In a continuous fight that raged through the night and into the next morning, somewhere between 600 and 1,500 people were injured, and many were killed, especially when “heavy gunfire broke out after 10 p.m. while the opposing factions traded Molotov cocktails from one rooftop to another, setting small fires that continued to burn but did not spread.”74 After initially standing back from armed confrontation with the regime, the Brotherhood had reversed its position after the battle for the Q asr al-Nil bridge, calling for all able-bodied young men to join the protest on Tahrir Square. Now the Brotherhood and the Ultras cooperated in an ad hoc alliance against their attackers.
As an underground network that had been illegal in Egypt for a generation, the Brotherhood didn’t have a lot of experience operating in the open street, but what it did have was an organized and disciplined cadre structure. Now the Brotherhood organized the protestors into teams and helped plan their defense against the regime attacks, breaking pavement up into chunks to be thrown, building barricades, and organizing a defensive line.
“The youth of the Muslim Brotherhood played a really big role,” [April 6 Movement founder Abdul] Maher said. “But actually so did the soccer fans [who] are always used to having confrontations with police at the stadiums,” he said. Soldiers of the Egyptian military . . . stood watching from behind the iron gates of the Egyptian Museum as the war of stone missiles and improvised bombs continued for 14 hours until about four in the morning. Then, unable to break the protestors’ discipline or determination, the Mubarak forces resorted to guns, shooting 45 and killing 2. . . . The soldiers—perhaps following orders to prevent excessive bloodshed, perhaps acting on their own—finally intervened. They fired their machine guns into the ground and into the air, several witnesses said, scattering the Mubarak forces and leaving the protestors in unmolested control of the square, and by extension, the streets.75
By the morning of February 3, as the sun rose over the chaos and the smoke and tear gas began to clear, it was clear that Egypt’s political landscape had changed forever: the regime could no longer count on the support of the military. Army troops had refused to fire on their own citizens: in fact, they had intervened to protect anti-regime protestors on the square and to disperse the pro-regime irregulars. For their part, the police—though generally loyal to the regime—had been defeated in the field in two successive major engagements. In terms of competitive control theory, the protestors (especially the Ultras) had shown sufficient capability at the coercive end of the spectrum to defeat the police in a straight fight, and because the police could no longer rely on the military (the ultimate coercive sanction on which the government’s entire normative system rested) the regime as a whole was now being outcompeted, leaving the protestors in control of the cities.
Reflecting this change in the relative balance of power, no security vacuum emerged when the police were forced to withdraw from many districts in Cairo—local citizens’ committees and neighborhood watch groups, most of which opposed the regime even if they hadn’t taken a direct hand in the uprising, immediately seized control. Other cities—notably Alexandria (hometown of Khaled Said), Mansoura, Suez, Port Said, and many smaller towns—were in uproar, with regime control completely breaking down in Alexandria, and Mansoura declared a “war zone” and evacuated by police. A week later, after continued mass demonstrations in Tahrir Square, and amid rumors of an impending military coup, President Mubarak stepped down in disgrace, handing control to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), whose leaders immediately promised major concessions and a transition to full democracy.
Mubarak’s departure was, of course, by no means the end of the Egyptian revolution. Violent mass demonstrations, as well as online and street-level activism, continued throughout 2011 and 2012 and into 2013, under both SCAF and the elected Muslim Brotherhood government of Mohammed Morsi. And Ultras from several clubs were involved in deadly stadium riots and urban unrest. But the first days of the uprising showed a clear evolution beyond the techniques used in Tunisia—both on the part of pro-democracy protestors and by the regime and its supporters—into a form of network-enabled urban revolution.
The regime’s attempts to oppose this revolution online (by suspending the Internet and cellphone networks, and through the Electronic Army) and on the ground (with riot police and pro-regime militia) backfired spectacularly, only helping to mobilize the mass of the Egyptian people and drawing in an ad hoc network of international supporters such as Anonymous and Telecomix. Ultimately, the uprising involved, as we’ve seen, components of both an “air war” (online and media) and a “ground war” (street and urban fighting), enabled by access to the Internet and cellphones, and by the alliance of real-world groups such as the Ultras and the Brotherhood with online activists, mass movements such as April 6, and social media groupings including We Are All Khaled Said. All these elements, which depended for their success on a sufficient density of tech-savvy population with access to communications technology, electricity, and the Internet, were artifacts of the predominantly urban, highly networked environment, in which the revolution took place.
