Madding Crowd, Part 3:
The Egyptian Civil War by Chris Oakley
Summary: In the first two chapters of this series we reviewed the
circumstances that led to the outbreak of civil war in Egypt in 2011
and the early battles of that conflict. In this segment, we’ll look
at the controversy that erupted in July of 2011 when evidence began
to surface that the Mubarak regime had used chemical weapons against
rebel troops.
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By June of 2011, when Libyan ruler Muammar Khadafy was under siege
by mutinous elements of his own army, Cairo looked less like a capital
city than a World War I no-man’s-land. Copious use of rockets and bombs
by both rebel and government forces had left at least half the city in
ruins and to some of its surviving residents it seemed as though it was
just a question of time before the rest of Cairo met a similar fate. On
June 8th the Egyptian capital’s one remaining operational hospital fell
victim to a devastating exchange of artillery fire between elements of
the regular Egyptian army and Muslim Brotherhood guerrillas; dozens of
patients and medical personnel were killed during the barrage. No sooner
had the echoes from the last shell’s detonations faded out than a flood
of condemnation was leveled at both sides by human rights groups appalled
at the carnage the artillery clash had inflicted on civilians.
As horrendous as the artillery incident was, however, it would pale in
comparison to an event which happened just six weeks later in the town of
Al Qababt. Hundreds of rebel troops, along with scores of civilians, died
as a result of an attack by government forces deploying what the initial
eyewitness accounts of the operation described as “gas” or “poison gas” in
a series of artillery strikes against the rebel defenses. A deputy attaché
posted to the Israeli embassy in Jordan at the time reported to his bosses
in Tel Aviv that social media all over the Middle East were buzzing almost
nonstop about the suspected gas attack.
The Mubarak regime’s first response to accusations of chemical weapons
use was to deny the Al Qababt incident had even happened. Despite a great
deal evidence corroborating rebel accounts of government troops deploying
such weapons at Al Qababt, Mubarak’s spokesmen insisted vehemently no such
thing had ever taken place. But then a video surfaced on YouTube in which
men wearing the uniform of the regular Egyptian army were clearly shown in
the midst of loading an 81-mm mortar with what looked like shells equipped
with chemical warheads. Confronted with evidence a chemical weapons strike
had in fact taken place, Mubarak changed tacks and asserted the men shown
in the YouTube clip were rebel soldiers dressed in stolen army fatigues in
an attempt to discredit and embarrass his regime.
That cover story would be blown to pieces within less than a day after
Mubarak made the claim. A second YouTube video came to light showing three
men loading what looked like crates of mortar shells onto a truck; one of
those crates had been left open, showing two of the shells in that crate
to have serial numbers matching those of two mortar rounds used during the
Al Qababt chemical attack. As soon as this video came to light an Egyptian
army lieutenant who had escaped to Turkey shortly after the attack stepped
forward to confirm government forces had indeed deployed chemical weapons;
he went on to say that further chemical strikes were planned, including at
least one series of air strikes with sarin-equipped bombs on two insurgent
strongholds near Cairo.
Any hope the Mubarak regime might have had of containing the damage
from the Al Qababt incident was effectively out the window after that. Not
that Mubarak didn’t try; once it was established that Egyptian government
troops had in fact used chemical weapons on rebel forces, the embattled
president of Egypt trotted out a new alibi for the attack, insisting that
his troops had only used chemical weapons because the Muslim Brotherhood
had tried to use them first. This interesting claim, however good it might
have sounded to Mubarak’s ears, was undermined by two small but important
details: 1)no major intelligence services, including Mubarak’s own agency,
had found even the slightest shred of evidence the Brotherhood possessed
any chemical weapons; 2)the insurgent troops who had fought at Al Qababt
belonged to a secular militia which had also clashed with the Brotherhood
more than once.
The new revelations about Al Qababt would further inflame already red-
hot fury at the Mubarak government. Outside Egypt, massive demonstrations
were held at Egyptian diplomatic offices throughout Europe, North America,
and the Middle East; in Egypt itself young people flocked to volunteer for
the rebel forces with grim determination to see Mubarak either driven into
exile or hanging from a lamppost in Tahrir Square. Even some people within
the political establishment who had previously supported Mubarak were now
beginning to reverse their stances and call for him to step down for a new
leader before the civil war destroyed the country altogether.
But Mubarak simply refused to budge. He had vowed from the beginning
to crush the insurgency at all costs, even if those costs included his own
life, and to that end he directed the Egyptian air force to speed up their
timetable for carrying out the next wave of air strikes on rebel positions
in and around Cairo. Realizing such action would not only further increase
the already appallingly high civilian death toll that had been incurred to
date in the civil war but also put their pilots at unnecessary risk, many
of the Egyptian air force’s squadron commanders refused to comply with the
Mubarak directive. An enraged Mubarak retaliated by having the dissidents
arrested and jailed on mutiny charges; the offending commanders were then
replaced by junior officers who were considerably less competent but more
loyal to the government.
