Skip to footer

More thugs and guns on the streets of Cairo

Some Muslim Brotherhood supporters have taken up weapons, and the Egyptian military and police are heavily armed. But now, it seems, they have company.

|
Manoocher Deghati/AP
Smoke overcasts a minaret and buildings in Cairo, Egypt, Friday.

Persistent reports of "popular committees" being formed are coming in from Cairo and other Egyptian cities.

The term can mean anything from a genial neighborhood watch to groups of young toughs looking for a fight. During the mass protests against Hosni Mubarak in Cairo in January and February 2011, civilians formed popular committees across the city, erecting barricades in front of their neighborhoods and sometimes aggressively questioning anyone who tried to pass.

I lived in Cairo from 2003-2008 and arrived back to cover the uprising on the evening of the bloodiest day to that point. The city was on edge, and I encountered Egyptian popular resistance committees - and weapons in the hands of civilians in the city - for the first time. I wrote then:

Out of the airport, we then easily went through 100 checkpoints and took three hours making a journey that, on a traffic-free day, takes 20 minutes. First were the friendly, almost offhand checkpoints run by Egyptian soldiers backed by Abrams tanks around the airport.

Then there were the “popular committees” – the neighborhood watch groups of young men armed with machetes, clubs, and butcher’s hooks – who were jumpy and a little undisciplined, but full of apologies for the “situation,” solicitousness to us, and full of more “welcome to Egypts” (a phrase commonly graced to foreigners here, both in English and Arabic) than I’d heard in my four years living here.

Finally, after a long, jagged route that took us far around Tahrir Square, we found ourselves on Roda – the Nile island just south of Zamalek that is a bastion of support for the Muslim Brotherhood. Here, the popular committees were more switched on, easier to communicate with – and a little better armed. Mixed in among their clubs and knives were a few narrow-gauge shotguns and pistols.

No one really knew what was to come for Egypt then. But in the two years since, armed popular committees have become part of Cairo's social fabric, particularly as respect for the police has declined. Now, with huge numbers either furiously in support of the Muslim Brotherhood or furiously against them, it appears that the committees - or perhaps, plainclothes agents of the state claiming they belong to the committees, or both - are going to play a larger role.

It's an alarming prospect, and one that bears watching.

The Twitter timeline of an assistant reporter from the New York Times Mayy El Sheikh caught my (and a lot of other people's) eyes today. I don't know her, but a lot of people I know and respect do, and they consider her a careful reporter of what she sees. This is what she said she saw today: 

She also described a group of men mixed in at a Muslim Brotherhood march along the Nile that frightened her and a number of the Brotherhood supporters she was with. She writes that as the march moved towards the Qasr al-Nil bridge near Tahrir Square, distant shots rang out, and that some people mixed in among them were trying to prevent marchers from moving away to a safer spot. Two masked men with rifles and handguns who had been among the marchers appeared and threatened some bearded Muslim Brotherhood supporters, and tried to force her to stay with the march. 

She explained she was a reporter and wanted to leave. They eventually assented.

That's just one moment in time in a vast city in a vast country. If more of these moments pile up, it won't mean anything good.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to More thugs and guns on the streets of Cairo
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Security-Watch/Backchannels/2013/0816/More-thugs-and-guns-on-the-streets-of-Cairo
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe