Egyptian Attacks Are Escalating Amid Stalemate
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
Mostafa Darwish/Associated Press
Egyptian security forces at the site of a car bombing on a security headquarters in the Sinai town of El Tur on Monday.
The lethal conflict between Egypt’s military-backed government and its
Islamist opponents grew on Monday, with an expansion of attacks against
government targets.
Mostafa Darwish/Associated Press
Egyptian security forces at the site of a car bombing on a security headquarters in the Sinai town of El Tur on Monday.
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
Published: October 7, 2013
CAIRO — The lethal conflict between Egypt’s military-backed government
and its Islamist opponents escalated on Monday, with an expansion of
attacks against government targets, signs that the authorities have
failed to secure the streets and a refusal by either side to back down.
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Dozens Are Killed in Street Violence Across Egypt (October 7, 2013)
Mohamed El-Shahed/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
A state security building after a car bombing on
Monday in the Sinai town of El Tur that killed two police officers and
injured nearly 50 other people.
Three brazen attacks across the country included a drive-by shooting
near the Suez Canal that killed six soldiers, a car bomb that killed
three police officers and wounded dozens near the Red Sea resorts area,
and the first rocket-propelled grenade launched in the struggle,
exploding near an elite enclave of the capital and damaging a satellite
transmitter.
The attacks came a day after security forces killed 53 protesters, many
shot in the head and chest, in the worst outbreak of street mayhem in
Cairo since mid-August.
Three months after the military ouster of President Mohamed Morsi of the
Muslim Brotherhood, the violence was the latest evidence that the new
government installed on July 3 by Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi had failed
to neutralize the Islamist opposition even after arresting its
leadership and demonstrating its willingness to use lethal force.
To many in the government, the protests and attacks seemed only to
underscore the need to redouble its fight against the Brotherhood, which
officials quickly blamed for Monday’s attacks.
To the Islamist opposition, however, a heavy turnout for a day of
protests on Sunday despite the deadly reprisals only proved the
resilience of their “anti coup” movement — even with no obvious
leadership. Faced with a return to decades of repression, Islamists
said, they had no choice but to continue their protests even if they
risked death and stood little chance of reversing the takeover.
The seemingly random attacks on Monday, many analysts said, indicated
that the violent backlash against the new government had taken on a
momentum that the leaders of the Brotherhood could no longer restrain
even if they wanted to.
While neither side could fully triumph, neither could see room to pull
back, setting the stage for further bloodshed, said Emad Shahin, a
political scientist at the American University in Cairo who has tried
without success to broker steps toward compromise. “We have reached a
bloody stalemate,” he said.
Since Mr. Morsi was deposed, the killing of security officers has become
an almost daily occurrence in the industrial canal zone of the lawless
northern Sinai. But the car bomb on Monday morning in the south Sinai
town of El Tur, in the same region as the biblical Mount Sinai and the
Sharm el Sheik resort, was the first sign that such attacks might be
spreading to what had been a pillar of the Egyptian economy, its Red Sea
resorts.
And the rocket-propelled grenade attack was the first time in years that
such a heavy weapon had been used in the vicinity of the capital. The
grenade tore a foot-wide hole in a satellite-transmission dish, and its
explosion an hour before dawn sent shivers through the affluent
neighborhood of Maadi, a heavily guarded precinct that is home to many
embassies and diplomats.
No one claimed responsibility for the attacks, nor did they need to. The
attacks were universally assumed to be the work of Islamists angry at
Mr. Morsi’s ouster, and, speaking on the condition of anonymity because
they were not authorized as spokesmen, two senior government officials
blamed the Brotherhood despite its repeated public disavowals of such
tactics.
“Blackmail by terrorism,” said one of the officials, a senior military officer.
Suggesting the Brotherhood was almost predisposed to violence, he argued
that the violence might have been worse if not for the crackdown, in
which security forces have killed more than 1,000 protesters and jailed
hundreds of Islamist leaders. If the violence was this severe with the
leaders behind bars, the officer asked, how much worse might it be if
leaders were released?
The Brotherhood’s “anti coup” alliance, meanwhile, saluted what it
called the courage and sacrifice of “unprecedented numbers” who had
turned out the day before. In a statement on Monday, the alliance called
for student protests at schools and universities on Tuesday “to
denounce the continuation of the massacres.”
And it all but dared the government to continue the violence against
protesters by calling for new marches on Friday to Tahrir Square, the
symbolic center of the 2011 revolt against President Hosni Mubarak and
more recently the staging ground for rallies in support of General Sisi.
It was the attempt by pro-Morsi marchers to reach Tahrir Square on
Sunday, when it was the site of a pro-military celebration, that set in
motion the day of deadly violence, and the opposition alliance’s plans
to try again this Friday appeared to set the stage for more.
“Nobody will keep us from the square no matter what the sacrifices,” the alliance said in its statement.
Leaders and supporters of the Brotherhood have said repeatedly for weeks
that they have no choice but to continue their street protests
regardless of the odds, because the new government has so far shown
every intention of suppressing Egyptian democracy as well as their
movement.
“This is a final ultimate battle with the military,” Ahmed el-Erainy,
42, a business consultant and Brotherhood member recently released from
prison after his arrest at an antigovernment sit-in, said on Monday. “It
is the ultimate battle between us and them, and by us I don’t just mean
the Brothers — I mean the civil state versus the military state.”
Like others in the Brotherhood, he dismissed the idea that its members
could ever hope for fairness under the military-led government, and
after his turn through Egypt’s capricious and politicized judicial
system he laughed with particular relish at the idea that instead of
street protests they might put their trust in the law and the courts.
“What judiciary?” he asked. “There is no judiciary in Egypt.”
H. A. Hellyer, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who is based in
Egypt, argued that the Brotherhood’s approach was tragically
shortsighted. Egypt’s security forces were likely to meet almost any
mass demonstration with force, and the Islamists end up taking the blame
for the loss of life, the chaos and any subsequent retaliation like the
attacks on Monday.
“Who do you think will be blamed for that R.P.G. attack?” Mr. Hellyer
said. “More people will die, you will have violence in other parts of
the country, and all that will be blamed on the Muslim Brotherhood.”
“It is only a question of whether the Brotherhood are pummeled out of
the political arena, or if they withdraw on their own terms,” he added.
But Professor Shahin of the American University in Cairo argued that by
harassing the government the protests gave the Islamists some leverage,
and that the current government was also in a battle it could never
fully win. “You can’t just say, ‘I have half the population on my side
and with it I can crush the other half,’ and go on like that
indefinitely,” he said. “This military-backed government cannot
consolidate on the basis of repression and the authoritarian measures of
the ‘50s and ‘60s. That is a bygone era.”
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