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Madding Crowd, Part 1:
The Egyptian Civil War
by Chris Oakley

   In February of 2011, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak had been in power nearly thirty years. Thrust into office by the assassination of his political mentor Anwar Sadat in 1981, Mubarak had done everything he could to strengthen Egypt’s ties with the United States as well as preserve the fragile peace with Israel that had existed since the 1978 Camp David accords. He had also done a great deal to maintain his hold on the presidency, and in the process turned his country into the kind of one-party state which has been all too common in the Middle East in the past half-century; now the Egyptian public, fed up with Mubarak’s authoritarian ways, was a powder keg needing only a small spark to set off a political explosion.

    That spark came in the form of a televised statement by Mubarak in February 13th in which he stated he would not capitulate to the demand by Egyptian dissidents that he resign his office to make way for a new president and the election of a democratic government. Outraged by his refusal to step down, thousands of demonstrators met in Cairo’s Tahrir Square to protest what they saw as a naked power grab; police and army units were swiftly dispatched to break up these rallies. Twelve hours into this latest wave of protest, Egyptian army tanks tried to breach an improvised barricade set up by university students to protect their encampment; in a moment of fury at what the tank crew was trying to do an older man picked up a stone or a piece of brick-- it’s not entirely clear which --and threw it at the tank crew commander, striking him in the side of the head.

     Convinced the tank was being attacked, the tank crew’s machine gunner turned his weapon on the unfortunate older man...and from that moment all hope of avoiding bloodshed was effectively wiped out. Just seconds after the tank commander was hit, the telltale staccato of the machine gunner’s .50 caliber piece could be heard over the screams of the demonstrators; an Al Jazeera correspondent covering the protests at the time described the machine gun burst as sounding much like, in his words, “an approaching thunderstorm”. When the machine gun stopped firing just twenty seconds later, the old man was dead along with two bystanders and an Egyptian security police officer who’d been sent to intervene in the melee and been mistaken for one of the protestors. At that point, all bets were off and the scene soon degenerated into one of utter violent chaos.

      By dawn on February 14th nearly a hundred people were dead, with at least as many more injured or missing, and virtually every foreign embassy in Cairo was on lockdown as governments around the world began scrambling to figure out ways of evacuating their diplomats from what was indisputably and rapidly turning into a war zone. Across the Sinai Peninsula, IDF troops patrolling the Egyptian-Israeli border nervously watched the horizon wondering if the Camp David peace accords that had been signed between Egypt and Israel nearly a quarter-century earlier were about to collapse. Egypt’s western neighbor Libya, which was in the midst of its own political and social upheaval at the time, braced itself for an influx of refugees trying to flee the anarchy gripping Cairo. To the south Sudan was in little position to influence events either for good or for ill, since it was locked in a bitter guerrilla war between rival ethnic factions that had been going on for years and would still be raging long after the turmoil in Egypt died down.

******

      While the police were solidly behind the Mubarak government, the army was considerably more divided. This was especially true among the ranks of the Egyptian army’s ordinary soldiers; for every man who was still loyal to the government, there was another who either tacitly or openly backed the Tahrir Square demonstrators. More than one of those sympathizers would eventually defect to the insurgents and in so doing draw the Mubarak regime’s wrath. The schism among the Egyptian army’s rank and file was mirrored by an equally deep split inside the highest echelons of the general staff-- a split that prompted one Middle East expert at the U.S. State Department to warn the White House three days after the carnage in Tahrir Square about the real and growing risk of a full-fledged civil war breaking out in Egypt.

      Even as the first funerals were being held for those who’d died in the violence at Tahrir Square, the global community was expressing fears that the rift within the armed forces between Mubarak’s allies and his opponents might lead to total anarchy in Egypt. British prime minister David Cameron, in a speech given before the House of Commons on February 16th, told his colleagues: “There is a genuine danger Egypt may degenerate into utter chaos unless constructive action is taken to restore domestic peace there.” President Barack Obama, speaking at a White House press conference on the events in Tahrir Square, told the assembled reporters: “As our own history demonstrates, the most tragic wars of all are the wars in which brother fights brother. The critical imperative before us is to make sure that Egypt doesn’t sink into the abyss of civil war.”

      Russian president Vladimir Putin, alluding to the long-standing friendship between Russia and Egypt that had existed for decades and predated the Communist regime of the Soviet era, phoned the Egyptian ambassador in Moscow shortly after Obama’s press conference and made a proposal to have the Kremlin mediate negotiations between Mubarak’s government and the dissidents with the goal of achieving a compromise which would enable Mubarak to exit gracefully while at the same time bringing an end to the violence racking Cairo. Unfortunately for him, and for that matter anyone else wanting to stem the bloodshed rapidly overtaking the Egyptian capital, neither Mubarak nor his foes were in a mood to talk...

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        A prominent military affairs expert and consultant for NBC News had predicted at the time of the Tahrir Square massacre that what happened in Cairo would quickly spread to other parts of Egypt, and as it turned out his dire warnings would be proven all too right. Just 48 hours after the bloodshed in Cairo, gun battles erupted in Alexandria as troops still loyal to the Mubarak government fought soldiers who’d defected to the rebel side. Twenty-four hours after that Port Said was the scene of a bloody mutiny as seamen about an Egyptian navy cruiser arrested and executed their pro-Mubarak officers. Within a week of the Tahrir Square massacre there were skirmishes between anti-Mubarak and pro-Mubarak forces going on in every major city in Egypt, and foreign tourists were fleeing the country as fast as they possibly could...

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