I woke up every morning at the first light that summer wondering, Had the police moved in during the night? Had they started to clear Rabaa?
Waiting for a massacre is a singular feeling. In early 2011, I visited the Libyan city of Zawiya, west of Tripoli, after its residents had liberated themselves in the first moments of the uprising against Qaddafi. “Free Zawiya” was celebrating in the town square, and I handed out business cards.
Three weeks later, I was woken up before dawn in my Tripoli hotel room, my phone buzzing with repeat calls from Zawiya. Qaddafi’s troops were retaking the city. Soldiers were shooting everywhere. They will kill everyone. Please do something, my callers implored. Tell Washington. Won’t somebody help us?
I posted a short article on the New York Times website. Zawiya was a ghost town when I made it back. The minaret of the mosque had been destroyed by mortar shells and newly dug graves filled a corner of the square. July and August 2013 in Cairo felt like a slow-motion replay. I felt just as powerless.
On August 11, an Egyptian official tipped us off that the assault on Rabaa would begin the next morning at dawn. Mayy and I watched the sunrise from outside a gate of the sit-in. Anxious sentries paced back and forth with wooden sticks in their hands.
Nothing happened. The Egyptian interior minister called it off at the last minute; American diplomats following the process told me that he was afraid to take the fall alone. He insisted that army troops join the operation, too.
Two nights later, on August 13, our driver got another tip from his mukhabarat handler (of course he had a handler—I always assumed that). Don’t come to work the next day, stay out of the crossfire. So the driver split the difference, as he later confessed to Laura and others. He waited to pick me up until after the assault had begun. He dropped Mayy el-Sheikh and me blocks from the shooting, in Nasr City.
Mohamed Soltan, the Ohio State grad in flip-flops and basketball shorts who had tried to broaden the message of the sit-in, had spent the night running errands around the sprawling tent city, and he paused at dawn near the corner of Nasr Road and Yousef Abbas Street to take a picture with about a dozen friends. Two were sons of Brotherhood leaders.
They were smiling for the camera when the bullets started flying from all sides. Soltan grabbed his gas mask, ran to a sandbag barricade, and held up his iPhone to try to film the assault. But gunfire was coming from above and behind him, from the top of an abandoned building. He counted seven army bulldozers rolling toward the sit-in. Hundreds of riot police with Kalashnikovs were coming on foot. One of the Islamist demonstrators jumped onto a bulldozer to try to climb into the cabin. A rifle blew him to pieces.
Soltan remembered that his father was inside the sit-in and ran off to find him. He turned out to be huddling with a group of Brotherhood leaders under a table on the soundstage, hiding from the bullets. Each leader took turns holding up a sheet of wood as a shield, running to the microphone, and exhorting the frantic crowd to keep faith in God. Then each retreated back below the table. Soltan hid with them.
Al Jazeera’s Egyptian affiliate had stationed a freelance cameraman on the stage. But at 11:30 A.M. a bullet hit the cameraman in the head and he fell to the ground. So another freelancer grabbed a bicycle helmet and stepped behind the same camera, until about thirty minutes later another bullet took him down, too. The bicycle helmet fell upside down on the stage, full of brains and blood, and Soltan took a picture of it.
A young woman—Marwa Saad, a pharmacist—lunged past the cowering Brotherhood leaders and grabbed the microphone. “Where are you? Where are the men of the world?” she screamed. “You are letting us die!”
Soltan was still filming the violence with his iPhone camera. When he leaned down to plug it into a generator, a bullet whizzed past his head. He pulled back, and a second shot hit his tricep. A doctor among the Brotherhood leaders made a tourniquet out of a keffiyeh Soltan had worn around his neck.
Soltan was built like a midwestern American frat boy, five eleven and 272 pounds. It took four friends to carry him to a field clinic near the Rabaa al-Adawiya Mosque, where doctors gave him painkillers and bandaged his wound. The adjacent room had been converted into a morgue. Bodies were stacked one on top of the other.
Mayy and I made our way on foot through the apartment blocks of the neighborhood, Nasr City, “the City of Victory.” The Interior Ministry had promised for weeks that the police “dispersing” the sit-in (their clinical phrase) would leave “a safe exit” for any demonstrators willing to go, especially for the women and children living inside. We heard the reassurances repeated again on state radio that morning on the way to the scene. But as hard as we looked, we could find no way in or out. The soldiers and police had the sit-in surrounded. There was no safe exit.
The side streets were a swirl of hate and anger. A middle-aged woman was patrolling her block in her sleeping gown, with a long head scarf covering her shoulders. She waved a small Taser at us as though she were ready to lend a hand to the police and soldiers. “Finally, they are clearing the square,” she told us.
