Hard-line Salafis called it a holy war. One television sheikh, Safwat Hegazy, explicitly threatened Christians who protested against Morsi. “You’re children of the homeland and partners in the homeland,” he said, “but we will never let it go that sixty percent of those standing at Ittihadiya palace are Nasara”—Nazarenes, a derogatory term for Christians.
“May God insult them and quicken their destruction,” another sheikh prayed on a Salafi television channel, and he claimed that the anti-Morsi demonstrators were drinking and fornicating in the tents outside the palace. “Grant victory to our religion and support to our president.”
“The rule is well known,” announced a third. “Their dead are in hell and our dead are in heaven.”
Around 4:00 P.M., hundreds of young Islamists poured out of a nearby mosque and converged on the sit-in. “Strength, will, faith, Morsi’s men are everywhere!” they chanted (it rhymes in Arabic), yanking up the tents and chasing away the few dozen demonstrators.
Mohamed Ismail, a twenty-eight-year-old coffee shop clerk, had been hanging around the tents. “They came from all sides and they punished us,” he told me when I arrived moments later. “I got slapped on the face and the back of my head.” (Others showed me video footage of the skirmish.)
Khaled Amin, the police general, had been stationed nearby. The Islamists “looked euphoric, high on their own power, like they were invincible,” he later told me.
I slipped home for dinner, thinking the scuffle was over. But Morsi’s opponents were rallying their troops. ElBaradei held a press conference to threaten a general strike. “We will not finish this battle for our freedom and dignity until we are victorious.”
I was working with a versatile new interpreter—I will call him Ibrahim here. He was a Coptic Christian with a long beard. Islamists took him for one of their own; so did anti-Islamists when they saw the cross tattoo on his wrist.
After nightfall, Ibrahim called to tell me that thousands of Morsi’s opponents were streaming back. We agreed to meet at the Roxy Cinema, a local landmark, but street fighting had closed off the roads. I got out of a taxi a few blocks away and tried to make my way among clusters of young men throwing rocks at one another. A tear gas canister landed at my feet. I joined a stampede, and when I got free of the gas I huddled with strangers by the fence around the Heliopolis Sporting Club.
A beefy, frat-boy-looking man with a crowbar crouched next to me and said he was with ElBaradei’s Constitution Party. He shrugged at the fighting. “After a while, you kind of get to enjoy it.”
When Ibrahim and I found each other, his Christian tattoo and Islamist beard enabled us to talk our way across the shifting battle lines. Both sides were using knives, clubs, chains, rocks, and Molotov cocktails. For the first time in Egypt, I heard gunfire from the ranks of civilians.
Gehad el-Haddad, Shater’s aide, later said that a friend standing next to him had taken a bullet to the neck. He bled out so quickly that Gehad and other Muslim Brothers said his last prayer for him.
A thirty-three-year-old journalist, Al Husseini Abu Deif, plunged into battle against the Islamists. “To every true revolutionary, if you find yourself facing a Muslim Brother shooting bullets at you, or holding a knife saying you are an atheist, tell him God is great and the revolution is greater than your gang,” he wrote that night on Twitter. “If I die there, I only ask you to continue the revolution!” He was shot and killed there.
Behind the Islamist lines, a boxy Lada cruised in circles with a loudspeaker roped to its roof. “This is not a fight for President Morsi,” a staticky voice intoned. “We are fighting for God’s law, against the secularists and liberals.”
Squadrons of riot police fired tear gas in all directions but never held their ground. After about 9:30 P.M., the only police I saw seemed to be attempting to separate the combatants along the neighborhood’s main commercial artery, El Khalifa el-Maamoun Street. The security forces were neither defending the palace nor dispersing the Islamists: they only added to the mayhem.
“The violence was unbelievable,” Amin told me later. “We were ordered not to open fire. We set up blockades, and the protesters ran and gathered behind the police vans, or we set up blockades in front of them. But the Muslim Brothers thought we were on their side and we were protecting Morsi. They did not want to attack us.” His twenty-three-year-old son was among the protesters fighting against Morsi and suffered a deep cut to his head.
