[3] According to Ali, he started work at the age of 15 in his father's gold shop in order to support his parents and siblings financially.

Around 2017, Kamel el-Wazir, the head of the army engineering authority, obtained an audio recording of Ali mocking el-Sisi and other generals.

Ali applied for residency in Spain and settled there with his family, completing the move in August 2018 with the end of his children's school term.

[4] Ali's videos outline specific incidents and directly accuse well-known military individuals, including Major-Generals Kamel al-Wazir and Essam al-Kholy.

According to Omar Said and Rana Mamdouh writing in Mada Masr, the governmental campaign "did not refute the substance of [Ali's] claims.

[10] On 21 September, Al Jazeera English estimated that "thousands" of protestors had participated in the previous day's protests in eight different Egyptian cities.

He said in a late October 2019 interview with Middle East Eye that in response to his videos, he had been contacted by many groups, and that the opposition to el-Sisi had become unified.

[14] Leila Arman, writing in Mada Masr, describes Ali showing charisma in his videos, with a character "of the intrepid blue-collar badass.

She summarises stating that Ali "portrays a realistic dramatic character, and then he asks the audience to play the hero with him, to enter the frame.