Into the Hands of the Soldiers: Freedom and Chaos in Egypt and the Middle East

by David D. Kirkpatrick

  Putting a gun to the head of the old man, a riot policeman told him, “What we are doing is for the sake of God. We are killing you hypocrites.”

  The interim prime minister later said that “close to a thousand” civilians had died that day at Rabaa. A yearlong study by Human Rights Watch released in 2014 determined that the deaths almost certainly exceeded that number and confirmed the names of at least 817 of the dead. “The indiscriminate and deliberate use of lethal force resulted in one of the world’s largest killings of demonstrators in a single day in recent history,” the study concluded. Rabaa surpassed the Tiananmen Square massacre in China in 1989 and the Andijan massacre in Uzbekistan in 2005.

  Families and human rights groups told me that government coroners were forcing families to accept falsified death certificates to hide the real death toll (a common practice to lower riot statistics in many Arab autocracies).

  “About three hundred deaths were written off as suicides,” Khaled Amin, the former brigadier general in the police, later told me. “As though everyone just decided to kill themselves that day! Hospitals and morgues were pressured to do it. They told the families, ‘Call it a suicide or you don’t get your kids.’”

  I tried for years to find a soldier or policeman who participated in the operation and would tell his side of the events. Each one refused or backed out. Some told intermediaries that members of the security forces were afraid to be caught talking about it to a Westerner.

  The official story was a variation of the one that the Egyptian police have told many times to explain excessive violence: The demonstrators fired the first shot. The security forces, enraged by a noble zeal, avenged their fallen comrades. “They started shooting and three martyrs fell from our side in less than forty-five minutes,” a police general insisted in a television interview a few days later. “So how can we deal with gunfire? We can’t just say, ‘Be quiet.’” He maintained that the police had restrained themselves as best they could. “If we had kept firing shots, everyone there would have died.”

  Then he added, even less plausibly, that most of the dead civilians were killed by “friendly fire” from other Islamists anyway.

  None of this, of course, was ever remotely corroborated.

  Amin later told me that the security forces had used their standard procedure for any major operation. The senior officers “charged up” the rank and file before the clearing of Rabaa ever began. The commanders reminded the troops about their friends and colleagues who had been killed in the past by violent Islamists and warned that the Rabaa sit-in was heavily armed. Prepare for fierce, violent resistance, the commanders instructed. The Islamists inside wanted the blood of the police.

  “They really pump them up,” Amin said. “The message is, ‘They killed your friends, they have guns, they will kill you, they are scary.’ The officers manipulate you emotionally and charge you up, so you can fire on others.”

  Amin had retired at the beginning of that summer, but he stayed in touch with his colleagues. “No one talks about it because it is unforgivable,” he told me years later. “Those who regret it are too scared to talk, and those who don’t regret it are quiet.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Sisi’s government decreed a 7:00 P.M. curfew. Military checkpoints sprang into place across the city. Cairenes had scoffed at curfews during Mubarak’s last days. Activists and intellectuals had defiantly headed out at night as if it were a matter of high principle. But on the night of August 14, 2013, Cairo was as still as a graveyard. Laura and our sons had recently returned from the United States to Cairo, and they spent the day within a few blocks of home for fear of the violence. I fell asleep at 4:00 A.M. at a cheap hotel near the New York Times bureau, and the next morning I headed to another mosque a few blocks from Rabaa.

  The Muslim Brotherhood had turned the gymnasium-size sanctuary of the mosque into another improvised morgue. Hundreds of corpses wrapped in white sheets were laid out in neat rows on the floor in the midday August heat. Men walked among them spraying antiseptic into the air. Others wheeled coolers containing large blocks of ice and put one on each dead chest to reduce the smell. They had been at it all night. Water from the melting ice had soaked the carpet.

  I moved through the room, counting corpses—I got to 240 even though the removal process had been going on for many hours, and this was only one of many repositories of the dead killed at Rabaa. Many of the bodies were charred beyond recognition, incinerated in their tents.