I had seen plenty of clashes pitting protesters against police or paid thugs, and I knew about fights between Muslims and Christians; this was the first time I had ever seen so many ordinary Egyptians battle one another over politics. Dawoud, the ElBaradei spokesman, was horrified. “The Muslim Brotherhood in civilian clothes fighting against us in civilian clothes, and the central security—the people who used to beat me all the time—were standing by doing nothing! For the first time in my life I saw the seeds of civil war.”
By dawn, the Islamists had captured, detained, and beaten dozens of their opponents, holding them in a small guardhouse that the police had abandoned. Yehia Negm, a forty-two-year-old former diplomat, was one of the prisoners. When I met him days later, bruises darkened both of his eyes and he had a bloody scab across the bridge of his nose. He pulled up a sleeve to show me red rope marks.
“They accused me of being a traitor, or conspiring against the country, of being paid to carry weapons and set fires,” he told me. “I thought I would die.”
Ola Shahba, a member of a socialist party, had worn a hood and a helmet to the fight, to hide her gender. She said her Islamist captors had groped her when they pulled off her hood and saw she was a woman. “What embassy do you meet in and receive money from?” her attackers demanded.
A Brotherhood official tried to persuade the Islamists to release her, but some were hard-liners from outside the movement. “If they were just Muslim Brotherhood, we would’ve gotten her out since the first moment,” the official, Ahmed Sobei, said later.
“Did they beat people up? Yes, they did,” he said. “Thugs infiltrated both sides. It was impossible to tell who was on which side.”
The next morning, Islamists turned nearly 130 captives over to the district prosecutor, who—of course—immediately released them.
Hundreds had been injured in the fighting. At least eleven people died, mostly from gunshots. Aside from the journalist, all or almost all of the dead were Islamists, as far as I could tell. The Brotherhood insisted all the dead were Morsi supporters, and after great effort I was unable to confirm any non-Islamist deaths besides the journalist. Morsi’s opponents were better armed. But no one was innocent.
The trauma of that night is hard to overstate. Westerners may expect chaos in the Middle East. But Egyptians think of themselves as citizens of the world’s oldest nation, the cradle of civilization. Wild, amateur armies had stained the streets with the blood of their countrymen, in violence reminiscent of the last days of the monarchy. It felt like Syria, Libya, or Iraq, some failed state—not Egypt.
Walking away from the fighting, I met an Egyptian friend—Ahmed, a recent college graduate with an engineering degree and ambitions in solar energy. He said it reminded him of an American movie about the nineteenth-century slums of Manhattan—“Gangs of New York.”
Morsi gave a televised address the next night and he invited all the non-Islamist factions to the palace on Saturday to negotiate a compromise. But he also claimed the detainees captured by the Islamists had, in fact, been thugs paid by a “fifth column” of Mubarak-era profiteers. They were passing out “black money,” conspiring with foreign interests, and “giving out firearms.” He sounded more than ever like a bearded Mubarak.
Morsi “closed the door to any dialogue,” ElBaradei fired back on Twitter. Western diplomats often complained over the next months that Morsi refused to volunteer big concessions. But he made many invitations to negotiations and dialogue. The
opposition always declined them.
* * *
• • •
Ibrahim and I met again the next day, Friday, December 7, near Al Azhar to join a funeral march for Islamists killed in the fighting. A parade of thousands snaked through the medieval city wailing, chanting, and seething. Ibrahim’s beard fit right in. I felt safer having him with me.
Then an Islamist neighbor pointed him out to a friend. Moments later a tall man much bigger than either of us stepped out of nowhere, grabbed Ibrahim by the arm, and held up his wrist. The cross tattoo.
A small mob formed around us. They were sure Ibrahim was an infiltrator, a Christian spy. Why else would he disguise himself in a Salafi beard? Hands were all over him. A man slapped him hard on the ear. Ibrahim bent over in pain. I grabbed him and held up my press card.
