Out of the Mountains (35 page)

The political effect of the bridge battle, amplified by online and media reporting—in particular, the extensive camera-phone and digital video footage of the violence that was captured by people in the crowd and by observers from rooftop vantage points around the bridge and subsequently posted on YouTube—was immense. Indeed, it was this surge of handheld cellphone video footage, and the subsequent negative press, that caused the regime to shut off the Internet. As Kareem Fahim reported from Cairo on the evening of the battle:

The long struggle for the bridge set the tone for the momentous events throughout the country on Friday. Egyptians slowly shed their fear of President Hosni Mubarak's police state and confronted its power, a few halting steps at a time. The protestors came from every social class and included even wealthy Egyptians, who are often dismissed as apolitical, or too comfortable to mobilize. For some of them in the crowd on Friday, the brutality of the security forces was a revelation. “Dogs!” they yelled at the riot police, as they saw bloodied protestors dragged away. “These people are Egyptians!”
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This day of street fighting came to be seen by external observers as “perhaps the most pivotal battle of the revolution.”
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Likewise, Ahmed Maher, founder of the April 6 Movement and organizer of the January 25 protest that sparked the revolution, regarded the fight for Q
 
asr al-Nil bridge as a turning point. He saw January 28 as “a very important day . . . in the morning, it was a demonstration, in the evening, it was a revolution.”
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The government's most public counterattack against that revolution was only a few days away—and again the Ultras were to play a key role as the hard core of the anti-regime protest.

As the uprising developed, President Mubarak hadn't restricted his response to the use of regular police and military forces. Just as Egyptian protestors had learned from the experience of their Tunisian colleagues, Mubarak's regime seems to have observed the experience of Ben Ali's government in Tunisia, responding to the initial protests with the “rapid implementation of a strategy of survival.”
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Before banning the Internet and blocking cellphones, Mubarak created what he called an “Electronic Army” to put out pro-regime messages on the Internet and social media. He also used group text messages via the mobile phone network in an attempt to rally supporters to head out into the streets and counter the protestors' message; when this failed, he opened jails to release hundreds of violent criminals into major urban centers, probably as a way of intimidating the demonstrators. The regime also organized an informal street militia of its own, a pro-government equivalent of the Ultras. These irregulars formed, in effect, a state-proxy armed group that was sponsored by pro-Mubarak business people and officials and drawn from pro-regime bureaucrats, plainclothes police, party activists and members of Mubarak's ruling National Democratic Party.
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It also included people who were paid to participate and brought in by buses from periurban areas outside the city.
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Six days after the Q
 
asr al-Nil bridge battle, this group launched its attack on Tahrir Square.

At
2
:
30
p.m. on the afternoon of Wednesday, February
2
, thousands of pro-regime irregulars charged the square, entering in cohesive columns from several side streets, and armed with rocks, clubs, firebombs, improvised explosives, pistols, shotguns, and rifles. Some observers noted plainclothes and uniformed police, who seemed to be playing a coordinating role, among the attackers. The militia pelted the protestors with rocks and attacked them with clubs and sticks. Other Mubarak supporters rained firebombs, bottles, bricks, chunks of concrete, and rocks down onto the protestors, from rooftops and a highway overpass.
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Then, in a move reminiscent of a cavalry charge, a column of pro-regime irregulars, mounted on horses and camels, burst onto the square and galloped into the packed crowds of pro-democracy protestors, riding people down and hitting them from horseback with sticks, whips, and clubs.

At first the protestors tried nonviolent resistance, but by
3
:
30
p.m. they began to retaliate, with the hard core by this time comprising Ultras from the al-Ahly and Zamalek clubs, along with the radicalized young men who had coalesced around them during the Q
 
asr al-Nil fight and—a new element—the youth wing of the Muslim Brotherhood. Other protestors swarmed to join the battle or to provide nonviolent support. The hard-core protestors formed a combat wing that fought to protect the thousands of peaceful demonstrators still on the square. They pulled several Mubarak supporters down from horseback, kicking and punching them; threw rocks and pavers in retaliation; formed a defensive cordon around the noncombatant demonstrators; and turned the lower level of the local subway station into an ad hoc prison where they held pro-regime militia fighters under guard.
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The battle quickly broke up into a general mêlée, with dozens of fights going on simultaneously all over the square: “The two sides pummeled each other with chunks of concrete and bottles at each of the six entrances to the sprawling plaza, where the
10
,
000
anti-Mubarak protestors tried to fend off the more than
3
,
000
attackers who besieged them. Some on the pro-government side waved machetes, while the square's defenders filled the air with a ringing battlefield din by banging metal fences with sticks.”
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In a continuous fight that raged through the night and into the next morning, somewhere between
600
and
1
,
500
people were injured, and many were killed, especially when “heavy gunfire broke out after
10
p.m. while the opposing factions traded Molotov cocktails from one rooftop to another, setting small fires that continued to burn but did not spread.”
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After initially standing back from armed confrontation with the regime, the Brotherhood had reversed its position after the battle for the Q
 
asr al-Nil bridge, calling for all able-bodied young men to join the protest on Tahrir Square. Now the Brotherhood and the Ultras cooperated in an ad hoc alliance against their attackers.

As an underground network that had been illegal in Egypt for a generation, the Brotherhood didn't have a lot of experience operating in the open street, but what it did have was an organized and disciplined cadre structure. Now the Brotherhood organized the protestors into teams and helped plan their defense against the regime attacks, breaking pavement up into chunks to be thrown, building barricades, and organizing a defensive line.

