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How American Hopes for a Deal in Egypt Were Undercut


Hundreds of supporters of the ousted president were injured on Wednesday when Egyptian security forces raided their encampments in Cairo.
Narciso Contreras for The New York Times


Senators John McCain, left, and Lindsey Graham in Cairo on Aug. 6, after they met with military leaders.
Amr Nabil/Associated Press


Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel pressed Egypt's military leaders to restore civilian governance.
Karen Bleier/Agence France-Presse - Getty Images

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK, PETER BAKER and MICHAEL R. GORDON
Published: August 17, 2013

CAIRO — For a moment, at least, American and European diplomats trying to defuse the volatile standoff in Egypt [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/egypt/index.html ] thought they had a breakthrough.

As thousands of Islamist supporters of the ousted president, Mohamed Morsi, braced for a crackdown by the military-imposed government, a senior European diplomat, Bernardino León, told the Islamists of “indications” from the leadership that within hours it would free two imprisoned opposition leaders. In turn, the Islamists had agreed to reduce the size of two protest camps by about half.

An hour passed, and nothing happened. Another hour passed, and still no one had been released.

The Americans heightened the pressure. Two senators visiting Cairo, John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, met with Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi, the officer who ousted Mr. Morsi and appointed the new government, and the interim prime minister, Hazem el-Beblawi, and pushed for the release of the two prisoners. But the Egyptians brushed them off.

“You could tell people were itching for a fight,” Mr. Graham recalled in an interview. “The prime minister was a disaster. He kept preaching to me: ‘You can’t negotiate with these people. They’ve got to get out of the streets and respect the rule of law.’ I said: ‘Mr. Prime Minister, it’s pretty hard for you to lecture anyone on the rule of law. How many votes did you get? Oh, yeah, you didn’t have an election.’ ”

General Sisi, Mr. Graham said, seemed “a little bit intoxicated by power.”

The senators walked out that day, Aug. 6, gloomy and convinced that a violent showdown was looming. But the diplomats still held out hope, believing they had persuaded Egypt’s government at least not to declare the talks a failure.

The next morning, the government issued a statement declaring that diplomatic efforts had been exhausted and blaming the Islamists for any casualties from the coming crackdown. A week later, Egyptian forces opened a ferocious assault that so far has killed more than 1,000 protesters.

All of the efforts of the United States government, all the cajoling, the veiled threats, the high-level envoys from Washington and the 17 personal phone calls by Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, failed to forestall the worst political bloodletting in modern Egyptian history. The generals in Cairo felt free to ignore the Americans first on the prisoner release and then on the statement, in a cold-eyed calculation that they would not pay a significant cost — a conclusion bolstered when President Obama responded by canceling a joint military exercise but not $1.5 billion in annual aid.

The violent crackdown has left Mr. Obama in a no-win position: risk a partnership that has been the bedrock of Middle East peace for 35 years, or stand by while longtime allies try to hold on to power by mowing down opponents. From one side, the Israelis, Saudis and other Arab allies have lobbied him to go easy on the generals in the interest of thwarting what they see as the larger and more insidious Islamist threat. From the other, an unusual mix of conservatives and liberals has urged him to stand more forcefully against the sort of autocracy that has been a staple of Egyptian life for decades.

For now the administration has decided to keep the close relationship with the Egyptian military fundamentally unchanged. But the death toll is climbing, the streets are descending into chaos, and the government and the Islamists are vowing to escalate. It is unclear if the military’s new government can reimpose a version of the old order now that the public believes street protests have toppled two leaders in less than three years, or if, after winning democratic elections, the Islamists will ever again compliantly retreat.

As Mr. Obama acknowledged in a statement on Thursday, the American response turns not only on humanitarian values but also on national interests. A country consumed by civil strife may no longer function as a stabilizing ally in a volatile region.

An Enduring Headache

Mr. Obama has found Egypt’s tumultuous political transition a headache for more than two years. Accused of sticking for too long by President Hosni Mubarak, the longtime ruler in Egypt who was ousted by a popular uprising in 2011, and then criticized when he later abandoned him, Mr. Obama gambled on Mr. Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood leader elected a year ago. He found Mr. Morsi a useful and pragmatic partner in handling issues like a violent flare-up in Gaza. But Mr. Obama became convinced that the Egyptian was not being inclusive enough at home to stabilize his own country.

When Secretary of State John Kerry visited Cairo in the spring, he urged Mr. Morsi to reach out to his opposition. If not, Mr. Kerry warned, Mr. Morsi would set the stage for another uprising, this time against himself. But the implied threat only hardened Mr. Morsi’s resolve not to bend, his aides said.

Mr. Morsi’s failure to incorporate other factions, his habit of demonizing his critics as part of a treasonous conspiracy and a near-calamitous economic crisis combined to fire up opposition to the Islamists, which spilled out in street protests. Hard-liners with the military and intelligence services who always despised the Muslim Brotherhood saw that the group’s experiment in power might have left it more vulnerable than at any time in its eight decades underground.

