafakji, a geographer who advised Arafat but says the late PLO leader, in exile for much of his life, did not appreciate how far Israelis had gone by the early 1990s in permanently colonizing the West Bank and East Jerusalem, captured in war from Jordan in 1967.

“Look at the facts on the ground,” Tafakji told Reuters last week as he reviewed maps of Israeli towns and infrastructure, which the United Nations deems illegal on occupied land: “There is no geographic contiguity between Palestinian villages and cities,” he said. “They have expanded settlements, built bridges and tunnels. We now have two states inside one state.”

Aside from its tightening grip on Arab East Jerusalem, Israel now directly controls about 58 per cent of the West Bank, while the rest is administered by Abbas’s Palestinian Authority.

GAZA (Reuters) – The Islamist movement Hamas will not let itself be dragged into a war against Israel if it attacks the nuclear facilities of Hamas ally Iran, Gaza leader Ismail Haniyeh said on Thursday.

“Hamas is a Palestinian movement that acts within the Palestinian arena and it carries out its political and field actions in a way that suits the interests of the Palestinian people,” he said at his headquarters in the enclave.

“Iran did not ask anything from us and we think Iran is not in need of us,” the prime minister of the Hamas government told Reuters in an interview.

Israel has repeatedly said it rules out no option in its determination to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. Iran says its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes.

“The Israeli threats are declared and they are not in need of analysis. But I think such an issue would have grave consequences on the entire region,” the 48-year-old Hamas leader said. “I cannot predict the scenarios but a battle of this kind would have repercussions for the region.”

Israel says it would have to reckon with potential attacks from the south by Iranian-supported Hamas and from the north by the Tehran-backed Hezbollah army in Lebanon, if it came to war with Iran. Israel says both groups possess stockpiles of rockets supplied by Iran and accuses both of practicing terrorism.

Haniyeh said the grand coalition formed this week by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which gives him an unassailable majority in parliament, had been established for internal reasons but could also have “external motives”.

RAMALLAH, West Bank (Reuters) – Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said on Tuesday he was ready to engage with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on a Middle East peace agreement if he proposes “anything promising or positive”.

Abbas, speaking to Reuters after Netanyahu announced a grand coalition that will strengthen the Israeli leader’s hand, said Netanyahu had to realise that Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank were destroying hopes of peace and must cease.

Abbas said it was still too early to comment directly on the new Israeli coalition, which saw Israel’s centrist opposition Kadima party join Netanyahu’s government.

While in opposition, Kadima had blamed Netanyahu for the failure of Palestinian peace talks. Kadima leader Shaul Mofaz said resuming negotiations that have been stalled for 18 months was an “iron condition” of his decision to join the government.

Abbas sent a letter last month to Netanyahu that was widely viewed as an ultimatum, setting out parameters for the stalled talks to resume. Netanyahu is expected to reply this week.

Abbas said he had no intention of letting his people take up arms against the Israelis, but he would be ready to renew his unilateral push for international recognition of statehood at the United Nations if there was no breakthrough.

“If there is anything promising or positive of course we will engage,” he said, speaking in his headquarters in Ramallah, the administrative capital of the Palestinian Authority (PA).

RAMALLAH, West Bank (Reuters) – Prime Minister Salam Fayyad said on Tuesday the Palestinians may have “lost the argument” on the international stage for an independent state but cautioned that continued Israeli occupation was unsustainable.

In an interview with Reuters, Fayyad struck a note of discord with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas by calling for elections that have long been delayed because of deep political divisions between the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank.

He also warned his administration’s future was clouded by severe financial strains and said the Palestinians had failed to galvanize a distracted world behind their cause.

“I think we are losing the argument, if we have not already lost the argument. But that doesn’t make our position wrong,” said the former World Bank economist, a political independent who has had strong support amongst Western powers.

Arab unrest, the U.S. presidential elections and financial crises in Europe had combined to knock the Palestinian issue off the global agenda more than 18 months after peace talks with Israel broke down in a dispute over Jewish settlement building.

“What is the biggest obstacle we face? The state of marginalization. It is unprecedented,” he said. “The Israelis have managed to successfully trivialize our side of the argument,” he added, alluding to the Palestinian demands for a halt to settlement building before negotiations can resume.

Israel says talks should continue without preconditions and has continued to build housing in blocs that dot the West Bank on land the United Nations deems illegally occupied.

LONDON, March 28 (Reuters) – Far from the bloodied streets of Syria and the dungeons of Bashar al-Assad, the largely émigré opposition that aspires to replace him is still squabbling ahead of what could be a make-or-break meeting of a coalition of countries intent on regime change, but equally at a loss about how to achieve it.

While the Assad government appears emboldened after its offensives against outgunned rebels in Homs, Idlib and the capital Damascus, the fragmented opposition, meeting in Istanbul ahead of the “Friends of Syria” meeting on April 1, seems still unable to cohere behind a unifying national project.

Some dissidents among the rebels are also denouncing the Syrian National Council (SNC) – the umbrella group recognised by leading Arab and Western nations as a “legitimate interlocutor” - as a front for the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood bankrolled by Gulf states such as Qatar.

Kamal al-Labwani, a physician and prominent opposition leader who resigned from the SNC this month, called it “an opposition under the cloak of fanatics hiding behind a veneer of stupid liberals”.

According to Labwani, the ostensibly secular and multi-party SNC is no more than a façade for the Muslim Brotherhood, a claim that chimes with Assad’s contention that the year-long uprising is an Islamist plot that will deprive Syria’s minority sects of their freedom.

The Assad rule is built around the Alawite sect, a heterodox offshoot of Shi’ite Islam, but uses this narrative to persuade fearful minorities such as the Christians that their future is in jeopardy if the Sunni majority, around three quarters of the population, comes to power.

“The Brotherhood are the dominant force in the Council,” Labwani said. “There is the Hama faction, the Damascus faction and the Aleppo faction of the Brotherhood, the Hama faction is backed and funded by Qatar and Turkey.”

LONDON (Reuters) – When Libya’s former spy chief flew to Mauritania last week, he was looking for a safe haven. Instead the man known as “Muammar Gaddafi’s black box”, the last of the fallen dictator’s henchmen still at large, walked into a trap set by French and Mauritanian intelligence.

Gaddafi’s head of intelligence, right-hand man and brother-in law, Abdullah al-Senussi, was arrested in the Mauritanian capital, Nouakchott, last week. The still murky circumstances of his capture set Libya on a collision course with France and the International Criminal Court, which both want Senussi.

Libya wants Senussi to stand trial in Tripoli for a catalogue of crimes. It sent a delegation to Mauritania but it returned without him after officials there said the legal formalities for his extradition were not complete.

Western and Arab powers are all too aware of the secrets Senussi holds, and are anxious to deny him the opportunity to say what he knows in public and expose the Arab and Western governments that used Gaddafi to plot against their enemies.

“He is Gaddafi’s black box,” said Noman Benotman, a senior Libyan analyst at the Quilliam Foundation. “He knows all the secrets about the dirty deals, plots to kill – and even what underwear Gaddafi wore.”

Senussi, 62, believed to be held at the headquarters of the Mauritanian security service in Nouakchott, is accused of playing a central role in repression and torture under Gaddafi.

He is widely suspected of anchoring high profile conspiracies such as the 1988 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, of a Pan Am jet that killed 270 people, the 1989 bombing of a French UTA airliner that killed 170 people, and plots against Arab and African states, including an attempt in 2003 to assassinate Saudi crown prince Abdullah, who is now the king.