“The youth of the Muslim Brotherhood played a really big role,” [April 6 Movement founder Abdul] Maher said. “But actually so did the soccer fans [who] are always used to having confrontations with police at the stadiums,” he said. Soldiers of the Egyptian military . . . stood watching from behind the iron gates of the Egyptian Museum as the war of stone missiles and improvised bombs continued for 14 hours until about four in the morning. Then, unable to break the protestors' discipline or determination, the Mubarak forces resorted to guns, shooting 45 and killing 2. . . . The soldiers—perhaps following orders to prevent excessive bloodshed, perhaps acting on their own—finally intervened. They fired their machine guns into the ground and into the air, several witnesses said, scattering the Mubarak forces and leaving the protestors in unmolested control of the square, and by extension, the streets.
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By the morning of February 3, as the sun rose over the chaos and the smoke and tear gas began to clear, it was clear that Egypt's political landscape had changed forever: the regime could no longer count on the support of the military. Army troops had refused to fire on their own citizens: in fact, they had intervened to protect
anti
-regime protestors on the square and to disperse the
pro
-regime irregulars. For their part, the police—though generally loyal to the regime—had been defeated in the field in two successive major engagements. In terms of competitive control theory, the protestors (especially the Ultras) had shown sufficient capability at the coercive end of the spectrum to defeat the police in a straight fight, and because the police could no longer rely on the military (the ultimate coercive sanction on which the government's entire normative system rested) the regime as a whole was now being outcompeted, leaving the protestors in control of the cities.

Reflecting this change in the relative balance of power, no security vacuum emerged when the police were forced to withdraw from many districts in Cairo—local citizens' committees and neighborhood watch groups, most of which opposed the regime even if they hadn't taken a direct hand in the uprising, immediately seized control. Other cities—notably Alexandria (hometown of Khaled Said), Mansoura, Suez, Port Said, and many smaller towns—were in uproar, with regime control completely breaking down in Alexandria, and Mansoura declared a “war zone” and evacuated by police. A week later, after continued mass demonstrations in Tahrir Square, and amid rumors of an impending military coup, President Mubarak stepped down in disgrace, handing control to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), whose leaders immediately promised major concessions and a transition to full democracy.

Mubarak's departure was, of course, by no means the end of the Egyptian revolution. Violent mass demonstrations, as well as online and street-level activism, continued throughout
2011
and
2012
and into
2013
, under both SCAF and the elected Muslim Brotherhood government of Mohammed Morsi. And Ultras from several clubs were involved in deadly stadium riots and urban unrest. But the first days of the uprising showed a clear evolution beyond the techniques used in Tunisia—both on the part of pro-democracy protestors and by the regime and its supporters—into a form of network-enabled urban revolution.

The regime's attempts to oppose this revolution online (by suspending the Internet and cellphone networks, and through the Electronic Army) and on the ground (with riot police and pro-regime militia) backfired spectacularly, only helping to mobilize the mass of the Egyptian people and drawing in an ad hoc network of international supporters such as Anonymous and Telecomix. Ultimately, the uprising involved, as we've seen, components of both an “air war” (online and media) and a “ground war” (street and urban fighting), enabled by access to the Internet and cellphones, and by the alliance of real-world groups such as the Ultras and the Brotherhood with online activists, mass movements such as April
6
, and social media groupings including We Are All Khaled Said. All these elements, which depended for their success on a sufficient density of tech-savvy population with access to communications technology, electricity, and the Internet, were artifacts of the predominantly urban, highly networked environment, in which the revolution took place.

If Egypt's revolution was in some ways a larger, more intense version of the Tunisian uprising, then what was about to happen in Libya was to be something else entirely. President Mubarak's quick climb-down and the restraint shown by Egypt's powerful army stopped the uprising from escalating into insurgency. In Libya, events were to take a sharply different turn.

“A Savage Rampage”: Network-Enabled Insurgency in Libya

On February 15, 2011, four days after Mubarak resigned, and just over a month after the fall of Ben Ali, protests began in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi.

Since mid-January, responding to events in Tunisia and Egypt, President Gaddafi had been cracking down on activists and tightening security in towns across Libya, including Benghazi—Libya's second-largest city and capital of the eastern region, known as Cyrenaica.
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Gaddafi had flown weapons and mercenaries into desert oases in southern Cyrenaica and into Libya's southwestern region of Fezzan in a series of cargo flights from the Republic of Belarus, whose president, Aleksandr Lukashenko, was one of his few allies.
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He'd given a speech decrying the protests, saying that the fall of the Tunisian regime “pained him” and claiming that WikiLeaks and foreign ambassadors had “led protestors astray.”
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He would later call the Libyan protestors “greasy rats,” blame their actions on hallucinogenic drugs in their Nescafé, call for them to be shot without trial, and attribute the uprising to forces as diverse as al Q
 
aeda and America.
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Libya, as noted, has the highest level of coastal urbanization in the Mediterranean, with fully
85
percent of its people living in urban areas on coastlines. Indeed, just two coastal cities—Benghazi (with
1
.
1
million people) and Tripoli, the capital (with
1
.
55
million)—together account for almost half of Libya's total population of
5
.
6
million.
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This is a huge level of urban concentration, even for coastal North Africa. Like towns in Tunisia and Egypt, Libyan cities had experienced rapid population growth in the decade before the uprising, and though overall per capita income was higher and education levels better in Libya than in either Tunisia or Egypt, urban youth unemployment was still significant, there were ominous inequalities and injustices among various population groups, and the average age of the population (twenty-four years old) reflected a similar urban youth bulge.
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