Two armored vehicles, a police car and two small open pick-up trucks entered the Al-Ray bel-Rash village in the Edfu district in northern Aswan in the afternoon of September 5, part of a security campaign targeting the home of Abdallah al-Hugairy. An exchange of fire that would last around two and a half hours was about to begin. Hugairy has repeatedly been implicated in incidents of gunfire and forcefully stealing cars, motorcycles and tuk tuks from villagers and dahaba (people who work in informal gold mining), according to Ahmed al-Bagga, a farmer from the village. He also says Hugairy is among those accused of killing a villager about two years ago. Bagga tells Mada Masr that Hugairy fought most of Saturday’s skirmish alone, before jumping from the roof of his house to that of a neighbor, whose livestock, “his source of livelihood,” was hit and killed by a stray bullet in the fray. Bagga says two police personnel were wounded in the uproar: the assistant investigator at the Edfu district, Mohamed Zidan, and a police conscript. News circulating about the incident recorded Zidan’s injury, without mentioning the conscript or further detailing the raid. Despite all this, Hugairy managed to escape from the village, while security forces raided another house, killed its owner — whom Bagga describes as a drug dealer — and then withdrew from the area. The next day, Hugairy returned to the village, “as if nothing had happened,” Bagga says. The eruption of violence at the beginning of the month exposes the recurring pattern that has taken root in Al-Ray bel-Rash. The village sank into deprivation in the 1990s, isolated from essential resources and services. Residents describe how these conditions gave space and air to the flourishing of informal and illicit arms and drug trades. Occasional security interventions and clashes, increasing over recent years, have done little to break these trades’ entrenchment. Instead, the volatile dynamic has deepened the isolation of both the village and its residents. The village, whose name roughly translates to sprinkle irrigation, was established only around six decades ago as part of a state-sponsored agricultural reclamation project. One of its farmers, Shazly, describes it to Mada Masr as still “the most famous village growing tomatoes in the governorate” of Aswan. So how has the village become a place whose name, for those in the area, is synonymous with drugs and weapons? The beginning of the road linking the desert to the village of Al-Ray bel-Rash in northern Aswan, September 2025. Photo: Mada Masr *** Al-Ray bel-Rash was established in 1968 as part of an agricultural reclamation project implemented by the Upper Egypt Agricultural Company in Wadi al-Radisiyah. When the company was liquidated in 1990, the lands it had reclaimed from the desert were broken up and re-apportioned to individual farmers — the company’s former employees — at reduced prices per feddan payable with a low interest rate over a 30-year period, on condition that the employees accept their redundancy from the company and be barred from applying to government jobs in the future. It’s here that the problems begin. According to an agricultural administration employee speaking to Mada Masr on condition of anonymity, when the Upper Egypt company was active, it cultivated only around 300 of the roughly 1,500 feddans that fall within the village’s official boundaries. But when the employees became land owners, they needed to make a living from farming and accumulate money to pay off the land’s cost and the interest. So, they sought to cultivate their new plots to the fullest possible extent. The village was not equipped to host all of this activity. Wadi Radisiyah begins at the villages of Tunab and Hasaya near the Nile, deepening eastward into the desert and passing through the villages of Bassaly, Zaqlouna, Raiya, reaching Al-Ray bel-Rash and Umm Salama before approaching the Nile again at the neighboring Adwa village. Al-Ray bel-Rash is more or less in the middle of this stretch, furthest from a water source at either end and surrounded by desert. To reach the village, Nile waters must first make a long journey via lifting stations and canals. The water that was sufficient for the company to cultivate roughly one-fifth of the village’s total area was no longer enough for the new owners to cultivate the entire tract. “The company handed over the lands on the basis they had an allocated water supply. In reality, farmers did not have any water allocation for a third of their land,” the employee says. Residents’ demands for an increased water share fell on deaf ears. The project was originally classified as land to be cultivated by sprinkle irrigation — giving the village its name. The employee says that while the company itself relied on flood irrigation to cultivate the lands, once the lands were redistributed, their official classification became a retort thrown back in the face of residents’ pleas. No agricultural association was established in the village to organize water distribution, and disputes began to flare up over the scarce resource, the employee says. Now, though the land needs watering every five to eight days, the irrigation cycle in the village can extend as long as 12 or 18 days, with some fields receiving no water at all. The employee estimates that by 2024 around 80 percent of the village’s lands were barren. Although Mada Masr is unable to independently verify the figure, it is consistent with farmers’ accounts of a widespread decline in cultivated areas. The situation worsened as irrigation infrastructure deteriorated. Abdou al-Nubi, who manages the water lifting station for Al-Ray bel-Rash, tells