If Egypt’s revolution was in some ways a larger, more intense version of the Tunisian uprising, then what was about to happen in Libya was to be something else entirely. President Mubarak’s quick climb-down and the restraint shown by Egypt’s powerful army stopped the uprising from escalating into insurgency. In Libya, events were to take a sharply different turn.
“A Savage Rampage”: Network-Enabled Insurgency in Libya
On February 15, 2011, four days after Mubarak resigned, and just over a month after the fall of Ben Ali, protests began in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi.
Since mid-January, responding to events in Tunisia and Egypt, President Gaddafi had been cracking down on activists and tightening security in towns across Libya, including Benghazi—Libya’s second-largest city and capital of the eastern region, known as Cyrenaica.76 Gaddafi had flown weapons and mercenaries into desert oases in southern Cyrenaica and into Libya’s southwestern region of Fezzan in a series of cargo flights from the Republic of Belarus, whose president, Aleksandr Lukashenko, was one of his few allies.77 He’d given a speech decrying the protests, saying that the fall of the Tunisian regime “pained him” and claiming that WikiLeaks and foreign ambassadors had “led protestors astray.”78 He would later call the Libyan protestors “greasy rats,” blame their actions on hallucinogenic drugs in their Nescafé, call for them to be shot without trial, and attribute the uprising to forces as diverse as al Q aeda and America.79
Libya, as noted, has the highest level of coastal urbanization in the Mediterranean, with fully 85 percent of its people living in urban areas on coastlines. Indeed, just two coastal cities—Benghazi (with 1.1 million people) and Tripoli, the capital (with 1.55 million)—together account for almost half of Libya’s total population of 5.6 million.80 This is a huge level of urban concentration, even for coastal North Africa. Like towns in Tunisia and Egypt, Libyan cities had experienced rapid population growth in the decade before the uprising, and though overall per capita income was higher and education levels better in Libya than in either Tunisia or Egypt, urban youth unemployment was still significant, there were ominous inequalities and injustices among various population groups, and the average age of the population (twenty-four years old) reflected a similar urban youth bulge.81
Beside these general sources of unrest, there was a strong interregional dynamic: Libya’s economy depends on petroleum exports, and much of the oil and gas that drives these exports comes from Cyrenaica. Yet throughout his forty-two-year rule, Gaddafi (who came from Sirte, in Libya’s western region of Tripolitania) had favored communities in and around Tripoli. The regime neglected Cyrenaica, allowing Benghazi’s infrastructure to decay and—in the view of many residents—denying the city its due political influence.82 This was particularly galling for Cyrenaicans because King Idris as-Senussi, Libya’s Cyre
naica-born monarch whom Gaddafi had overthrown in a coup in 1969, had treated Benghazi and Tripoli as coequal centers, dividing his time between the two cities. As a consequence, cities in eastern Libya saw frequent unrest and protests throughout the Gaddafi regime, with periodic demonstrations and violence against officials and security forces, and a major uprising in 1996 that the secret police (the Mukhabarat al-Jamahiriya) suppressed with great bloodshed. Beside this tradition of unrest, eastern Libya had excellent connectivity with Egypt, and there was a history of events in Egypt influencing conditions in Cyrenaica. After Mubarak’s fall, it was thus only a matter of days before unrest began to affect Libya.