A block away, a man who had managed to escape the sit-in held up his hands to show the bloodstains on his palms. “You let him kill us, you traitors,” he screamed toward the balconies. “You gave him a mandate.”
A few blocks from the sit-in, a group of young men was crouched over a plastic milk crate filled with bottles. They were pouring gasoline and dipping scraps of torn T-shirts into the neck of each bottle: Molotov cocktails. Then one looked up. He saw me watching, with my pen in my notebook. I averted my eyes and we turned to flee.
Before we could, an armored personnel carrier rumbled around a corner behind us. A handful of masked riot policemen in black body armor were approaching with raised rifles. Standing near the Molotov makers made us obvious targets, so Mayy and I hustled across the street.
Glass shattered around us; shards hit Mayy’s jeans. A bullet had smashed a bus window two yards away. I remember soldiers and police shooting from both sides; Mayy remembered protesters throwing gas bombs from one side and police shooting from the other. Either way, we were stuck in the middle.
We ducked together into the shelter of an alley perpendicular to the street. A dead end. Gunshots cracked in volleys through the street behind us outside the alley. Canisters of tear gas streaked past and clouds obscured the view.
“Don’t worry, Mayy,” I said, trying to sound like I meant it.
I looked in vain at the walls and fences, hoping for something to climb, like a drainpipe or a ladder, or for a window to knock on. I remembered that at Mayy’s job interview she told me she had learned English rereading Jane Eyre. Now she was twenty-seven years old. She had just gotten married the previous September. She had already risked her life more than once doing this job. I imagined telling her parents that she had died at Rabaa.
Mayy was murmuring her last prayers. She gasped and jumped, and I thought for an instant that a bullet had hit her. Then I glimpsed a cat’s tail disappear between bins. For a novice journalist, Mayy was remarkably cool in perilous situations—in tear gas in Cairo, in gunfire in Port Said, inside the offices of the Egyptian Defense Ministry. But she was terrified of small animals, even the tiny lizards that crawled the walls of my office. One of the ratlike cats that swarm over Cairo had sprinted across our alley hiding place and brushed against her ankle.
At least four journalists were killed that day in and around Rabaa. At least one, the photographer Mahmoud Abou Zeid, known as Shawkan, was detained that day and imprisoned for more than four and a half years without any conviction. But all I could think about was Mayy, and all Mayy could think about was a street cat. I would look back on our moment in the alley as a parable about the way Egyptians managed, or displaced, their feelings about the horror of that day.
Tear gas, dust, bullhorns and screams, the dull thud of gas cannons, and the cracking of gunfire: smells and sounds are what I remember. We crouched close to the walls for what seemed like another twenty minutes. The battle had moved on; the tear gas had mostly cleared from the street outside the alley. Mayy and I peeked around the corner to make sure it was clear enough, then sprinted out. A man in a red T-shirt lay dead on the stoop.
We found ourselves across a plaza from the entrance to the Rabaa al-Adawiya Medical Center. We huddled near a corner. Snipers fired down from nearby rooftops. A handful of Islamist protesters near us held up garbage can lids or Styrofoam kickboards to try to shield themselves.
We had stumbled onto a kind of makeshift gateway in and out of the sit-in that the protesters had created, although it was hardly a safe passage. They had managed to haul Dumpsters, debris, and overturned cars to partially shelter a path in and out of the medical center, from which a second entrance opened on the opposite side into the Rabaa sit-in.
“There is no safe passage,” said Mohamed Abdel Azeem, a twenty-five-year-old storekeeper. He had escaped the besieged camp and was now trying to get back in through the hospital. We watched as he sprinted and crawled in bursts over the twenty yards of partially protected pavement to the door of the building. I held my breath until I saw that he had made it.
Mayy and I dashed forward behind him, dropping to the ground at the beginning of a low stone ledge along a path toward the door. It seemed to offer some shelter, and we crept along on all fours.
“Come over here, there are bullets holes just over your head!” Mayy yelled to me.
“There are bullet holes over your head, too!” I shouted back defensively, and for some reason we both laughed.
We inched along the dirt, with our heads close to the ground and the seats of our jeans in the air. I felt a pang of guilt for the cost to Mayy’s dignity. “I feel like a coward,” she called out.
“You are the opposite of a coward! Just stay down,” I snapped at her, suddenly furious that some sense of honor might compel her to lift her head.
