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Standoff in Cairo as Security Forces Surround Mosque
Standoff Erupts at a Mosque in Cairo as Egypt Falls Further Into Violence
(about 1 hour later)
CAIRO — Soldiers, police officers and armed civilians clashed with supporters of former President Mohamed Morsi at a mosque early Saturday, a day after a tense standoff between Islamists and the military-backed government left 173 people dead across Egypt.
CAIRO — Gun battles erupted Saturday outside a Cairo mosque where supporters of the ousted president, Mohamed Morsi, were sheltering, turning a central thoroughfare into a war zone as the country’s security seemed to slip further from the grasp of Egypt’s new military rulers.
Riot police stood guard outside the Fateh Mosque in Cairo’s central Ramses Square, which had been transformed into a field hospital and morgue on Friday during fierce clashes in the area. Tanks guarded the mosque’s back entrance, and at about noon, witnesses said they heard gunfire.
State television showed soldiers and police officers crouching on the street or in armored vehicles firing at the minaret of the Fath mosque in Ramses Square, apparently believing the tower was a source of gunfire. Stun grenades were thrown into the mosque, while on the streets outside, civilians wielding crude weapons beat journalists, and waited to attack the Islamists when they emerged from the mosque.
The standoff came as Mr. Morsi’s supporters prepared for another round of demonstrations, raising the likelihood of further violence. Egyptian officials announced that they had arrested hundreds of Islamists over the last two days, as part of an expanding crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s most powerful Islamist movement.
Even as the gunfire continued, the army appeared to be trying to negotiate a peaceful end to the standoff. Soldiers had been shown trying to escort Islamists from the mosque, but they faced difficulties because of the crowd, which was attacking the Islamists. By late Saturday, the state news agency said soldiers had cleared the mosque.
The scenes outside the mosque, broadcast live on television on Saturday, deepened the sense that Egypt was descending into anarchy. On Friday, terrified protesters caught in a cross-fire jumped or fell from an overpass in a panicked effort to escape. A gunfight erupted on the doorstep of a Four Seasons hotel. Men wielding guns and machetes — some backing the Islamists, others police supporters in civilian clothes, others simply criminals — roamed the streets of the capital and other cities, and it was often impossible to tell friend from foe.
The violence came a day after battles throughout Egypt — between security forces and Islamists, and civilians fighting among themselves — left at least 173 people dead, according to an official count.
Health Ministry officials on Saturday said 95 of the 173 deaths on Friday occurred in Cairo, bringing the total since Wednesday to about 800.
The standoff at the mosque, which began Friday, was emblematic of Egypt’s wider chaos, with no end in sight to a feud between the Islamist supporters of Mr. Morsi and the military that has devolved into violent conflict since security services raided two Islamist sit-ins last week. The sit-ins were called after the military ousted Mr. Morsi, the country’s first democratically elected president.
Among those killed, according to media reports, was the son of the Muslim Brotherhood’s supreme guide, Mohamed Badie. According to reports, the son, Ammar, died during clashes Friday in downtown Cairo.
There were signs on Saturday that the civil strife was intensifying, as the government proposed new measures aimed at further limiting the influence of the main Islamist movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, or possibly trying to eradicate it.
Responding to the calls for more protests, the country’s interim prime minister and a Western-trained economist, Hazem el-Beblawi, has proposed that the Muslim Brotherhood be dissolved, Reuters reported. The group had been banned for many years and had just recently registered as a nongovernmental organization. A government spokesman, Sherif Shawky, told Reuters that the proposal was being studied.
Civilians have added a layer of menace to Egypt’s violence in recent days, as so-called popular committees set up checkpoints in neighborhoods, searching cars and occasionally robbing their drivers. On Friday, armed men roamed Cairo freely, their allegiances — to Mr. Morsi or the military — unclear.
Later Saturday Mostafa Hegazy, an adviser to Egypt’s interim president, said the country faced “war by the forces of extremism” and said the government would use what he described as “security measures within the framework of law”, according to Reuters.