In early August of 2011 the already shaky relationship between the
Egyptian president and his armed forces became even more tenuous when the
chief of staff for the Egyptian navy died under mysterious circumstances
just hours after submitting a memo to the defense ministry that was highly
critical of the way Mubarak was handling the civil war. The government’s
official explanation for the chief of staff’s demise was that he’d been
the victim of a heart attack, but the rebels accused Mubarak of having him
assassinated, and WikiLeaks released a stash of e-mails which it claimed
constituted evidence the navy chief of staff had in fact been the victim
of cyanide poisoning at the hands of Mubarak’s secret police; incidences
of mutiny within the Egyptian navy skyrocketed overnight, and before long
anti-Mubarak rumblings could be increasingly heard throughout the rest of
the Egyptian military too.
One of the clearest signs of how deep the rupture between Mubarak
and his armed forces had become appeared just ten days after the Egyptian
navy’s chief of staff died. A unit of regular army troops who’d been sent
to arrest rebel fighters holding a machine shop near the Suez Canal wound
up instead defecting to the rebels’ side, and when their company commander
received an order from Cairo to have the defectors shot, he ignored it and
joined his men in the rebel lines; their battalion commander followed suit
just twelve hours later. Their division commander, faced with the prospect
of being cashiered for his perceived failure to anticipate or to forestall
the defectors’ actions, shot himself with his sidearm the following day.
No sooner had news of the division commander’s suicide hit the world
press than four of the Egyptian army’s five most senior generals abruptly
tendered their resignations. The Suez Canal defections were the last straw
for these veteran commanders, who’d been growing increasingly disenchanted
with the Mubarak government as a whole and its conduct of the civil war in
particular. Coming at a time when Mubarak desperately needed every inch of
support he could get from his armed forces, these resignations were a deep
if not mortal wound to his presidency’s already badly weakened prestige. A
junior aide to the embattled president would anonymously confide to an Al-
Arabiya correspondent covering the civil war: “There’s great fear that out
enemies(the insurgent forces) will use the resignations as propaganda with
which to incite the people against us.”
Not that the people needed much inciting by then. Egyptian embassies
and diplomatic offices abroad were now picketed on an almost hourly basis,
and at home Mubarak could hardly even venture outside his own presidential
palace anymore without at least a dozen bodyguards in tow-- bodyguards who
were themselves getting upset over the fact they hadn’t been paid in weeks
(or even months, in some cases) as a consequence of the financial problems
the civil war had created for the government. In the abandoned offices and
hallways of what had once been the chambers for the Egyptian Parliament, a
colony of homeless civilians were huddling against the bombs and bullets--
and nursing thoughts of revenge against the autocrat primarily responsible
for their plight.
Even those ordinary citizens who’d continued to support the existing
government out of fear of being arrested by the security forces or doubts
regarding the rebels’ motives for trying to topple Mubarak were starting
to turn against the regime. On those increasingly rare occasions when the
embattled Egyptian president ventured out in public, he now had stones and
other things thrown at him by angry crowds who resented his very existence
by then. Indeed, stones were often the least of it-- the already agonizing
summer heat in downtown Cairo was made that much tougher to bear due to
the fires set off by homemade bombs thrown at Mubarak and his entourage.
With Cairo’s fire brigades effectively out of commission, it fell to the
Egyptian capital’s beleaguered civilian population to get the fires under
control, and in some cases the amateur firefighters’ efforts to get those
blazes under control actually ended up exacerbating the problem. In one of
the most tragic examples of how the loss of a professional fire department
can hurt a city, more than fifty homeless people squatting in an abandoned
hotel were killed on August 13th when a stray firebomb crashed through one
of the hotel’s windows and set the entire first floor ablaze within a mere
two minutes; ten minutes later the hotel itself had been reduced to ashes.
All that was left of the homeless colony which had been sheltering inside
its walls was a handful of bones and a half-skull partially charred on one
side as a result of the blaze.
The fire which killed the homeless squatters also destroyed Mubarak's
last hope for surviving the rebellion against his government. In a burst
of rage over what was seen as tragic incompetence at best and blatant mass
murder at worst, the few remaining Egyptian regular military personnel who
were still on Mubarak's side turned against him en masse; on August 17th, a
combined group of rebel fighters and disaffected regular army troops broke
into Mubarak's presidential palace and arrested him. A military government
assumed control in the ruins of Cairo and directed all combatants on both
sides of the civil war to lay down their arms; the cease-fire accord which
officially ended the conflict was signed in Alexandria on August 22nd, five
days after Mubarak's arrest.
Ancient Egyptian rulers had been honored with grand pyramid monuments
when they passed away; in more recent times Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar
Sadat, Mubarak's predecessors as president of the modern Egyptian nation,
were accorded the honor of majestic state funerals upon their deaths. But
no such privileges would be granted to Mubarak when his own life ended. If
anything, his demise would serve as the occasion for a host of posthumous
humiliations against him as his people took revenge on the fallen Egyptian
dictator for the abuses to which he'd subjected them during his rule....