The Obama administration warned the military against stepping in, noting that a coup would require an aid cutoff under American law. But on July 3 the military moved in, detaining Mr. Morsi and rounding up scores of his allies.

Mr. Obama made no public comments, opting instead for tempered written statements. He skirted the aid law by refusing to determine whether Mr. Morsi’s ouster constituted a coup, while Mr. Kerry and Mr. Hagel pressed the military to restore civilian governance as soon as possible.

Although Mr. Obama agreed not to restrict the aid, he postponed the delivery of four F-16 fighter jets. At the time, officials discussed pulling out of joint military exercises called Bright Star scheduled for September, but the White House opted to wait to see if the generals would follow through on their threat to clear out pro-Morsi protesters.

Western governments took a wait-and-see approach even after the military committed its first mass killing, shooting more than 60 supporters of Mr. Morsi at a sit-in on July 8. Western diplomats did not engage in earnest until July 24, when General Sisi, in dark sunglasses and military regalia, delivered a fiery speech asking the public to turn out for demonstrations giving him a “mandate” to take on the Islamists. Security forces killed 80 more Morsi supporters in their second mass shooting on the day of the demonstration.

The next morning, Morsi aides and Brotherhood leaders say, their phones began ringing with American and European diplomats fearing an imminent blood bath.

The administration enlisted people on opposite sides of the contest unfolding in Egypt. Diplomats from Qatar, a regional patron of the Muslim Brotherhood, agreed to influence the Islamists. The United Arab Emirates, determined opponents of the Islamists, were brought in to help reach out to the new authorities.

But while the Qataris and Emiratis talked about “reconciliation” in front of the Americans, Western diplomats here said they believed the Emiratis were privately urging the Egyptian security forces to crack down.

Abdullah bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the Emirati foreign minister, went to Washington last month and urged the Americans not to cut off aid. The emirates, along with Saudi Arabia, had swiftly supported the military takeover with a pledge of billions of dollars, undermining Western threats to cut off critical loans or aid.

The Israelis, whose military had close ties to General Sisi from his former post as head of military intelligence, were supporting the takeover as well. Western diplomats say that General Sisi and his circle appeared to be in heavy communication with Israeli colleagues, and the diplomats believed the Israelis were also undercutting the Western message by reassuring the Egyptians not to worry about American threats to cut off aid.

Israeli officials deny having reassured Egypt about the aid, but acknowledge having lobbied Washington to protect it.

When Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, proposed an amendment halting military aid to Egypt, the influential American Israel Public Affairs Committee sent a letter to senators on July 31 opposing it, saying it “could increase instability in Egypt and undermine important U.S. interests and negatively impact our Israeli ally.” Statements from influential lawmakers echoed the letter, and the Senate defeated the measure, 86 to 13, later that day.

Building Connections

Mr. Hagel tried to forge a connection with General Sisi, the defense minister who has become the country’s de facto leader. Mr. Hagel, a 66-year-old decorated Vietnam War veteran, felt he and General Sisi, a 58-year-old graduate of the United States Army War College in Pennsylvania, “clicked right away” when they met in April, an American official said.

In a series of phone calls, Mr. Hagel pressed General Sisi for a transition back to civilian rule. They talked nearly every other day, usually for an hour or an hour and a half, lengthened by the use of interpreters. But General Sisi complained that the Obama administration did not fully appreciate that the Islamists posed a threat to Egypt and its army. The general asked Mr. Hagel to convey the danger to Mr. Obama, American officials said.

“Their whole sales pitch to us is that the Muslim Brotherhood is a group of terrorists,” said one American officer, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the dialogue.

American and European diplomats hoped to reinforce the few officials in Egypt’s interim cabinet who favored an inclusive approach, led by Mohamed ElBaradei, the vice president and Nobel Peace Prize-winning former diplomat. After the second massacre, on July 26, Mr. ElBaradei wanted to resign, but Mr. Kerry talked him out of it, arguing that he was the most potent, if not the only, voice for restraint in the government.

But General Sisi never trusted Mr. ElBaradei, and on the other side was a small core of military officers close to the general who saw a chance to finally rid Egypt of the Muslim Brotherhood. Among them were Gen. Mohammed al-Tohami, a mentor and father figure to General Sisi and now head of the intelligence service, and Gen. Mahmoud Hegazy, the general’s protégé and chosen successor as head of military intelligence. And with no serious reprisals against Egypt after two mass killings, many analysts here argue that the hard-liners could only feel emboldened.

Mr. Kerry sent his deputy, William J. Burns, to Cairo, where he and a European Union counterpart scrambled to de-escalate the crisis.

Under a plan they worked out, the Muslim Brotherhood would limit demonstrations to two squares, thin out crowds and publicly condemn violence. The government would issue a similar statement, commit to an inclusive political process allowing any party to compete in elections and, as a sign of good faith, release Saad al-Katatni, the Muslim Brotherhood speaker of the dissolved Parliament, and Aboul-Ela Maadi, founder of a more moderate Islamist party. Both faced implausible charges of instigating violence, and Western diplomats felt that before the takeover, Mr. Katatni in particular had proved himself a pragmatic voice for compromise.