We sprinted up the steps of the medical center—the last meter to safety—and I looked around me. The marble floor of the lobby was covered in blood. Women walked through the room, trying to help the wounded, and blood stained the hems of their abayas.
A young woman sat cross-legged on the floor, a baby cradled in one arm. Her name was Hayam Hussein, and she had been sleeping in a tent with her daughter, Sarah, eighteen months old, when they were awoken at dawn by the sound of gunfire, sirens, and screams. She grabbed her daughter and ran, forgetting her shoes. Holding Sarah tight to keep her out of the blood on the tiles, Hayam redialed her mobile phone again and again trying to reach her husband. “I just can’t stand all the blood I have seen,” she sobbed.
“Martyrs, this way!” a medic called out. Men rushed by in groups of four, carrying more corpses in their linked arms to a makeshift morgue in the basement. Dead men, women, teenagers. Asmaa Beltagy, the seventeen-year-old daughter of a Muslim Brotherhood parliamentarian I knew, was killed there that day. One rights group counted at least thirty children under the age of eighteen killed at Rabaa. At least nineteen women were killed there that day, most with bullets to the head or the chest, according to Mozn Hassan’s Nazra for Feminist Studies. Many mothers with small children had taken them to beds elsewhere or there might have been more.
Downstairs in the morgue dead bodies filled the shelves and tables. Volunteers were spreading them out on the floor. I could not possibly count them all. If I was a better journalist, I would have been studying details like the location of the wounds on the bodies. Had the security forces been shooting to kill? All I could think about was the volume of blood. There was no way to convey the magnitude of the gore in the few hundred words of a newspaper dispatch.
I decided to try to measure its velocity. How fast were the newly dead coming into this room? I made a mark in my notebook as each corpse was brought through the door. Nine bodies in fifteen minutes. Another dead every hundred seconds, with no end in sight. Of course, the medical center was not the only repository of fresh corpses at Rabaa. I still had no way of knowing how fast people were dying. I was fooling myself, or distracting myself. When I later looked back at that page of my notebook, I saw only hash marks and numbers.
We tried to make our way out of the medical center and across to the mosque. Mayy overheard a young man on his phone. “Safe exit? I’ll ask,” he said into the phone. Another man in bloodstained clothes told him there was no such exit, and the younger man punched the air in anger. Then he feigned calm and reassured the caller. “I am heading for the safe exit right now. . . .” Mayy guessed he was talking to his mother.
Afraid of the gunfire, we retreated to the safety of the medical center and tried climbing its stairs. From a sixth-floor window, we saw thousands of demonstrators crammed into the square, and they seemed to ebb and flow in unison, first in one direction and then in the other. Waves of police were advancing from both sides, squeezing the crowd back against itself.
A crouching hospital orderly pulled us back from the window. Snipers, he said, and he showed us where a bullet shot from a nearby rooftop had shattered a window near us.
I later saw amateur video footage taken that day of army bulldozers flattening open-sided tents with rows of dead bodies in white shrouds lying inside. In the background a police officer yelled through a megaphone, “The Interior Ministry is very keen on the safety of the citizens.” Riot police doused other tents with fuel to set them on fire.
A journalist I trust later told me that he saw two demonstrators in the sit-in fighting back with firearms. One had a homemade handgun that fired a single shotgun cartridge at a time and the other had what looked like a small submachine gun. I would have been surprised if no one had smuggled in a gun. The police later said eight of their own were killed there. The interior minister announced that the police had recovered fifteen firearms used by the demonstrators, who numbered in the thousands. Rocks and Molotov cocktails were the only weapons I saw in the hands of civilians. Who has a gun but instead throws a stone or a gas bomb?
Mohamed Soltan was in the field hospital at the mosque, waiting for a letup in the violence. By 5:00 P.M., his painkillers were wearing off and his arm was throbbing. A senior Brotherhood leader—Mohamed Beltagy, whose daughter had just died—announced to the room that the army had agreed to provide a safe exit for any injured who could walk on their own.
“If you can get away with your skin, get away,” he said. Leave behind any possessions.
Soltan filed out with the others, staring at the ground, through a gauntlet of riot police. He heard an elderly man in front of him mutter, “From God we seek refuge and to him we return.”
Putting a gun to the head of the old man, a riot policeman told him, “What we are doing is for the sake of God. We are killing you hypocrites.”
The interim prime minister later said that “close to a thousand” civilians had died that day at Rabaa. A yearlong study by Human Rights Watch released in 2014 determined that the deaths almost certainly exceeded that number and confirmed the names of at least 817 of the dead. “The indiscriminate and deliberate use of lethal force resulted in one of the world’s largest killings of demonstrators in a single day in recent history,” the study concluded. Rabaa surpassed the Tiananmen Square massacre in China in 1989 and the Andijan massacre in Uzbekistan in 2005.
