Madding Crowd, Part 2:
The Egyptian Civil War by Chris Oakley
Summary: In this first chapter of this series we reviewed the chainof events that triggered civil war in Egypt in 2011. In this segmentwe’ll look at the battle for the Suez Canal and the mass exodus offoreign tourists from Cairo as the civil war between Mubarak and hisopponents escalated.
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By the first week of March the fighting in Egypt’s civil war
had spread all the way to the Sudanese border and martial law was in
effect in Cairo, Alexandria, and Port Said. The terminals of Cairo’s
main international airport were jammed with foreign tourists trying to
get out of the Egyptian capital before they wound up in the crossfire
of another street battle between the government forces and the growing
rebel army. Most foreign diplomatic offices in Egypt were by this time
operating with what amounted to skeleton crews, all nonessential staff
and dependents having long since been evacuated from the country; some
diplomatic outposts had been shut down altogether. Foreign businesses
were pulling their money and their employees out from the country with
what seemed like breakneck speed. Even a number of international media
outlets had closed down their Cairo offices rather than risk losing a
correspondent to gunfire.
One notable exception to this trend was the BBC, which continued
to maintain a news operation in Cairo even as the Egyptian capital was
turning into a modern-day Sarajevo. In fact, out of the twenty foreign
journalists killed during the first days of the Egyptian civil war, at
least half were employed by the BBC either directly or through a third
party; one of those deaths, the murder of a BBC World News Middle East
affairs correspondent, prompted massive protests in London and demands
from some of the more hard-line members of the British political right
for the Cameron government to send troops to Egypt to restore order in
that country. Cameron declined to do so, but the fact such deployments
had been suggestion was a reflection of the outrage the BBC reporter’s
murder had provoked.
This is not to day Cameron simply stood by on the sidelines as
the civil war escalated. He suspended all British trade with Egypt and
put a temporary hold on military aid to Cairo; the Mubarak government
considered this an insult and retaliated by having two senior defense
aides to the British high commissioner in Egypt arrested on what were,
at best, dubious charges of espionage. Their incarceration proved to be
a brief one, however, as international pressure forced the government to
release the two British diplomats just 72 hours after their arrest. They
promptly took the next plane home to London and presented a debriefing
to Cameron’s defense minister, Liam Fox, which made clear the situation
on the ground was even more dire than the nightly news reports from Sky
and the BBC were suggesting-- and they were suggesting Egypt was turning
into hell on earth. Not only was the Egyptian army basically at war with
itself, but ragtag parties of civilians were engaging in guerrilla raids
against Mubarak government offices and police stations armed with nearly
everything from chunks of pavement to RPGs. The human rights organization
Amnesty International warned that the civilian death count in the growing
insurrection in Egypt could soon exceed 10,000 if constructive action was
not taken quickly to end hostilities.
And it didn’t help that the Muslim Brotherhood, led by Mohammed
Morsi, was running a private army that was fighting both the Mubarak
government and the secular anti-Mubarak insurgents. There were rumors
the Brotherhood guerrillas were getting military assistance from Syria,
an allegation Morsi didn’t exactly bend over backwards to dispute. For
that matter Iran’s theocratic regime seemed to be getting disturbingly
close to Morsi’s group as well. In its first public statements regarding
the escalating hostilities between the Mubarak government and the rebels
the Iranian foreign ministry had pointedly ignored the secular opposition
groups in Egypt while at the same time effusively praising what it called
“the heroic people’s uprising” of Morsi’s Islamist insurgents. There were
even allegations North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il-- and also his son and
eventual successor Kim Jong Un --were funneling weapons and explosives to
the Brotherhood in return for Morsi’s guarantees that the post-revolution
Egyptian government would assist Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program.
The Mubarak government was fighting this civil war with one hand
tied behind its back; outrage over alleged human rights abuses by the
Egyptian government’s security forces before hostilities broke out had
prompted many Western governments to sharply reduce their military aid
to Cairo, and there were increasing demands for that aid to be cut off
altogether as rumors of war crimes being committed by regular Egyptian
army troops against captured insurgents started to filter out of Egypt.
For that matter, some of Egypt’s fellow Arab states were having second
thoughts about their ties with Cairo; on March 8th Jordan suspended most
of its ties with Egypt, and twenty-four hours later Iraq announced that
it would temporarily close its embassy in Cairo “pending resolution of
the domestic troubles facing the Egyptian government”, as the official
statement from Baghdad put it.
