On October 6, 1981, Anwar Sadat sat on a reviewing stand in Cairo to watch a parade honoring the war he had launched eight years earlier; the men who broke ranks and ran toward him that afternoon wore the same uniform as the soldiers standing guard beside him.

Anwar Sadat had crossed the Suez Canal once already, in 1973, and lived to spend eight years celebrating it. What he did not survive was the anniversary.

Sadat had not been born to power. He grew up one of thirteen children in a village in the Nile Delta, attended one of the first British-run military academies open to Egyptians, and there met a fellow officer named Gamal Abdel Nasser. The two men organized secretly against British rule for years afterward; the British jailed Sadat in 1942 for conspiring with German agents against them, and jailed him again in 1946 over a political assassination he was later acquitted of. He joined Nasser's Free Officers movement, helped overthrow the monarchy in 1952, and served on and off as Nasser's vice president through the 1960s. When Nasser died of a heart attack in 1970, Sadat succeeded him. Analysts at the time widely expected him to be a transitional figure, easily managed and soon replaced. He surprised most of them twice: first by launching the 1973 war with a secrecy so tight that even much of his own military command learned the timing only hours ahead, then by making a separate peace with the enemy he had just fought.

What was the parade actually for?

Every October 6, Egypt marks the day its army crossed the canal and broke through Israeli lines at the opening of the war Egyptians call the October War (Israelis call it the Yom Kippur War). The crossing did not win that war outright, but it restored enough Egyptian pride, and enough Egyptian leverage, to make a negotiated peace with Israel politically survivable. Sadat spent the rest of the decade using it. In 1977 he became the first Arab head of state to visit Israel; in 1978 he and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin negotiated the Camp David Accords under Jimmy Carter's mediation, and that December the two men shared the Nobel Peace Prize. The gains and losses arrived together: Egypt got the Sinai Peninsula back, and Egypt got expelled from the Arab League for ten years, suspended from 1979 to 1989 for making peace without the rest of the Arab world's consent.

The 1981 parade was billed as a tribute to the crossing. For four soldiers riding in an army truck near the reviewing stand, it was an opportunity created by the peace.

Who was waiting in that truck?

Lieutenant Khalid al-Islambuli commanded an artillery unit assigned to the parade route through Cairo's Nasr City district. As his truck drew level with the stand, he forced the driver to halt, jumped down with three grenades hidden under his helmet, and walked toward Sadat shouting that he had killed the Pharaoh. Three other soldiers followed him out of the truck firing automatic rifles into the crowd of officials. The attack lasted about two minutes. Sadat, shot four times, was airlifted to a military hospital and died there almost two hours later; ten more people were killed alongside him, and 28 were wounded, among them Ireland's defense minister and a Coptic Orthodox bishop.

Vice President Hosni Mubarak sat within arm's reach and took a bullet through the hand, his only injury. Within a week he was president of Egypt.

Who was actually behind it?

Islambouli and four co-defendants were tried, convicted, and put to death on April 15, 1982, two by firing squad and three by hanging. Egyptian prosecutors traced the plot to Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a cell organized around a civil engineer named Muhammad Abd al-Salam Faraj, whose pamphlet The Neglected Duty argued that armed struggle against an insufficiently Islamic ruler was as much a religious obligation as prayer. The official account has not gone unchallenged. Tal'at Fu'ad Qasim, a former leader of the rival militant group Gama'a al-Islamiyya, later claimed it was his own organization that recruited Islambouli and planned the operation, with Egyptian Islamic Jihad brought in only afterward. Historians still cite both versions. The honest answer is that the lines between Egypt's Islamist militant factions in 1981 were blurrier than either group's later telling allows.

Was the peace worth what it cost him?

That argument outlived Sadat by decades, and it has never fully settled.

Supporters point to a fact that has now held for more than four decades: the Egypt-Israel treaty is the oldest surviving peace agreement in the modern Middle East, and the two countries have not gone back to war. Critics point to what came before the assassination rather than after it. That September, weeks ahead of the parade, Sadat's government had jailed more than 1,500 opposition figures, journalists, and clerics in a sweep Sadat defended as a matter of state stability and his assassins later cited as one more reason he deserved to die. The treaty is the harder fact to argue away. A peace that has now outlasted the man who signed it by more than four decades did not need his crackdown to survive; it needed only to hold, and it has.

What is left of that day?

Ronald Reagan sent three former presidents to the funeral rather than attend himself, on the advice of the Secret Service. Nixon, Ford, and Carter flew to Cairo together in what remains the only time three former American presidents shared a plane. Hardly any Arab head of state came; Begin, leading Israel's delegation, walked behind the coffin in a country that had spent two years treating his own presence there as a minor miracle.

Islambouli's name outlived the argument about who had actually commanded him. Tehran named a street after him within a few years of his execution, hailing him as a martyr, and the sign stood as a standing insult to Cairo for four decades even after a brief 2004 attempt to rename it. In June 2025, with Iran and Egypt cautiously rebuilding ties, Tehran's city council finally took the name down, replacing it with one honoring Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader killed by Israel the year before. Officials on both sides called it a diplomatic gesture, and it was one. It is also, whether either government meant it this way, a small sign that the fight Sadat died in the middle of is still being fought, just with different names on the street signs now.

Sources

• "Assassination of Anwar Sadat," Wikipedia, accessed 2026
• HISTORY.com, "The president of Egypt is assassinated," This Day in History
• Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, "The Assassination of Anwar Sadat"
• The Nobel Prize, "The Nobel Peace Prize 1978," nobelprize.org
• The New Arab, "Iran renames Sadat assassin street to ease rift with Egypt" (2025)