And, possibly adding further energy to the cycle of bloodshed and revenge, the Brotherhood announced that the son of its spiritual leader, Mohamed Badie, had been killed during the fighting outside the mosque on Friday “by live ammunition.” The movement had previously announced that the grandson of its founder, Hassan al-Banna, was killed during the same clashes.
Defying a 7 p.m. curfew, antagonists had battled into the night in the Ramses Square area Friday, lit by an unchecked fire that consumed a nearby office building. The military-appointed government issued a statement declaring that the military, the police and the people were “standing together in the face of the treacherous terrorist scheme against Egypt of the Brotherhood organization.” But the extent of the mayhem cast doubt on its ability to deliver on its central promise of restoring order and security.
Last week, the 17-year old daughter of a senior Brotherhood leader was killed when the army and the police tore through the encampment of Mr. Morsi’s supporters at the Rabaa al-Adawiya mosque.
France and Germany on Friday called for an emergency meeting of European foreign ministers to respond to Egypt’s violence. “The toll of death and injury is shocking,” said Catherine Aston, the top diplomat for the European Union. “Responsibility for this tragedy weighs heavily on the interim government, as well as on the wider political leadership in the country.”
The interim prime minister, Hazem el-Beblawi, submitted a proposal to the ministry that regulates nongovernmental groups to ban the Islamist movement, his spokesman said Saturday. In a news conference, the spokesman, Sherif Shawky, said the world had seen the “organized terrorism and sinful aggressions on the citizens” by a “small faction that lost its mind and was blinded by the lust for power, and the dreams of coming back for power.”
Just two days earlier, the police had routed thousands of protesters from sit-ins in support of Mr. Morsi, killing several hundred. The government suspended legal protections against arbitrary police action and authorized security forces to kill anyone who threatened a public facility.
It was unclear if Mr. Beblawi was suggesting that the Brotherhood could be allowed to maintain its political arm, the Freedom and Justice Party. Mr. Shawky asserted that the government was still interested in an “inclusive” political process, but only after “this homeland belongs to everyone,” he added.
For many on Friday, however, shock at the scale of the bloodshed began to outweigh the threats. The violence started soon after the noon prayer, as thousands of Islamists marched in a last defense against a return to the era of political exclusion, imprisonment and torture they endured under 60 years of military-backed dictatorship.
In the meantime, the government has continued to sideline its opponents. State news media said that hundreds of Brotherhood members had been arrested across Egypt over the last two days, including some it said had firearms or explosives.
For the first time since the president’s removal six weeks ago, some non-Islamists stood with the Morsi supporters, sometimes risking their own lives as well.
In a sign of the government’s growing anger at the international criticism of its crackdown against the Islamists, Egyptian officials lashed out at the foreign news media and unspecified countries on Saturday, accusing them of ignoring the “terrorism” of the Islamists. At a news conference, Mustafa Hegazy, an adviser to Egypt’s interim president, warned that the Egyptian government “knows who supported them and those who failed them,” as well as “those who give international cover or financial cover” to acts of terrorism.
“Where are we going with this?” one young man asked another watching at the edge of the Ramses Square battle. “Are we just going to fight one another endlessly?”
“Egypt is not a soft state,” he said. “It is not a follower. It has never been and will never be.”
His friend replied that he had protested against Mr. Morsi, and that the police had protected him from threats. But now they were killing the Islamists, he said.
The government has suggested the Brotherhood was behind recent chaos in Sinai as well as attacks on Christian churches, which intensified after the brutal crackdown of the Islamists last week.
“They’re Egyptian, too,” he said. “Why were we safe while they’re being killed by the police?”
The mosque that was the site of Saturday’s clash had been transformed into a field hospital and a morgue on Friday. Later that night, it was surrounded by riot police officers and the military, who negotiated with the Islamists early Saturday to abandon the mosque.
There was no sign that the chaos would end anytime soon. The Muslim Brotherhood, the main Islamist group behind Mr. Morsi, called for similar marches every day for the next week, and vowed to hold daily, nonviolent marches to Ramses Square for morning and evening prayers, declaring, in language inspired by Thomas Jefferson, that the bloodshed “irrigates the tree of liberty in Egypt.”