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Within a week after the Iraqi embassy closure and the Jordanian
government’s decision to put most of its formal relations with Cairo on
hold, the already horrific state of affairs in Egypt became a Dante-like
nightmare. A schoolbus packed with children had the misfortune to drive
right into the crossfire of a battle between government forces and rebel
troops near Alexandria. The bus driver lost control of his vehicle and
collided with an Egyptian regular army troop truck coming the other way;
everyone in both vehicles was killed.
Barely had the shock of this tragedy begun to subside before the
main campus of Egypt’s largest university was bombed by air force jets
flown by pilots loyal to the Mubarak regime. Hundreds of students and
faculty were killed in these air strikes, with dozens more sustaining
horrific injuries. Mubarak became a virtual prisoner inside the walls of
his own presidential palace as demonstrators marched in the streets to
demand his execution and pro-government forces remained locked in bitter
struggle with anti-government partisans. Also trapped as a result of the
chaos in the streets were the legislators of Egypt’s Parliament, who had
to take shelter inside their offices since the streets of Cairo were too
hazardous to risk trying to go home.
Sooner than any of them would have expected or liked, there came a
time when even the offices of Parliament weren’t safe. On March 13th a
rocket attack on government positions in the heart of Cairo killed at
least sixty Parliament lawmakers; two others died from their injuries
en route to the Egyptian capital’s one remaining functional civilian
hospital and another legislator succumbed to cardiac arrest due to the
shock of the rocket strikes. Less than twelve hours later, pro-Mubarak
forces would strike back at the rebels with a series of automatic rifle
attacks on known and suspected rebel neighborhoods in the Cairo area;
these attacks left dozens of people dead and a hundred more wounded by
the time the shooting stopped.
In this atmosphere it was inevitable most of the few foreigners
still left in Egypt would become more determined than ever to get out
of the country. One particularly desperate Algerian migrant worker and
his family stowed away on a garbage scow rather than endure another day
in what was essentially one vast war zone. Even the BBC now started to
give serious consideration to shutting down its Cairo office and pulling
its remaining correspondents out of Egypt. Applications for passports to
Egypt dried up while requests for visa to get out of Egypt went through
the roof. One Australian news media outlet dubbed the massive emigration
“Exodus 2.0”.
******
By the third week of March there was hardly a city or town in Egypt
which hadn’t seen at least one firefight-- and some of them were the site
of multiple battles. One city to see much of the most frequent and worst
fighting of the early months of the Egyptian civil war was the seacoast
city of Port Said, a critical linchpin of Egypt’s economy as well as the
site of a major naval base. In April of 2011 alone there were at least a
dozen firefights on the Port Said docks between government troops and the
anti-Mubarak insurgents; by May 1st the carnage had reached a point where
most maritime shipping companies had stopped doing business at Port Said
and the U.S. State Department was issuing travel warnings urging merchant
ships to avoid the city at all costs.
Within another week all but two of the world’s largest commercial
airlines had canceled passenger service to Egypt and the rest were about
to do so. Egypt’s economy, in shaky condition even before the civil war
broke out, proceeded to collapse altogether; the National Bank of Egypt
crashed on May 10th, leaving millions of customers in the financial lurch
and raising questions about whether the economy could be revived once the
war was over. It also served to further exacerbate the already horrendous
image of the Mubarak government in the eyes of foreign investors, who had
opted en masse to stop providing Cairo with new capital and withdraw what
was left of the foreign currency already in the country. And last but not
least it meant Cairo went through ten different finance ministers in just
two weeks.
The turnover at the top of the Interior Ministry was almost as rapid
and frequent; the Mubarak administration’s right hand often didn’t seem
to know what the right hand was doing, and as Egypt’s police forces grew
increasingly overwhelmed by the civil war Mubarak’s choices to serve the
role of interior minister found themselves getting fired in hurry-- in a
few cases, before the ink had dried on the press releases announcing the
selection of said choices. Intelligence and diplomatic figures throughout
the rest of the Middle East were left with a growing suspicion the Cairo
government’s left hand didn’t know what its right hand was doing, and for
that matter some questioned whether the left hand’s thumb was aware what
the index finger was doing. On any given day, the same Interior Ministry
office could issue two totally different statements-- sometimes within an
hour of each other. This was not the kind of thing to inspire even a mild
degree of confidence that the Mubarak government could weather the storms
buffeting it from all directions.
In and of itself the chaos within the upper ranks of the Mubarak
government would have made it hard enough to get an accurate read on how
things were going in the civil war, but to complicate matters that much
further nearly every foreign embassy in Cairo was now shut down, leaving
Egypt’s allies and neighbors effectively half-blind as to who was winning
the battle for the country’s future...