  Tables in a corner displayed rows of identification cards taken from the dead to help families claim them. A small boy about the size of my four-year-old son, Emmett, was asleep on a dry patch of carpet between the tables.

  Outside, a cluster of men ignored pleas from the mosque loudspeaker to disperse in order to avoid attracting the security services. “Shoot anyone in uniform,” one man said. “It doesn’t matter if the good is taken with the bad, because that is what happened to us last night.”

  Others reassured him that the bloodbath would turn the Egyptian public against the army. “It is already happening,” one insisted.

  But at the site of the massacre, I found a scene of jubilation. Workers in orange jumpsuits were removing rubble and washing away the bloodstains from the charred ground outside the Rabaa al-Adawiya Mosque. Soldiers and riot police stuck their chests out like heroes. Civilians stopped to congratulate them. A group of young men was dancing to music blasting from the stereo of a nearby parked car. It was the summer’s omnipresent hit: “Bless the Hands” of the soldiers.

  As life took us for a turn

  A voice filled with kindness said,

  “May our hands be severed from our bodies

  If they ever touch Egyptians.”

  The vow of a real man, son of a real man

  We swear you kept your promise.

  26

  Jihadis in the White House

  August 15, 2013

  President Obama, on vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, convened a meeting of his National Security Council by teleconference, and now he was no longer so detached or pragmatic. The massacre was hardly unexpected. Essam el-Haddad warned that bloodshed was inevitable. Of course, only violence could break the opposition to the ouster of Egypt’s first elected president. Indeed, Sisi’s ministers had vowed repeatedly to use all necessary force to eradicate the demonstrators, and everyone knew that the police worked at two speeds: lazy or lethal. The security forces had already carried out two mass shootings in July, killing dozens at a time. But Obama, the Pentagon, and others in the White House were somehow surprised. The president was furious now.

  “That is not what we were expecting after we had not reacted as harshly as we might have to the unconstitutional change of power,” one senior official, who spoke with Obama that day, later told me. “We were surprised that they would be so ruthless, brutal, and public in their brutality.”

  Samantha Power, by then UN ambassador, was on the conference call with national security staff.

  “He said, ‘They just mowed down hundreds of unarmed people. We are allied with a government that is just shooting people in the street,’” Power recalled.

  “He was more angry and more horrified than anyone in the Situation Room.”

  But again Kerry, Hagel, and the Pentagon argued that punishing the Egyptian military would diminish American influence.

  Obama delivered a televised address at 10:30 A.M. “Our traditional cooperation cannot continue as usual when civilians are being killed in the streets and rights are being rolled back,” he said. He announced the cancellation for the year of a biannual joint military exercise, known as Bright Star. Two months later, in October, the White House suspended the $1.3 billion in annual military aid to Egypt, “pending credible progress toward an inclusive, democratically elected civilian government through free and fair elections.”

  Egypt was
America’s closest Arab ally. We may never know if the Arab Spring might have turned out differently had the United States taken a more consistent position toward events in Cairo, or if Washington had pressed its Persian Gulf allies harder to respect the elections in Egypt. Now the administration was more deeply divided than ever: Kerry, Hagel, and others argued that resuming the aid was the only way to retain any sway with Egypt. Power and Rhodes argued that capitulating completely relinquished Washington’s influence and credibility.

  “It was a surreal experience,” Philip Gordon, the White House coordinator for the Middle East, said, looking back. “Neither side believed their policy was going to have any effect on Egypt.”

  Vexed by the aid suspension, Pentagon officials called Rhodes, Power, and others on the National Security Council staff “the Muslim Brotherhood caucus” or “the jihadis in the White House.”

  27

  Retribution

  August 14, 2013–June 1, 2017

  A violent backlash broke out across the country as soon as the assault on the sit-in began. As the soldiers and policemen moved into Rabaa al-Adawiya Square, mobs of Muslims in other towns attacked dozens of churches, blaming Christians for supporting the coup. Kerdasa, a town west of Cairo, had been a hub of Islamist militancy for decades. Gunmen stormed its police station, executed fourteen officers, and left their bodies strewn on the floor.