On February 15, several hundred demonstrators gathered in front of the Revolutionary Committee (local government) center in Benghazi, then marched to police headquarters to protest the detention of Fatih Terbil, a lawyer representing the families of more than a thousand detainees killed by the secret police in Abu Salim jail, Tripoli, after the 1996 uprising. As in Tunisia and Egypt the protests began peacefully, but when police attacked the demonstrators, killing twenty-four, the National Conference for the Libyan Opposition (an umbrella group like those in Tunisia and Egypt) called for a Day of Rage on February 17. Mass demonstrations broke out that day—sponsored both by pro-democracy activists and by regime supporters mobilized to drown out the protest—and rapidly turned deadly as security forces fired tear gas, rubber bullets, water cannons, and ball ammunition into the crowds. Dozens were killed. Numerous observers reported mercenaries and Mukhabarat in plain clothes roaming Tripoli in unmarked cars, committing drive-by shootings against any group of more than three people on the street in an effort to dissuade protestors from gathering.83 As in Tunisia, the regime attacked protestors’ funerals, and this heavy-handed brutality created such an immense popular backlash that the number of demonstrators swelled dramatically, with many violently confronting police in towns across the country. 84
On February 21, after a week of rioting, rebels in Benghazi announced the formation of a provisional government, the National Transitional Council. The council sought recognition from the international community, reinstated the royal tricolor of independent Libya to replace Gaddafi’s plain green revolutionary banner, and declared its intention to overthrow the regime, by force if necessary. This prompted the immediate resignation of Libya’s entire mission at the United Nations in New York and the defection of Libyan ambassadors to China, India, Indonesia, and Poland.85 Mustafa Abdul Jalil, the former justice minister, defected to become head of the National Transitional Council and called for an end to the regime. A former interior minister and several army generals later joined the rebels. The same day, two Libyan air force pilots defected to Malta with their Mirage fighters, in protest at being ordered to bomb demonstrators on the streets of Benghazi, while French workers from an offshore oil platform near Benghazi fled by helicopter, also to Malta.86
Like the French oil workers, most of the 1.5 million expatriates in Libya (many employed in the economically critical oil and gas sector) were “scrambling for the border, or waiting from help from their governments. Several passenger ferries [were] waiting in the choppy waters off the coast of Benghazi for any evacuation order,” and the harbors of Brega and Benghazi were crowded with refugees.87 Convoys of expatriate workers headed along the coast road for the Egyptian and Algerian borders, and international companies pulled workers out and closed facilities. The regime’s control was unraveling fast.
Though the uprising centered on Benghazi and other eastern cities, towns in Tripolitania—including Zintan, Yefren, Misurata, and Tripoli itself—were also experiencing unrest, with police stations on fire and violent battles in the streets. Far from remaining peaceful or taking the path of civil disobedience as in Tunisia and Egypt, the Libyan uprising was fast evolving into a military struggle—a proto-insurgency. Resistance groups were forming on their own initiative, seizing weapons from the regime, arming themselves, allying with military and police defectors, capturing and holding territory, and establishing local neighborhood watch groups to administer the areas they had liberated from regime control.88 This was classic competitive control behavior, with numerous groups struggling for dominance over the same key terrain—almost exclusively the coastal cities, the routes between them, and people living in those areas. The competition had a hard coercive edge: there was much brutality and little quarter given on all sides.
Libyans were now using the expression intifadat al-Libya (Libyan uprising) to describe the revolt, implying an armed insurgency, alongside the generic term at-thawra (the revolution), which protestors had used in Egypt and Tunisia. Insurgent groups were forming simultaneously alongside the continuing mass civil unrest in Libya’s cities—a civilian pro-democracy movement and a diverse armed resistance were thus emerging in parallel. The death toll had passed one thousand, with thousands more wounded, and police, troops, and mercenaries were firing into crowds in Tripoli and other cities, killing dozens every day. It was clear that this was going to be different from, and far more intense than, the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt. The protests were more violent, the protestors were better armed, and President Gaddafi—spooked by the rapid collapse of regimes to his east and west—was showing a great deal of fight. Besides rallying supporters to stifle protests and having the security forces, including the army, immediately escalate to lethal force against the demonstrators, Gaddafi’s regime had created an Electronic Army in a similar vein to Egypt’s, but with a much more active strategy of hacking, spoofing, and breaking up anti-regime networks, as well as using phishing techniques to identify the locations of online regime opponents, who would then be arrested or killed. Gaddafi quickly imposed a near-total media and Internet blackout on the country, cutting off web access as early as February 18, making it extremely difficult for outsiders and Libyans alike to understand what was happening, but also having the unintended effect of blinding his own Electronic Army, undermining his own awareness of the insurgents’ “air war.”
