On January 25, eleven days after Ben Ali’s fall from power, Egyptian pro-democracy groups organized a national day of protest, in which massive rallies of peaceful demonstrators called for democratic freedoms similar to those just won by Tunisians. The day of protest was sponsored by a loose alliance that included secular democracy organizations, liberal and leftist groups, and the youth wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, and it was timed to coincide with Egypt’s National Police Day.53 As in Tunisia, brutality against the early demonstrators led to an escalation of the protests, which rapidly turned into a series of violent uprisings in Egypt’s major cities, including Alexandria, Cairo, and Port Said.
On January 28, in response to protestors’ defeat of the police during the battle for the Q asr al-Nil bridge (discussed below), President Mubarak disabled the Internet across Egypt, blocking access to the Web in most cities throughout the country, and suspended cellphone networks in many urban centers. This was possible “because Egypt permitted only three wireless carriers to operate, and required all Internet service providers (ISPs) to funnel their traffic through a handful of international links. Confronted with mass demonstrations and fearful about a populace able to organize itself, the government had to order fewer than a dozen companies to shut down their networks and disconnect their routers from the global internet” in order to suspend Internet and cellphone services in a matter of minutes.54 This action was designed to hamper protest organizers, who were using Facebook, Twitter, and cellphone text messages to coordinate their action. But it backfired, encouraging demonstrators by showing that their protests had rattled the regime, and angering many Egyptians who had stayed neutral to that point. By blocking their access to international media and communications, the regime gave them a personal grievance against the government and a personal connection with the protestors.
Many people subsequently joined the demonstrations, including the “days of rage,” a series of mass protests in major cities on successive Fridays, which turned violent as security forces and pro-regime activists attacked demonstrators. Striking workers in Egypt’s textile industry and on the Suez Canal formed a key urban center of resistance to the regime. The focal point that emerged through the unrest was Tahrir Square, a huge open space strategically located in the urban core of Cairo that was permanently occupied by an enormous number of protestors (up to a million people at the revolution’s peak) and was encircled and besieged by regime supporters and security forces. Besides Tahrir Square, however, street fighting, rioting, and mass anti-regime protests spread across most urbanized areas in coastal Egypt during the uprising, and it was this broad-based urban unrest—as much as events in Tahrir Square itself—that resulted in Mubarak’s stepping down as president on February 11, 2011.
As in Tunisia, highly connected, marginalized youth in Egypt’s coastal cities played a central role in the revolution. Along with labor unions and the youth arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, the main organization involved in the 2011 uprising was the April 6 Movement, a secular pro-democracy group formed in response to brutal police repression of demonstrations in Mahalla, a city in the Nile River delta, on April 6, 2008. April 6 had spent years consciously copying the techniques used in “color revolutions” in Europe and the Middle East and seeking assistance from international online activist groups:
The first thing the April 6 leaders did was study. They started with the Academy of Change, an Arabic online group promoting nonviolent civil disobedience. Its inspiration was Optor, a youth movement cofounded by a Serbian revolutionary, Ivan Marovic, which helped overthrow Yugoslavia’s Slobodan Miloševic in 2000 by means of a “Bulldozer Revolution” that was remarkably peaceful: only two people died. Marovic later cofounded the Center for Applied Non-Violent Action and Strategies (Canvas), which has since trained activists from more than 50 countries. In the summer of 2009, April 6 sent an activist named Mohammed Adel to train with Canvas in Serbia. He returned with a book about peaceful tactics and a computer game called A Force More Powerful, which lets people play with scenarios for regime change. Taking advantage of the game’s Creative Commons license, April 6 members wrote an Egyptian version. “We used it to help train our activists,” says [the group’s founder, Ahmed] Maher.55
When the uprising broke out on January 25, the already connected and tech-savvy Egyptian protestors were able to draw on immediate international support from groups like Anonymous, which had rolled directly from its #OpTunisia “Freedom Op” into #OpEgypt. “Anonymous started to set up lifeline internet connections and target government servers [with distributed denial-of-service attacks] just as they had in Tunisia. Three days later, Mubarak turned off the Internet. Anonymous was aghast, both at this display of existential threat to the net as a way of political expression, and [at] their impotence in the case of a nation just taken offline.”56