Sahafi, sahafi—journalist, journalist—I said. The Islamists tried to pry me away. They meant me no harm, one of them told me. I was a guest in their country. Ibrahim was an Egyptian Copt. That was a different story.
Someone behind me lunged for Ibrahim, shoved into me, and knocked my eyeglasses off my face. They disappeared under the throng of marchers. I squinted and clutched at Ibrahim.
The mob parted for an older man with a graying beard and stern face. More trouble, I thought. The new authority figure took Ibrahim by an arm and pulled him through the crowd. I hung on to his other arm and bounced along behind like we were playing a game of Crack the Whip.
Trailed by a deferential posse, our captor dragged us past a chain-link fence into what appeared to be a schoolyard. The Islamists pulled up a pair of chairs and sat us down for an interrogation. We were journalists for the New York Times, I kept repeating, in English and Arabic. Ibrahim was murmuring in Arabic too fast and soft for me to follow, and a young man was using a mobile phone camera to film our interrogation. Was he hoping to record a confession? His video of my babbling, broken Arabic would turn up on the website of an anti-Islamist newspaper, Youm el-Saba—7 Days. The cameraman was the real spy.
The big man in charge grabbed Ibrahem and me by our elbows and we were on the move again. This time he found an Egyptian police officer and turned us both in. Moments later all three of us—Ibrahim, our Islamist captor, and I—were up several flights of stairs in the office of the chief of the local police precinct.
He had no interest in Ibrahim, but was I a spy? The chief peered intently at my Egyptian press card.
I breathed a sigh of relief. This happened all the time. Another policeman had taken my iPhone on the way in and, with typical professionalism, asked me if he could play games on it. So I borrowed back my phone and called the Egyptian government’s foreign media director. I knew he would vouch for me. I emailed colleagues, and they notified the American embassy. Meanwhile, the police chief, in classic Egyptian fashion, served tea and made small talk. The Islamist, Ibrahim, and I shared a couch, sitting side by side.
I wanted to make sure that the umbrella of the New York Times would shelter Ibrahim, too. I went on and on about how he was working for us, what an excellent interpreter he was, what a valued part of our team he was. I repeated the words “the New York Times” as often I could. I barely knew Ibrahim, but I tried through my warm tone to imply that he had worked with us for years.
That is when Ibrahim whispered in my ear. “Save yourself and get out,” he told me furtively. “I have a gun in my pocket.”
Maybe he packed it after the bloodshed of the previous night. Maybe he had had it then, too. Either way, if the police found the illegal and unregistered handgun in his jacket pocket, we were both going to jail.
I grinned. I sipped my tea. I chatted about the weather. I pretended that there was no place in the world I would rather be right then than in the office of this police chief. He spouted the customary nonsense about the pluralistic tolerance of the “real Egypt,” where Muslims and Christians always lived in harmony and never felt strife. And after a few hours, we all shook hands as friends. Thank God the Islamists had never searched us. The police—again, with their customary professionalism—never searched us either.
On our way down the stairs, our Islamist captor was feeling the spirit of the tolerant “real Egypt,” too. He stopped to tell us that the building housing the police station had belonged to the Muslim Brotherhood in the days of its founder, Hassan el-Banna. Ibrahim and the Islamist exchanged phone numbers and promised to stay in touch. I squinted home without my glasses.
Attacked by an Islamist mob: this was what worried my mother when I moved to Cairo. But the paranoia of the Islamists no longer seemed so irrational. Ibrahim had been the one with a gun.
I could see why an Egyptian Copt might want to arm himself. But the Islamists turned out to be right to suspect a bearded Christian. Without the protection of the law, each of us falls back on the protection of his tribe.
17
Murder, Rape, Christians, and Spies
December 8, 2012–March 9, 2013
On January 26, 2013, two years and a day after the start of the uprising, hundreds of men, women, and children huddled around car stereos and transistor radios outside the main prison in the city of Port Said, at the Mediterranean end of the Suez Canal. Twenty-one local soccer fans, some of them inside the prison, stood charged with murder in the deaths of seventy-four people killed in a stadium riot a year earlier, on February 1, 2012, under the rule of the generals. The families of the accused had gathered to hear the verdict from a judge in Cairo.