Mada Masr that the station has not been comprehensively renovated since the project’s establishment and that another station that lifts Nile water into the valley has also not been renewed since 1996. The system’s water collection basin has not been cleaned since 1986. Some of the pumps operate at about 10 percent capacity, says Nubi, while the Wadi Radisiyah canal itself needs lining and gradient adjustment to prevent water evaporation when the volume is high. The area is ill-equipped to serve residents in other ways, too. A local administrative unit employee speaking to Mada Masr says the village has no health clinic, post office or youth center. As a result, residents have to travel about 15 km to reach the Edfu General Hospital, more than half of which, he says, is along unpaved roads. The local unit employee says that the lands in the valley designated for public services were sold off in recent years, following the liquidation of Upper Egypt company’s assets. He adds that the land allocated for the agricultural cooperative association ended up in the hands of a man that village residents describe as a drug dealer. Even the village mosque has been closed since 2021 after the building became threatened with collapse, according to the residents who set up a prayer tent at their own expense. The deprivation extends along the valley. The main village of the reclamation project, Wadi al-Radisiyah, was once classified as among the 100 poorest villages in Egypt. It has since been included in the presidential Hayah Karima initiative. While the residents of Al-Ray bel-Rash believe their village is in a worse condition in terms of services, the village is not included in the initiative, with residents attributing the exclusion to the security situation. The conditions are compounded by the absence of public transportation serving the village. Saber, a driver from Al-Ray bel-Rash, says that during the day residents are transported back and forth by two pickup trucks — which are not equipped for carrying passengers — while at other times they rely on finding a passing truck or an agricultural tractor. Once daylight fades, the problem is no longer one of finding an appropriate vehicle but rather that drivers are worried to venture along the road at all. With the decline of agriculture and a dearth of alternatives, Shazly says drug dealers began buying land in the village and setting up outlets for their business, while leaving the land uncultivated. Land prices collapsed. A drug-trading outlet has been established next to Shazly’s own land. He says his land was previously valued at around LE400,000 and has now become worth less than half that amount. Nevertheless, he has refused an offer to sell it to a customer he described as another dealer, “so I could keep my neighbors safe from harm.” Dense areas of the invasive plant, heish, grow on abandoned farmland in Al-Ray bel-Rash, says the agricultural administration employee, lending partial concealment to dealers and users. While agricultural associations can, in theory, order landowners to clear land, some employees at the associations in neighboring villages are afraid of getting into confrontations with the owners. The same fear appears in the local unit employee’s account. He says that many government workers, including Electricity Ministry employees, are reluctant to go to the village to issue violation orders where land is being used for drug outlets or informal prospecting “mills” — the sites used by informal miners to crush and process gold-bearing rock which have also spread throughout the village over the past decade. A source who was formerly in a security role at the Edfu police precinct dates the expansion of the drug and arms trade in Wadi Radisiyah, which includes Al-Ray bel-Rash, to the years following the January revolution. He cites the 2011 kidnapping of the Tounab village mayor, Fawzy Ahmed Ali Makady, following a confrontation reportedly linked to the establishment of a drug-selling outlet in his village. Makady has not been seen since. In the following years, the valley and its villages began appearing in reports of clashes with Interior Ministry forces, with Al-Ray bel-Rash appearing particularly in reports concerning drugs and weapons. Beginning in 2020, press reports started using the phrase “Al-Ray bel-Rash dens” in coverage of security campaigns targeting the village. While weapons may have entered the village alongside the illicit drug trade, their presence has lent an extra layer of violence and volatility to local disputes. A 2020 disagreement between two families over a plot of land that escalated into an exchange of fire prompted security forces to cordon off the village. Killings spread over family or business disputes, sometimes involving shootings and stabbings — even between siblings. The disputes themselves are nothing new, according to Farag, one of the village’s farmers, but the means to settle them have changed. As he puts it, “back then, we used to fight with sticks. Now, even the slightest dispute between two families involves rifles.” More recently, the spread of informal mining has become increasingly intertwined with the other trades. In the years following the 2011 revolution, informal gold mining expanded across the Eastern Desert, with Edfu becoming one of the main departure points for dahaba heading into the mountains. Al-Ray bel-Rash is located near several routes that lead to the Edfu mountains. The proximity of Al-Ray bel-Rash to the desert has pushed some of its residents into informal mining, according to Shazly. The village also became a base for some miners and rock-processing mills, alongside the spread of the drug and arms