  Graffiti calling Sisi a murderer sprang up all over Cairo, even in the affluent blocks surrounding our villa. CC qatil. Sisi is a killer, written using the two English Cs to stand for his name.

  The streets were deserted on Friday morning, August 16, two days after the massacre. The army stationed soldiers and a tank at the entrance to our neighborhood. Laura and the boys planned to spend the day in the safety of Maadi House, the club run by the American embassy. They were virtually the only Western family who had returned to Cairo after the summer. They had the place all to themselves. Work crews were raising the exterior walls and adding barbed wire.

  I picked up Mayy, for safety in numbers, and we drove downtown together. We did not get far. A dozen men in civilian clothes carrying Kalashnikovs had closed the elevated highway over Bassetine, just northeast of Maadi. At first I thought that they might be Islamists, or maybe carjackers.

  Then I saw some lean over the edge of the roadway and point their guns at the Bassetine police station. No one was shooting back, so these were the police, or at least working for them. But that was no relief. The police had already detained several journalists. With an American in the car, they might take us for spies. Our driver made a U-turn and drove back against the direction of traffic—if there had been any traffic. That day, we had the whole road.

  Mayy and I got out on the Nile corniche, planning to catch up with an Islamist march protesting against the coup and the massacre. We heard nearby gunfire almost as soon as the driver pulled away. Two men with bandanna masks over their beards came running around a corner, carrying long guns. One berated passersby to join the Islamist protest. Had the “Brotherhood militias” we had heard so much about finally appeared?

  We hid behind a sycamore tree near the river. Two women in head scarves and a bearded man holding a Morsi poster were hiding behind another tree next to us, and one of the women called to Mayy. “Who are these men? Are they with us or with them?”

  “We are journalists!” Mayy told her. “We should be asking you!”

  One of the two masked gunmen appeared out of nowhere from the other side of the tree and moved his gun barrel across the five of us, like an outlaw at a holdup.

  “They are journalists!” the woman spat out. She was throwing us in to protect herself.

  The gunman aimed at Mayy. After a long moment he appealed for sympathy. “They have been shooting at us all day,” he said. I had no idea who he meant.

  “We were trying to cover the demonstration. We are just trying to leave!” Mayy pleaded.

  The gunmen would let us escape if we walked south by the Nile, away from the Islamist march we had planned to cover. Mayy and I were convinced that the men were police provocateurs in disguise. It was becoming hard to know who was who.

  As we walked, we followed reports and videos on social media of gunfire all around Cairo. In one video, a Morsi supporter was firing a rifle near the entrance to the Four Seasons Hotel opposite the zoo. In others, pedestrians fleeing gunshots jumped or fell from bridges over the Nile. We saw an empty office tower burn unchecked and unattended.

  The Muslim Brothers were still trying to organize street demonstrations, and all came under withering assault by the military and police. Amr Darrag had handled the eleventh-hour negotiations with Western diplomats to try to avert the massacre. He walked with his wife and three daughters that Friday in a protest march across a bridge from Zamalek toward downtown. Gunmen started shooting from the top of a hotel. Plainclothes thugs cornered them on the roadway, and the police smothered the march in tear gas. (There were non-Islamist witnesses, too.)

  “We are dealing with vampires,” Darrag told me when I caught up with him that afternoon. “My analysis is that they would like to force people to go to violence.” (Darrag was among the lucky few Brotherhood leaders who eventually managed to escape Egypt—mainly to Istanbul, Doha, or London.)

  By afternoon, thousands of Islamist demonstrators gathered in Ramses Square, the open plaza about a half hour’s walk northeast of the Tahrir traffic circle. Ramses Square was where the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood had been assassinated decades earlier by agents of the king. Young Islamists hurled rocks and Molotov cocktails at a police station, and the police shot back. A thirty-year-old grandson of the Brotherhood’s founder was killed. So was the thirty-eight-year-old son of the Brotherhood’s general guide, Mohamed Badie (who coined the slogan “Our peacefulness is stronger than their bullets”).