Families and human rights groups told me that government coroners were forcing families to accept falsified death certificates to hide the real death toll (a common practice to lower riot statistics in many Arab autocracies).
“About three hundred deaths were written off as suicides,” Khaled Amin, the former brigadier general in the police, later told me. “As though everyone just decided to kill themselves that day! Hospitals and morgues were pressured to do it. They told the families, ‘Call it a suicide or you don’t get your kids.’”
I tried for years to find a soldier or policeman who participated in the operation and would tell his side of the events. Each one refused or backed out. Some told intermediaries that members of the security forces were afraid to be caught talking about it to a Westerner.
The official story was a variation of the one that the Egyptian police have told many times to explain excessive violence: The demonstrators fired the first shot. The security forces, enraged by a noble zeal, avenged their fallen comrades. “They started shooting and three martyrs fell from our side in less than forty-five minutes,” a police general insisted in a television interview a few days later. “So how can we deal with gunfire? We can’t just say, ‘Be quiet.’” He maintained that the police had restrained themselves as best they could. “If we had kept firing shots, everyone there would have died.”
Then he added, even less plausibly, that most of the dead civilians were killed by “friendly fire” from other Islamists anyway.
None of this, of course, was ever remotely corroborated.
Amin later told me that the security forces had used their standard procedure for any major operation. The senior officers “charged up” the rank and file before the clearing of Rabaa ever began. The commanders reminded the troops about their friends and colleagues who had been killed in the past by violent Islamists and warned that the Rabaa sit-in was heavily armed. Prepare for fierce, violent resistance, the commanders instructed. The Islamists inside wanted the blood of the police.
“They really pump them up,” Amin said. “The message is, ‘They killed your friends, they have guns, they will kill you, they are scary.’ The officers manipulate you emotionally and charge you up, so you can fire on others.”
Amin had retired at the beginning of that summer, but he stayed in touch with his colleagues. “No one talks about it because it is unforgivable,” he told me years later. “Those who regret it are too scared to talk, and those who don’t regret it are quiet.”
Sisi’s government decreed a 7:00 P.M. curfew. Military checkpoints sprang into place across the city. Cairenes had scoffed at curfews during Mubarak’s last days. Activists and intellectuals had defiantly headed out at night as if it were a matter of high principle. But on the night of August 14, 2013, Cairo was as still as a graveyard. Laura and our sons had recently returned from the United States to Cairo, and they spent the day within a few blocks of home for fear of the violence. I fell asleep at 4:00 A.M. at a cheap hotel near the New York Times bureau, and the next morning I headed to another mosque a few blocks from Rabaa.
The Muslim Brotherhood had turned the gymnasium-size sanctuary of the mosque into another improvised morgue. Hundreds of corpses wrapped in white sheets were laid out in neat rows on the floor in the midday August heat. Men walked among them spraying antiseptic into the air. Others wheeled coolers containing large blocks of ice and put one on each dead chest to reduce the smell. They had been at it all night. Water from the melting ice had soaked the carpet.
I moved through the room, counting corpses—I got to 240 even though the removal process had been going on for many hours, and this was only one of many repositories of the dead killed at Rabaa. Many of the bodies were charred beyond recognition, incinerated in their tents.
Tables in a corner displayed rows of identification cards taken from the dead to help families claim them. A small boy about the size of my four-year-old son, Emmett, was asleep on a dry patch of carpet between the tables.
Outside, a cluster of men ignored pleas from the mosque loudspeaker to disperse in order to avoid attracting the security services. “Shoot anyone in uniform,” one man said. “It doesn’t matter if the good is taken with the bad, because that is what happened to us last night.”
Others reassured him that the bloodbath would turn the Egyptian public against the army. “It is already happening,” one insisted.
But at the site of the massacre, I found a scene of jubilation. Workers in orange jumpsuits were removing rubble and washing away the bloodstains from the charred ground outside the Rabaa al-Adawiya Mosque. Soldiers and riot police stuck their chests out like heroes. Civilians stopped to congratulate them. A group of young men was dancing to music blasting from the stereo of a nearby parked car. It was the summer’s omnipresent hit: “Bless the Hands” of the soldiers.
As life took us for a turn
A voice filled with kindness said,
“May our hands be severed from our bodies
If they ever touch Egyptians.”
The vow of a real man, son of a real man
We swear you kept your promise.