Cairo, Egypt - More than 13 million Egyptians voted for the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated candidate Mohamed Morsi in the presidential elections in 2012. One year later, as Morsi turns from the first democratically-elected, civilian president to deposed leader, a majority of Egyptians said in a recent poll that they agreed with the way two Brotherhood protest camps were cleared by security forces in recent weeks.
Last Wednesday, security forces cleared the Rabaa and Nahla square camps of Brotherhood supporters who were protesting the military order deposing Mosi, leaving hundreds of people dead and thousands injured. The military takeover followed mass protests by disgruntled Egyptians against the president and the Brotherhood more generally.
As senior officials from Brotherhood are arrested and hundreds of supporters are killed in protests, the future of the 80-year-old organisation, which is thought to be the largest Islamist group in the world, has become a matter of intense speculation.
Mohamed al-Qassas, a former member of the Muslim Brotherhood who left the organisation following the 2011 revolution, says that Morsi's rule was"catastrophic".
"That's why I participated in the June 30 mass protests against Morsi," the young defector said. He believes that what he considers Morsi's bad governance made a military coup inevitable. "But no-one imagined this level of violence against the Brotherhood,"
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