Soldiers fired their weapons in the air to disperse civilians trying to beat the Islamists. On the edges of the mosque, some of the civilians carried rubber hoses or metal pipes. “The mosque is full of weapons,” one man said to a crowd, stirring them up.
As they have since the ouster of Mr. Morsi, state and private news media cheered on the battle against the Brotherhood. “Egypt is fighting terrorism,” a deep voice intoned periodically over Egyptian state radio throughout the day; a similar slogan in English and Arabic flashed on state television.
Then there was gunfire, though its source was unclear. A soldier could be seen on television peering through binoculars. White spots began to appear on the brown brick of the minaret, as the bullets struck.
ONtv, a private satellite network hostile to the Islamists, broadcast pictures of 60 detainees kneeling with bound hands in military custody. A headline on the screen described them as “militants.”
Mayy
El Sheikh contributed reporting.
A government official holding them said that 40 of them, including a few foreigners, had been captured by civilians near Ramses Square before being turned over to the military.
Islamists in Pakistan, Tunisia and Turkey, organized protests against the crackdown. But in Saudi Arabia, a fierce foe of the Brotherhood, King Abdullah delivered a televised statement pledging support for what he described as Egypt’s fight against “terrorism,” and he scolded the West for its criticism.
“The kingdom stands with Egypt and against all those who try to interfere with its internal affairs,” he said, adding, “Those who are interfering in its internal affairs are lighting the fire of strife and supporting the terrorism they had claimed to be fighting against.”
Outside Cairo, security officials said, the police broke up a pro-Morsi sit-in at the city of Qena, and the military killed protesters while breaking up another sit-in at the city of Suez. State news media reported that a crime wave had erupted in the security vacuum, with six banks robbed in Beni Suef and a museum looted in Minya.
In Cairo, Friday’s marches denouncing the military takeover began at mosques around the city after the noon prayer, and within an hour the city was all but paralyzed. Mr. Morsi’s supporters and civilian vigilantes opposing them both blocked roads, bridges, tunnels and highways.
Guns were visible in the hands of civilians on all sides, including a Morsi supporter filmed with a machine gun and peeking around a corner of the Four Seasons hotel in Giza as a gunfight broke out.
In many places, heavily armed civilian supporters of the new government carried or fired guns while soldiers and police watched. In other cases, civilians hurling rocks or wielding sticks advanced against opponents under the cover of police gunfire.
There also appeared to be provocateurs. At a pro-Morsi march, two masked men with machine guns seemed to pose as Islamists. First, they seemed to support the march, herding passers-by into its ranks. Then they aimed their guns at the terrified protesters, who fled in fear.
“Who are these men with guns?” one woman among the Morsi supporters asked in terror. “Are they with us or with them?”
Amr Darrag, 54, a senior leader of the Muslim Brotherhood who spent the last month negotiating with Western diplomats over the crisis, said he had been in a march with his wife and daughters when they were fired upon by gunmen atop a hotel, and cornered from three sides on an overpass by a combination of security forces, firing tear gas, and armed civilians.
“We are dealing with vampires,” he said. “They intentionally killed us. My analysis is that they would like to force people to go to violence, because this is the only explanation.”
Thousands had gathered in Ramses Square when the fighting there began. A small group of young people started throwing rocks at a nearby police station, and others quickly moved to try to stop them.
Gunfire erupted from the police station soon after. Mohamed Abdel Salem, 19, said he happened to be walking by with a friend, Saed, 22, who was shot and killed by a police bullet. “Many died,” he said.
A military helicopter hovered low overhead as the crowd chanted, “There are the mass killers, there they are.”
By 3 a.m. Saturday, hundreds of protesters had taken refuge in the Fateh Mosque, refusing to leave for fear of arrests. Swarms of riot police officers and their supporters in civilian clothes began breaking down the doors, throwing rocks through the windows, and filling the mosque with tear gas. Among the Islamists killed in Ramses Square was Dr. Khaled el-Banna, 30, a grandson of the Muslim Brotherhood’s founder, Hassan al-Banna, who was gunned down near the same square in 1949.
Mayy El Sheikh contributed reporting from Cairo, and Alan Cowell from London.