But other groups were already stepping into the breach. Peter Fein, a Chicago-based member of Telecomix, an online hacker/activist collective that describes itself as an “ad-hocracy” that engages in “guerrilla information warfare,” worked twenty-hour days during the uprising, creating tools to help Egyptian protestors fight back against the Web blackout:
The Internet was being cut off, and telephones were cut off and communication across the country got much more difficult. Suez was completely cut off. And so this kind of created a need for internal communication—not for people to be able to talk on Facebook or Twitter to the world, but amongst themselves . . . so there were a number of tools, mesh technology and so on—that we tried to help people figure out. I had several hours of chats with guys on the ground [to determine] what they needed. A lot of the time they don’t have the technical knowledge of what they actually need, they just want to be able to communicate without being wiretapped . . . so we’ll send them [the secure web browser] Tor or something. Towards the end they were just asking us how they could hold [Tahrir] Square—it’s difficult and necessary to communicate across an area that large and packed and we helped them. [We sent them] instructions on how to set up a wireless mesh network [a way of creating a communication network] often using mobile phones’ Bluetooth technology or two-way radio [microphones]. One of the things we started working on is a how-to, a set of instructions, to build two-way radios, walkie-talkies . . . with hardware that people already have and the best thing we came up with is if you take a normal clock radio, smash it apart and cross a couple of wires and you can get them to communicate with each other. They have a two-kilometre range.57
It’s worth noting that there are two essential prerequisites for a Bluetooth mesh-network or radio net of this kind: first, the population must have a base level of technical knowledge and access to electricity and electronic componentry, and second, there must be a sufficient residential density that members of the network are close enough to each other (about a mile at most) to receive short-range radio signals. Both these requirements, of course, imply an urban or periurban rather than rural environment.
Hacktivists such as Anonymous and Telecomix weren’t the only international groups to rally in support when Mubarak blocked the Internet: for-profit companies joined in, too. Google engineers took only two days to build “a system that enabled protestors in Egypt to send tweets even though the Internet in their country had been shut down. ‘Like many people’, they blogged, ‘we’ve been glued to the news unfolding in Egypt and thinking of what we can do to help people on the ground. Over the weekend we came up with the idea of a speak-to-tweet service—the ability for anyone to tweet using just a voice connection.’ They worked with a small team of engineers from Twitter and SayNow (a company Google [had] recently acquired) to build the system. It provides three international phone numbers and anyone can tweet by leaving a voicemail.”58
Google’s involvement went back several months before the revolution. In mid-2010 Google marketing executive Wael Ghonim had created an online anti-regime Facebook group, We Are All Khaled Said, named for an Egyptian
youth publicly beaten to death by police in June 2010. Working closely with the April 6 Movement and the National Association for Change—a broad-based opposition group led by Mohamed ElBaradei, the Vienna-based former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and a prominent Egyptian secular pro-democracy politician—Ghonim publicized the injustice and cruelty of Khaled Said’s death and filled the Facebook site with images, news clips, and videos of police brutality, along with pro-democracy messages. The group “eventually attracted hundreds of thousands of users, building their allegiance through exercises in online democratic participation.”59 The April 6 Movement then used We Are All Khaled Said as a forum to announce and organize the January 25 protest that sparked the uprising.
As in Tunisia, the Internet, radio, and television propaganda battle between Mubarak’s regime and pro-democracy activists in cyberspace and on the airwaves was only one part of a multidimensional fight—the “air war” counterpart, as it were, to a “ground war” that played out simultaneously on the streets of Egypt’s cities. Online activists relied on a broader set of Internet-based tools than had the Tunisian groups, using Facebook to organize and announce protests and demonstrations, Twitter to coordinate them, and YouTube videos to capture and disseminate the results to mass media outlets and international supporters. Again, however, as in Tunisia, an intense escalatory synergy developed when real-world trusted human networks, based on residential and family loyalties and local allegiances, meshed with virtual social networks. Street fights created the raw material for the propaganda battle, while media messaging reinforced the political impact of events on the street.