trades. Stone-crushing and processing mills for quartz extracted from mining sites have spread throughout the area and surrounding villages. “Ever since the mills started operating [in Al-Ray bel-Rash], the electricity has been getting weaker,” Nubi says, as power has been diverted to the small informal processing plants. As gold prospecting brought high-value vehicles, ore and equipment into the area, it also increased the perceived need for armed protection. A mill owner in the village also links the expansion of mining to the spread of weapons, saying that carrying arms has become more common as competition over gold-mining sites intensified around 2018. “I have to get a weapon and ammunition to protect myself,” he explains. The overlap between the two activities is also evident in the most recent campaign itself. According to Bagga, the accusations against Hugairy involve not only stealing villagers’ vehicles, but also vehicles used by the dahaba. Farag attributes the rapid spread of weapons to conflicts erupting in late 2021 over informal mining sites in the Edfu mountains. Groups from tribes in the area were involved, he says, and the repercussions extended to the villages that miners travelled to the mountains from. “After that,” he says, “weapons increased in the village. Everyone wants to protect their crops and livestock.” As possession of rifles became more widespread, a market grew around them. Farag says an automatic rifle costs between LE150,000-200,000, while a bullet costs between LE120-140. Dealers also rent rifles for around LE1,000 a day to anyone who wants one, while ammunition can be bought on credit. If a debtor fails to repay, they could lose their land, car or home. Farag says the deteriorating security situation led him to consider selling his wife’s gold to buy a rifle to protect his family. He also believes that the involvement of members of local families in killings has drawn more people into cycles of pursuit and revenge, lamenting that “the number of thugs in our village increases by one every day.” *** Within this environment, the market for the drug shabu (crystal methamphetamine) has also expanded. Its spread was not limited to Al-Ray bel-Rash. As documented by Mada Masr in June 2025, the entire governorate has seen an expansion in the drug’s circulation, prompting community-led protests and action in several villages and areas across Aswan against drug-selling outlets. Some sources cited in the report linked the rise in shabu use to informal gold mining as it is often used as a stimulant for working long hours in the mountains. Shazly offers another explanation for the difficulty of confronting these activities: the village’s residents belong to multiple families and tribes, unlike some of the valley’s more socially homogeneous villages. In his view, this reduces the residents’ ability to take collective action against the dealers. He says the number of drug users among young people in the village and surrounding communities is constantly increasing. He describes a near-daily phenomenon of users visibly unconscious in the village streets. He also points to a connected increase in theft rate: “They even broke into the village cemetery and stole the iron rods used to build the graves.” In recent years, news outlets have also reported injuries resulting from fights inside the village and deaths as a result of gunshots or hanging, as well as armed clashes connected to the drug trade, some involving dealers and Interior Ministry forces. Among the incidents were clashes that began over competition to open a new drug outlet, the injury of a young man who passed near one of the selling outlets, and other confrontations that lasted for days as a result of disputes between groups linked to the drug trade. But for Shazly, the trade’s impact is more tangible in the reputation that has come to surround the village, increasingly isolating it from its surroundings and other nearby communities. This became particularly clear in 2023, when slogans reading “No to drugs. Shabu means death. Al-Ray bel-Rash is deadly” appeared in central areas of Edfu, as part of a community campaign against drug use. Source: Al-Nabaa Al-Watany newspaper, September 2023 Shazly says some families from surrounding villages have begun refusing their daughters marry young men from the village, “As soon as they find out the groom is from Al-Ray bel-Rash, they tell him, ‘Our daughter won’t live there.’” In June 2025, during protests over the spread of drugs in the governorate, residents of nearby Bassaly blocked the road leading to Al-Ray bel-Rash in protest against the spread of shabu, repeating the same anti-drugs slogans. The valley whose villages were once connected by a shared network of water and agriculture began to see some of its roads closed as fear of its central village grew. Abdou al-Samty, who bought land in Al-Ray bel-Rash about 25 years ago and made a living farming it, recounts how his eldest son began using shabu and then selling drugs. He ultimately kicked his son out. “I’m a simple man with no criminal record. I know nothing but farming. I live in a mud-brick house, and I’m content with earning an honest living,” Samty says. For him, the village that others have come to fear is also the place where he fears for his son, “I don’t want him to grow up, and I don’t want to lose him.” *** The conditions hang heavy over the village. When Mada Masr first visited in 2024, residents pointed to outlets on the main road that they said were used to sell drugs. The same happened during a second visit, in 2025, when the number of outlets appeared to have increased significantly, despite the Interior Ministry having demolished a