Pre-Arab Spring this would have been unimaginable.

CAIRO (AP) — Under Hosni Mubarak’s rule, Egypt’s authorities took a tough line on Egyptians coming home after waging “jihad” in places like Afghanistan, Chechnya or the Balkans, fearing they would bring back extremist ideology, combat experience and a thirst for regime change. In most cases, they were imprisoned and tortured.

But after Mubarak’s overthrow and his replacement by an elected Islamist president, jihad has gained a degree of legitimacy in Egypt, and the country has become a source of fighters heading to the war in Syria.

Egyptian militants are known to have been travelling to Syria to fight alongside Sunni rebels for more than year — but their movements were done quietly. But in recent days, a string of clerics have called for jihad in Syria, with some calling for volunteers to go fight against President Bashar Assad’s regime.

On Saturday, Morsi attended a rally by hard-line clerics who have called for jihad and spoke before a cheering crowd at a Cairo stadium, mainly Islamists. Waving a flag of Egypt and the Syrian opposition, he ripped into the Syrian regime, announced Egypt was cutting ties with Damascus and denounced Lebanon’s Shiite Hezbollah guerrillas for fighting alongside Assad’s forces.

Clerics at the rally urged Morsi to back their calls for jihad to support rebels. Morsi did not address their calls and did not mention jihad. But his appearance was seen as in implicit backing of the clerics’ message. It came after a senior presidential aide last week said that while Egypt was not encouraging citizens to travel to Syria to help rebels, they were free to do so and the state would take no action against them.

Khalil el-Anani, an Egyptian expert on Islamist groups, called the move “Morsi’s endorsement of jihad in Syria” and warned it was “a strategic mistake that will create a new Afghanistan in the Middle East.”

The new tone in Egypt risks fueling the flow of Egyptian jihadi fighters to Syria, where the conflict is already increasingly defined by the sectarian divide, with the mostly Sunni rebels fighting a regime rooted in the minority Alawite sect, an off-shoot of Shiite Islam, and backed by Shiite Iran and Hezbollah.

There are no official figures on how many Egyptians have gone to Syria to fight. Security officials monitoring the movement of militants estimate as many as 2,500 have gone, and their numbers are likely to significantly pick up after Hezbollah’s intervention.