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Page added on August 17, 2013
Egypt: Killings Erupt Right After Prayers
Cairo is in total, full-blown revolution.
Several cities across Egypt erupted into fierce street battles Friday between supporters of ousted President Mohammed Morsi outraged over the deaths of hundreds at sit-ins earlier this week, residents and security forces.
Health Ministry officials said that at least 60 people died, pushing the death toll toward 700 since armed government forces swept into two camps of pro-Morsi demonstrators Wednesday. Several news channels described the day’s events as “Egypt fighting terrorism,” embracing the government’s definition of members of the Muslim Brotherhood, the secretive organization through which Morsi had ascended to the presidency.
In a statement, the Brotherhood called for its supporters to go back to the streets for another week. Those opposed to the military ouster of the democratically elected Morsi “only have two options: either to go back home or protest. If they go back home, they will suffer from oppression and military rule,” said Amr Darrag, who leads the foreign affairs committee of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party. “The regime is (killing protesters) because they don’t have any political means” to end the crisis.
In Cairo, abandoned highways and bridges were peppered with burnt cars, blockades and tanks, as Morsi supporters, largely Islamists, marched in what they called a “Day of Rage” against Wednesday’s unprecedented government crackdown. The various protests never could coalesce, as they were confronted by repeated gunfire, forcing them to disperse.
Morsi supporters charged that either police or military personnel were shooting at them from helicopters that hovered over the capital. At one point, video captured protesters plunging from a bridge into the Nile to escape the gunfire. Lines of bodies were at mosques turned into makeshift morgues.
Alaa Mohammed, 16, awoke Friday morning to attend the funeral of her friend Asmaa el Beltagy, 17, daughter of Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed el Beltagy. She’d died Wednesday at the sit-in in the Rabaa section of Cairo. As women wailed for Asmaa, Mohammed said she planned to protest for the first time in her life because “the military has to be punished for what they are doing.”
Marwa Dewaidar, 33, a 16-year member of the Brotherhood who once taught Asmaa, urged the women around her to write their names and national ID numbers on their arms in case they too, ended up at the morgue.
“We cannot live with these people,” Dewaidar said of the government as women around her began asking each other for pens.
The government and the Brotherhood blamed each other for Friday’s violence. Many Morsi supporters vowed retribution, not for his ouster but for the deaths of their “martyrs.”
At 7 p.m., when a curfew started, the streets were largely empty with only sporadic clashes and fighting in the restive Sinai.
For the first time, Egyptians spoke Friday of potential civil war and asked how their nation compared with Algeria, which endured a brutal civil war in the 1990s, and Syria, which is engulfed in a 2-year-old civil war.
“CC=Bashar” said graffiti near Nasr City, in Cairo’s eastern outskirts. It was a reference to military strongman Gen. Abdel-Fattah el Sissi, pronounced See-See, equating him to Syrian President Bashar Assad.
Through the gunfire at so many sites, it was unclear who’d shot whom.
Reporters saw residents and Islamists alike armed. Residents would pull out sticks, handguns and machetes as Morsi supporters’ protests drew near and Islamists would brandish guns as soon as they heard gunfire. Finding out who’d started the battles was all but impossible.
In the Giza section of Cairo, for example, numerous protesters told McClatchy that army forces stationed nearby had fatally shot two protesters and wounded a third.
“I saw soldiers shoot at us from the church,” said Hussein Ali, 37, an accountant for an electrical company who’s a Morsi supporter. A nearby army officer told McClatchy that his troops did indeed shoot at protesters but only when they’d tried to storm the church and set it ablaze.
Mustafa Mahmoud, 23, who lives near the church and said he didn’t support either side, said the troops had started shooting when the protesters came by the church “because they were too close.”
In a sign of how much the landscape has changed, whereas Morsi supporters once had demanded that he be reinstated, they now said they were taking to the streets as a form of retribution for the deaths of protesters Wednesday.
“Either we seek democratic solutions from A to Z or we take to the street,” Dewaidar said at the funeral. “How can we believe in the vote when they throw our vote in the trash bin?”
Within seconds of finishing their prayer, which ends with the line, “Peace be upon us and on those who are righteous servants of Allah,” the angry chants against the military began.
“Down with all the dogs of the military,” thousands screamed as they began they marching toward the burial site.
Nearby, residents had set up a checkpoint manned by men in their 20s armed with machetes. It was unclear whether the men who were checking those passing by were there to protect the neighborhood from the Muslim Brotherhood or attack them when they arrived.
16 Comments on "Egypt: Killings Erupt Right After Prayers"
actioncjackson on Sat, 17th Aug 2013 6:29 pm
Considering protests against the government, this situation isn’t new. The last hundred years alone has been filled with them. It’s like we were always meant to live this way, with a powerful few ruling many. History is filled with it. We’ll never get past this tendency I don’t think. We’re locked in the cycle somehow, with each successive generation picking up the struggle where the previous left off.
efsome on Sat, 17th Aug 2013 6:53 pm
As long as people don’t use their brains and blindly follow their traditions (civil religion or good old ancestor religion) it’ll go on. We need to examine every aspect of our lives. In Egypt like Syria, people supporting either group is wrong.
DC on Sat, 17th Aug 2013 6:57 pm
Over-population and a puppet US military that obeys the pentagons orders-a lethal combination.
The only ‘solution’ here is the one no one would ever contemplate-let alone discuss openly. Egypt needs to shed at least 50%-60% of its current population AND disband its military. And of course, cut all ties to the corrupt US empire. What Egyptians don’t seem to grasp is, w/o US ‘aid’ the military would collapse-its power comes form the outside, in the form of US meddling.