The Ultras in the Urban Ground War
Again, Ultras played a key role in the ground component of the uprising. Soccer fans from rival teams joined forces to oppose the regime during several critical street battles, including the two most important urban engagements of the revolution: the fight for the Q asr al-Nil bridge on January 28, 2011, and the “Battle of the Camels” in Tahrir Square on February 2, 2011. In Egypt, as in Tunisia, Ultras formed the hard core of the street protests, and took the battle to police and security forces in a way that rallied and motivated other protestors.
Q asr al-Nil is an imposing colonial-era road bridge, four lanes wide, that spans the Nile in central Cairo. It’s an important chokepoint, covering the western approaches to Tahrir Square from the Gezira district, which includes the Opera Square and the Mokhtar al-Tetsh Stadium, a major soccer venue and the original home of the al-Ahly soccer club. On the first Day of Rage on Friday, January 28, 2011, tens of thousands of protestors, organized by April 6 and other activist movements, motivated by the arrival from Vienna of Mohamed ElBaradei, and spearheaded by Ultras from al-Ahly who had temporarily united with fans from their archrival club, Zamalek, tried to march from Gezira to join fellow protestors in Tahrir Square. The march began peacefully, with the demonstrators singing the Egyptian national anthem, but turned deadly when they reached the bridge.60 Blocking the bridge’s eastern end were more than a thousand riot police with armored vehicles, mobile barriers, batons, and shields. They attacked the marchers with tear gas, rubber bullets, “an unidentified, burning red liquid” (probably pepper spray), and water cannons.61 The protestors made it about a third of the way across the bridge before being forced back to the Opera Square, where police repeatedly attacked them with tear gas; after a period of confusion they fought back hard, with the Ultras in the vanguard. The battle raged all afternoon, the crowd repeatedly surging forward, chanting anti-Mubarak slogans and trying to breach the police line, only to be thrown back by police baton-charges under a barrage of tear gas, rubber bullets, and high-pressure water sprays.
Dozens of demonstrators were seriously injured or killed, but the Ultras, along with an ad hoc group of young men who aggregated around them as the battle wore on, continued to spearhead the fight. The Ultras and the self-selected group who had rallied to them played a critical role in motivating the broader crowd on several occasions: at one point, “when the bursts from the tear gas launchers quickened, the protestors retreated, until the young men at the front told them to come back.”62 As the crowd advanced in great depth on the narrow four-lane frontage of the bridge, a simple rotation system developed in a self-synchronized way: “the people who were injured would go to the back and other people would replace them . . . we just kept rotating.”63
By 5:30 p.m. the demonstrators had seized the bridge and pushed the riot police back, overrunning several armored vehicles, destroying mobile police posts, throwing hastily erected metal police barriers into the Nile, and capturing and wounding several police officers. In the late afternoon the riot police counterattacked in strength, recaptured the bridge, and penned the demonstrators next to a nearby park, using an aggressive counter-riot technique known as “kettling,” in which rioters are encircled and attacked in order to inflict casualties, allow the arrest of ringleaders, and cow them. Many demonstrators were hurt, but the Ultras fought back once more—by the middle of the evening they had broken the encirclement, retaken the bridge, and pushed through to join other protestors at Tahrir Square. As burned-out police vehicles smoldered in the streets, a strong smell of tear gas lingered, the headquarters of Mubarak’s ruling party burned late into the night, the police retreated and—foreshadowing what was to come—military armored vehicles began to close in on Tahrir Square for the first time.64
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!”65
This day of street fighting came to be seen by external observers as “perhaps the most pivotal battle of the revolution.”66 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.”67 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.”68 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 irregul
ars 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.69 It also included people who were paid to participate and brought in by buses from periurban areas outside the city.70 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.71 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.72 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.”73
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