few. The remains of the demolished structures could be seen in the form of rubble scattered across the farmland surrounding the road. During the first visit, weapons appeared before interviews could begin. As soon as the car transporting the Mada Masr reporter turned into Wadi Radisiyah toward the village, it was followed by a motorcycle carrying two armed men who seemed to have gotten wind of the visit as residents gathered at the host’s home. Upon the reporter entering the house, the two men fired several shots into the air. During the same reporter’s second visit, an armed man stopped them while filming in the village streets, before residents intervened to help them leave. While walking around on both occasions, the reporter saw armed men carrying automatic rifles shopping in village stores, as well as vehicles driving without license plates and fitted with heavy automatic weapons or carrying armed men. Some of the children and teenagers passing by on motorcycles were also carrying weapons. Spent bullet casings were scattered across the ground, and children were collecting and playing with them. A live bullet found by village children in the streets of Al-Ray bel-Rash in northern Aswan, September 2024. Photo: Mada Masr. For Shazly, these scenes shape the rhythm of daily life in the village. As afternoon sets in, activity begins to pick up around the drug outlets, while movement among the rest of the residents declines. Homes shut their doors, women and children venture out less, and travelling outside the village becomes more difficult. “The children kept waking up terrified at night,” Shazly says, as he talks about the gunfire, speculating that a large number of the village’s children deal with unintentional bed-wetting as a result. He has started turning up the television volume at night “so that the children can sleep,” he says, noting that on one occasion, the shooting reached the only primary school in the area during the school hours. Several women across the age spectrum recount similar stories linked to their fears of recurrent violence in the village and how it limits their movement and activities. One of the oldest women in the village, who spoke on condition of anonymity, recalls an entirely different version of life, “We used to go out with our men to plant. The man would work in the land, the woman would make a wicker mat or a dish, and the children would play around them.” Now says she is afraid to even go to her courtyard at night, as bullets often hit the residential properties. She explains that “satellite TV dishes and water tanks across the area are all punctured by bullets.” As for younger women, some say they will often go to the grocery store themselves rather than sending their children, as they fear for their safety amid the speeding cars used by arms and drug dealers and with the village’s streets frequently a scene of car chases and, at times, exchanges of gunfire. They also describe reducing their visits to neighboring villages, where many of their relatives reside, to specific hours of the day. “Now, if a woman stays with friends or family in a neighboring village beyond the afternoon, her husband tells her to stay there,” one of the women says. The women Mada Masr interviewed all share the same worry, in different forms. They are afraid their children will grow up to embody what they are surrounded with: struggling with addiction, entering the circles that deal in weapons and violence, or becoming victims of those circles. For Umm Saber, the fear has already become a reality. When her son objected to a shooting taking place in front of their house in 2024, he was shot dead with three bullets in front of her, she tells Mada Masr. *** Residents who spoke to Mada Masr say security officers sometimes blame them when they call the police for help, accusing them of allowing miners and drug dealers to live among them. Aboul Hassan, a tuk tuk driver from the village, says that in his experience having Al-Ray bel-Rash listed as his address on his national ID card can sometimes be enough to change the way police treat him at checkpoints, resulting in more stops, searches and suspicion. Nevertheless, many residents welcome security campaigns and the deployment of security forces inside the village. When a security force was stationed in Al-Ray bel-Rash following one of the killings, residents said some brought the officers food and tea, while one resident slaughtered a calf to celebrate their presence. The deployment meant people could leave their homes after sunset and sleep without worrying about another round of gunfire. But the force did not remain for long. According to the former police source’s account of one raid, a deployment consisting of three armored vehicles and a large number of cars entered the village before being forced to withdraw after about an hour of heavy gunfire from a small number of armed men. Mada Masr could not independently verify every detail of the incident, but it resembled a pattern that recurred in later reports and played out again on September 5: security deployments enter the village, ensued by clashes in which individuals are killed or injured and weapons are seized, followed by continued operation of illicit activities. Bagga, the village farmer, says the situation has deteriorated further since the beginning of this year. “Every day, you either find a dead person, or someone who has been beaten and robbed on the road, or that a house in the village has been robbed,” he says. “Day and night, the gunfire never stops.”The post How agricultural reclamation village Al-Ray bel-Rash became beset by weapons, drugs and the informal gold trade first appeared on Mada Masr.