The US provides a full THIRD of the Egyptian military’s budget-and thats just overt aid. There is likely a lot of off-the-books aid that isn’t accounted for at all.
So it doesn’t really matter in the end, if Egyptians think Morsi is the man for the job or not. Or perhaps someone else we haven’t met yet, less offensive to our western sensibilities. No party or individual can fix the corrupt US controlled army, nor can he\she deal with the population problem, which lies at the root off all this mayhem.
Arthur on Sat, 17th Aug 2013 7:02 pm
Cairo is majority secular, as always with big cities; the conservative supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood are elsewhere (‘flyover country’).
If the military thinks it can get rid of the MB, just by outlawing a group that won the majority vote in a democratic election, than they are plain wrong. The MB has it’s martyrs, that’s what counts. Time works in favour of the MB.
Meanwhile the sanctimonious media in the west pretend that a rift is growing between the West and the Egyptian military…
http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/aegyptens-neue-fuehrung-unter-general-sisi-veraergert-usa-und-europa-a-917124.html
…which is bogus, in secret the West supports the military, but can’t say so, to uphold the appeareance of being committed to democratic values. The logic of western politics dictates that any force that resists against the NWO, like the muslim fundamentalists, who have a NWO of their own (worldwide caliphate), needs to be destroyed. It is not going to work and the muslims, around since ca. 620, will outlive the zionist desire for world government. Just like the Algerian military managed to suppress their islamists, the Egyptian military will probably able to keep the upperhand in Egypt, for years to come, as long as it receives material and financial support from Washington. But the MB is not going away. The MB is the only logical candidate to take over power in Egypt after the end of Pax Americana.
Arthur on Sat, 17th Aug 2013 7:07 pm
“Egypt needs to shed at least 50%-60% of its current population”
How?
“And of course, cut all ties to the corrupt US empire.”
Ah, now I see. Egypt receives ca. 50% of it’s food from the US.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2011/12/eric-margolis/let-those-people-go/
“Egypt cannot feed itself. Half of Egypt’s food comes from the US in the form of wheat aid.”
noobtube on Sat, 17th Aug 2013 7:25 pm
And where does the US get the wheat?
I wouldn’t be surprised if the US stole food from some other third world country, then gave it to Egypt as “AID” to make it seem like the United States is so kind.
LewRockwell is a joke of a race-supremacist website that puts all facts in terms of the West is best, everybody else is bad.
Despite the FACT the West would collapse without Africa to steal from.
GregT on Sat, 17th Aug 2013 8:37 pm
One in 6 in the US are now on government food assistance programs. What will happen when the Fed stops it’s QE to infinity campaign, or when the US can no longer export it’s inflation in the form of US Federal Reserve notes?
The same thing as Egypt, times four.
What we are witnessing are the birthing pangs of a new global reality. There are simply too many people, chasing an ever decreasing supply of global natural resources, at ever increasing production costs, due to the peaking of conventional crude oil. Oh, and did I mention climate change? The perfect storm is brewing on the horizon.
Arthur on Sat, 17th Aug 2013 10:42 pm
“LewRockwell is a joke of a race-supremacist website”
Don’t worry about ‘supremacism’, noob… in the coming segregated world nobody needs to worry about that 20th century concept anymore.
bobinget on Sun, 18th Aug 2013 12:00 am
“Terrorists” trapped inside house of prayer.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-23738588
Battles across Egypt rage on with ANTI Muslim BH
forces (thugs) targeting journalists who are trying to cover ongoing massacres.
This was NOT a test of nonviolence any more then
the Syrian peaceful demonstrations were two years and one hundred thousand dead, one million Syrians displaced, another million internally homeless.
Where will pro Brotherhood refugees flee? War ravaged Libya? War torn Sudan? Muslim activists will free to the south where they are more popular.
This human tragedy is turning
into an unmitigated disaster. Look out for Ruanda
like genocide.
Which comes first? Winter or a wider ME war.
Plantagenet on Sun, 18th Aug 2013 6:20 am
Anyone who believed the Arab Spring would usher in democracy in Islamic countries across the middle east was a fool.
Arthur on Sun, 18th Aug 2013 9:25 am
“Muslim activists will free to the south where they are more popular.”
bobinget, what could happen is that a MB uprising in the Egyptian south could succeed, followed by a march on Cairo. But the MB will not be supported by anybody, except maybe foodaid from Europe and Russia, if the military will allow these humanitarian transports pass the Suezcanal to the port of Hurghada.
But in the long run the Egyptian army is toast anyway. As is the house of Saud. And Assad. And Israel. The future in the Middle-East belongs to Erdogan and Morsi.
smokeyjoe on Sun, 18th Aug 2013 4:34 pm
sorry Arthur, the future of the middle east is collapse. Peak oil, water shortages, over population, climate change, these are the under laying forces at work in the ME and the world. I’m with DC on this one. the population will collapse because it is simply unsustainable.
GregT on Sun, 18th Aug 2013 5:14 pm
Once upon a time,
Exponential growth, provided by cheap fossil fuel energy- meets a finite environment.
The end.
Arthur on Sun, 18th Aug 2013 5:16 pm
I was talking about the coming years. I agree with DC as well that in the long run nothing is going to stop third world birth rates except cruel mother nature herself.
GregT on Sun, 18th Aug 2013 6:32 pm
The third world is not going to notice anywhere near as much of a difference as we are. They are used to living off of the land in what we would consider to be abject poverty. We are not.
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