  The official reports concluded that more than a hundred civilians had been killed, but my colleague Kareem Fahim counted at least thirty dead bodies in another makeshift morgue inside a mosque near the square. I doubted the Health Ministry counted them in its total.

  I wondered if this was how Algeria felt as its civil war started. Laura and the boys evacuated the next day, Saturday, to Tel Aviv, but she brought them back a few weeks later, with some trepidation. We did not want to miss the start of the school year. Many expats stayed away. Our sons’ classes at the Maadi British International School shrank to half the size they used to be.

  * * *

  • • •

  Michael Morrell of the CIA and other American intelligence officials had worried under Morsi that Al Qaeda might find a foothold in the North Sinai—the loosely governed strip of rocky desert between the Suez Canal and Israel, about 120 miles east of Cairo and 200 miles north of the biblical mountain. Now the backlash against the takeover expanded that initial foothold into a nascent insurgency. Within hours of Morsi’s arrest, militants released an online video of a crowd of thousands in the North Sinai rallying under the black flag of jihad. “The age of ‘peacefulness’ is over, no more peacefulness after today,” the speaker declared, mocking the Brotherhood slogan.

  “No more elections after today,” the crowd chanted back.

  The jihadist group Ansar Beit al-Maqdis—whose murder of sixteen Egyptian soldiers in the summer of 2012 had scandalized the country—was reborn as the main armed opposition to Sisi. After the Rabaa massacre, Ansar Beit al-Maqdis shifted from attacking Israel to attacking the Egyptian security forces. It claimed responsibility for near-daily attacks on police and soldiers. The militants shot one or two here and there, executed them by the busload, or set off bombs that killed dozens at a time. Killing sixteen soldiers at once became almost routine.

  Within weeks, the militants started carrying out bombings and assassinations inside Cairo. A car bomb blew a crater in a Nasr City street but failed to kill the interior minister. An improvised explosive device took out the top pros
ecutor. On the third anniversary of the uprising—January 25, 2014—an explosion demolished a security headquarters and damaged an Islamic art museum. And so on. By the spring of 2017, thousands of members of the security forces had died and the numbers were still growing.

  Ansar Beit al-Maqdis was almost as hostile to the Muslim Brothers as it was to Sisi. Jihadists everywhere had long faulted the Muslim Brothers for eschewing violence, for demanding democracy, for befriending Washington, and most of all for trusting the generals. Ayman al-Zawahiri of Al Qaeda compared the Brotherhood to “a poultry farm” that “breeds happy chickens pleased with what they are given and ignorant of the thieves and monsters around it.”

  In a video taking responsibility for a bombing in Cairo that October, a narrator for Ansar Beit al-Maqdis mocked “this farce called ‘democratic Islam.’” The voiceover told the Muslim Brotherhood it would have lost nothing by joining a puritanical jihad. “Would they have prevented you from reaching power? Now they have ousted you. Would America have been upset with you? Now it is upset. Would they have detained you? Now they are detaining you. Would they have shed your blood? Now they are shedding your blood and burning your headquarters and assaulting mosques.” Sisi’s battalions “found only chants and shouts and bare chests. So you were easy prey for him—to be murdered, captured, tortured, and harassed.”

  “Armed confrontation” was the only response, the narrator concluded. “Iron must be fought with iron and fire by fire.” Jihadists across the region proclaimed their vindication.

  Egypt was the pivot. Until the coup of July 3, 2013, journalists, scholars, and diplomats all talked without apology about an Arab Spring, a democratic opening. Tunisia’s Islamist party had won parliamentary elections, then formed the region’s first Islamist-liberal coalition government. The Syrian uprising was still more or less centered on democracy—not revenge or theocracy. Only a small faction of the rebels had pledged allegiance to Al Qaeda, and they dared do so in public only as recently as April. Libya had held credible parliamentary elections and chosen a liberal prime minister. The State Department held up Yemen as a model transition to democracy.