But the violent attack by soldiers and police upon opposition protesters’ main camp in Cairo was stunning in its ferocity, an assault that transformed nearby streets into a war zone.
Gunfire crackled as
police in flak vests, armed with assault rifles, ran in and out of the
Rabaa al-Adawiya protest camp. Plumes of black smoke and white smoke
rose from the fires and tear-gas canisters. Bulldozers plowed into tents
and tore through the protesters’ walls of sandbags.
Two colleagues from
the Washington Post’s Cairo bureau and I reached the site just before 8
a.m. Wednesday, about an hour after security forces launched a raid on
the camp where men, women and children have been rallying for the past
six weeks, demanding the reinstatement of ousted president
By then,
violence was spilling over into side streets. Police carried a wounded
colleague past us. A police officer beat a teen over the head with a
handgun before hauling him away. A woman implored a police officer not
to kill protesters as they shoved back a man who, through tears, said he
was trying to get to his little sister, who was trapped inside Rabaa
al-Adawiya mosque.
Full coverage:Crisis in Egypt
It wasn’t long before
the police opened fire with tear gas and then live ammunition, on
spectators too. Women and men ran down the block, screaming for cover.
“If I see you again,
I’ll shoot you in the leg,” a police officer told me and my colleagues,
Sharaf al-Hourani and Mansour Mohamed. Security forces on the roof of a
nearby building watched us through binoculars. Two helicopters circled
overhead.
We found ourselves
trapped between police cordons as pro-Morsi protesters marched on a line
where hundreds of black-clad police faced outward.
“With life, with
blood, we sacrifice for Islam,” they chanted, until police opened fire
with an onslaught of bullets and tear gas.
The rapid fire of automatic guns was echoing between buildings as we crouched with neighbourhood residents against a wall.
By 11 a.m., a bullet
whistled too close, directly over our heads. I have no idea where it
came from. At times, it sounded like the gunfire was coming from all
directions, from side streets and the towering apartment blocks.
Sharaf, Mansour and I
dropped to the pavement and crawled downhill into a low alley shielded
on two sides from the street. We lay there with two young Egyptian
reporters as barrage after barrage of gunfire resounded a few hundred
metres away, where police appeared to be clashing with protesters.
Young men wheeled four
metal carts down the street, each containing a wounded man. They
approached the cordon cautiously, hoping to deliver them to the other
side.
Egypt’s
military-backed interim government had vowed for weeks to break up the
sit-ins. Government officials and local media had painted Morsi’s
supporters in the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorists bent on the
destruction of the nation.
But now, government
forces were unleashing sniper fire that seemed indiscriminate. Along
with scores of Morsi supporters, those who were felled included two
journalists and the teenage daughter of a prominent Brotherhood leader.
(A photojournalist friend was shot in the leg.) Snipers also shot at
people who tried to approach or leave a makeshift hospital inside the
camp, where dozens of dead lined the floor.
By noon, the clashes
that were pinning us down begun to abate, the police having pushed
protesters back from their cordon. We edged our way out, past rows of
police and a vehicle, to where bloodied men detained by government
forces sat on benches, clutching their heads and awaiting their fates.