As in Egypt, when the Libyan regime blocked international news media, social media networks stepped into the breach, enabled by the fact that virtually all the fighting was in urban centers, which initially had good cellphone coverage. Besides passing information to the outside world—mainly cellphone videos and photographs smuggled out to Al Jazeera television and rebroadcast into Libya—social media networks emerged as remote command-and-control nodes that played a practical coordination and logistics role. Social media, in this sense, besides the “air war” function of popular mobilization as in Tunisia and Egypt, also performed a command function like that of the Mumbai raiders’ Karachi control room, though in this case the command system was distributed through multiple networks and remote platforms, rather than concentrated in a single node. Twitter was used “to transmit information on medical requirements, essential telephone numbers and the satellite frequencies of Al Jazeera—which [was] continuously being disrupted . . . Social networking sites have supplied the most graphic images of the crackdowns on protestors, but also broadcast messages from hospitals looking for blood, rallied demonstrators and provided international dial-up numbers for those whose internet has been blocked. Libyan activists also asked Egyptians to send their SIM cards across the border so they could communicate without being bugged.”89
John Pollock, in a brilliant piece of contemporaneous reporting on the uprising, highlighted the ways in which social media and online tools began to fulfill these practical military functions. We’ve already looked at his account of the engagement outside Yefren in which Sifaw Twawa’s team destroyed the Grad launcher with help from virtual advisers over Skype, an example of something closely approaching nonstate remote warfare. He also describes how activists in Benghazi reacted to the regime’s downing of the Internet on February 18: “Internet and cell-phone access was cut or unreliable for the duration, and people used whatever limited connections they could. In Benghazi, [a citizen journalist named] Mohammed �
��Mo’ Nabbous realized he had the knowledge and the equipment, from an ISP business he had owned, to lash together a satellite Internet uplink. With supporters shielding his body from potential snipers, Nabbous set up dishes, and nine live webcams, for his online TV channel Libya Alhurra (‘Libya the Free’), running 24/7 on Livestream.”90
Nabbous gave interviews to international media, created the nucleus of what later became the Rebel Media Center, and inspired international supporters much as activists in Tunisia and Egypt had done. “Nabbous had only enough bandwidth to broadcast,” says Pollock, “so volunteers [in Europe and elsewhere in the Middle East] stepped forward to capture and upload video. Livestream took an active role, too: it archived backups several times a day, dedicated a security team to guard against hackers, and waived its fees. Others ran Facebook groups or monitored Twitter, pasting tweets and links into the chat box.”91 A self-organizing corps of volunteers, many of whom had never met a Libyan or been to Libya, thus became critical to the Libyan intifada.
As well as getting the message out, these volunteers provided training in first aid, taught Libyans how to communicate securely via Skype and email, and gave intelligence support to the rebels by passing updates on regime actions and weapons sightings. Steen Kirby, a high school student in the American state of Georgia, was one such volunteer: “As well as identifying weaponry, Kirby pulled together a group through Twitter to quickly produce English and Arabic guides to using an AK47, building makeshift Grad artillery shelters, and handling mines and unexploded ordnance, as well as detailed medical handbooks for use in the field. These remotely crowd-sourced documents were produced in a matter of days, then shared with freedom fighters in Tripoli, Misurata, and the Nafusa Mountains.”92 The American broadcaster Andy Carvin, of National Public Radio, used Twitter to crowd-source weapons technical intelligence: it took his Twitter followers only thirty-nine minutes to correctly identify an unusual parachute-equipped bomb seen lying on the docks during fighting in Misurata—it turned out to be a Syrian-made variant of the Chinese Type 84 air-scatterable mine, which regime forces were dropping from helicopters over the city and harbor. Carvin’s effort to identify the mine was permanently recorded on the social networking site Storify.com—this was the Type 84’s first known use in war.93
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