The riot had been among the deadliest in the history of soccer. Ultras backing rival teams from Port Said and Cairo had smuggled knives, clubs, and fireworks into the stadium. Some victims were stabbed to death. Others fell from balconies. More were crushed in a stampede for the exits. In all, at least five hundred had been injured.
Outside the prison, a hush fell over the crowd. Then a whisper moved through it. “Execution.” The judge, without explanation, had convicted and sentenced to death all twenty-one men.
Cell-phone videos of the next moment show a whiz of bullets. Someone in the crowd shot a guard outside the prison, and the police opened fire. Within a few hours, the police had killed at least twenty-one civilians. Someone had shot another deputy policeman. Violence engulfed the city. Hundreds of others were wounded. The hospitals were overwhelmed. Doctors were calling television and radio stations to plead for help from anyone with medical training. Rioters started attacking television cameras, and the live broadcasts ended.
Mayy el-Sheikh had grown up in Port Said. Her family there said the police had fled the streets, falling back into besieged stations and prisons. A police barracks was burning.
By 8:00 P.M., the Interior Ministry had declared, uncharacteristically, that this time there could be no “security solution” to the Port Said chaos. The army deployed troops to secure the canal and seaport. Egypt’s third largest city, with a population of about seven hundred thousand, had spun out of government control.
When Mayy and I arrived the next morning, tens of thousands were chanting for Port Said to secede from Egypt. An endless procession of mourners carried over their heads two-dozen-odd coffins—the bodies of those killed by the police. Chanting and wailing, the marchers snaked along the Mediterranean toward the city’s main cemetery, until the parade passed the walls of the Grand Sky Resort—a beachfront club exclusively for police officers.
Maybe a rock was thrown, maybe a taunt was shouted. However it started, the police in guard towers began firing tear gas everywhere. Coffins dropped to the ground. The bodies of dead “martyrs” sprawled on the sidewalk. I saw an angry mourner pull out a handgun, and we heard the crackle of gunfire from automatic weapons. Police gunmen were crouching and scurrying along the resort roof. Smoke rose from inside.
We pulled back toward the relative safety of the seaside cemetery, caught our breath, and crept back to try to assess the damage. At about 4:00 P.M., we saw a row of policemen standing side
by side on the pavement, firing straight ahead of them. That was enough. We fled for our lives.
When we reached our hotel, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry was on television declaring that not a single policeman in the city had carried a loaded weapon. “Infiltrating saboteurs” were the only ones shooting. Among the police, “there is only a small group pushing back against intense shooting.” Even the tear gas, he insisted, had come from civilians.
Morsi declared a state of emergency with a curfew in Port Said and in the neighboring canal cities. The rioting was “the ugly face of the counterrevolution,” he said, and then, to my astonishment, he thanked the police “for the great efforts they have exerted.”
“I sent my orders to the Ministry of Interior’s men, very clearly,” he said. I could not figure out if he was trying to win them over, or if he was afraid to admit his lack of control.
General Sisi the next day warned for the first time against what he called a possible “collapse of the state.” But he promised the military “will remain the hard, solid mass and the backbone” underneath that state.
When we left the next day, some stores were opening, carefully, but no representative of the central government dared show a face in the city. The state had pulled out of Port Said.
* * *
• • •
Cairo, too, felt increasingly lawless. That January, the Times had flown in a former commando with paramedic experience to train several of us in first aid for combat zones. He went for an evening walk by the Nile near our office, and two luckless thieves tried to mug him.
“One grabbed me and the other stabbed me with what could only be described as a sharpening steel,” the trainer wrote to me in an email the next day. “I disarmed him after being stabbed and gave him his weapon back (straight into the upper shoulder). The other one I still had hold of and subsequently dislocated his left arm. Not much to tell really. . . . Oh, by the way, the police said ‘they’ll look into it.’ LOL.”
Into the Hands of the Soldiers: Freedom and Chaos in Egypt and the Middle East Page 23