But on Aug. 4, the interim government surprised the diplomats by bringing charges for incitement to murder against the Brotherhood’s supreme guide, Mohamed Badie, who was in hiding, and Khairat el-Shater, its most influential leader, who had been detained.

Adding to the shock of the new charges, they came just hours before Mr. Burns and his European partner, Mr. León, were allowed to see Mr. Shater. Mr. Shater embraced the need for dialogue, but did not endorse the proposals.

Still, the diplomats grew hopeful that they had gotten through to the government. On the morning of Aug. 6, Brotherhood leaders and diplomats said, Mr. León called Amr Darrag, an adviser to Mr. Morsi and top negotiator for the Islamist coalition, and told him to expect Mr. Katatni and Mr. Maadi to be released within hours. When nothing happened, Mr. Darrag called Mr. León back, the Brotherhood officials said. Do not worry, Mr. León said, arguing that the new government must have put the release off by a day to avoid the appearance of bowing to American pressure.

Heightened Tensions

Mr. McCain and Mr. Graham arrived in Cairo amid increasing tensions. They went first to see Ambassador Anne W. Patterson. “You could see it on her face, that nobody’s listening,” Mr. Graham said. He said administration officials asked them to press for the release of the two Islamists and to push the Brotherhood to pull people off the street.

When the senators asked government officials to release the Islamist leaders, one woman on the Egyptian side stormed out. The senators warned that the United States would ultimately cut off aid if the military did not set elections and amend the Constitution.

Mr. Graham recalled arguing with General Sisi. “If Morsi had to stand for re-election anytime soon, he’d lose badly,” the senator remembered saying. “Do you agree?”

“Oh, absolutely,” the general answered.

“Then what you’re doing now is making him a martyr,” Mr. Graham said. “It’s no longer about how badly they ruled the country and how they marginalized the democratic institutions. It’s now about you.”

The meeting with the prime minister was even tenser. As they walked out, Mr. Graham said, he told Mr. McCain, “If this guy’s voice is indicative of the attitude, there’s no pulling out of this thing.”

When Egyptian state news media leaked reports of an imminent government statement that diplomacy had failed, the diplomats were stunned, and scrambled to hold it off.

The next day, Mr. León, the European envoy, assured the Islamists that although the prisoner release had fallen through, at least the Egyptians had agreed to pull back the statement, Brotherhood leaders said.

A half-hour later, it was issued nonetheless. “The phase of diplomatic efforts has ended,” it declared, calling the sit-ins “nonpeaceful” and obliquely blaming the Muslim Brotherhood for any coming violence.

The Americans and Europeans were furious, feeling deceived and manipulated. “They were used to justify the violence,” Mr. Darrag said in an interview. “They were just brought in so that the coup government could claim that the negotiations failed, and, in fact, there were no negotiations.”

Mr. Burns left Cairo with a sense of foreboding. Western diplomats in Cairo said that, despite their public statements at the time to the contrary, it was then that they, too, gave up hope.

Mr. Hagel made a last stab at holding off violence. He called General Sisi late on the afternoon of Aug. 9, and they talked for 90 minutes. “Secretary Hagel was strongly urging restraint,” said an American official briefed on the conversation. The secretary recited the same talking points he had been delivering for weeks: avoid violence, respect freedom of assembly and move toward an inclusive political transition.

But within the Egyptian government, the only real debate was about tactics and blame. Mohamed Ibrahim, the interior minister under Mr. Morsi who had kept his job by refusing to protect the Islamists, was convinced that brute force was the only way to break up sit-ins by tens of thousands of Morsi supporters. But diplomats and Egyptian officials said Mr. Ibrahim was worried that if the assaults went badly he might be held up as a scapegoat.

Last Sunday, Interior Ministry officials told journalists that the police would move in at dawn to choke off the sit-ins, cutting off food and water and gradually escalating nonlethal force. But overnight, diplomats said, Mr. Ibrahim reconsidered, worried that a gradual approach would expose the police to Brotherhood retaliation, for which he could be blamed.

Two days later, Mr. Ibrahim and the government told Mr. ElBaradei that they had a new plan to minimize casualties: maximum force to get it over with quickly, the Western diplomats said. And the military had agreed to support the police. But the attack the next morning left more than 600 dead, according to official figures that soon grew. By midday, Mr. ElBaradei had resigned.

As images of Egyptian security forces opening fire flickered across television screens in Washington, Mr. Hagel called General Sisi again and warned him that the violence had put “important elements of our longstanding defense cooperation at risk,” as he put it in a statement afterward. Mr. Kerry made the same points in tandem to the interim foreign minister, Nabil Fahmy.

Mr. Obama announced the cancellation of Bright Star exercises without saying anything about the aid. As of Friday, American officials were still working phone lines to Cairo. Mr. Kerry talked with his Egyptian counterpart, urging the government to appoint an envoy to negotiate directly with the Islamists, United States officials said. But the diplomats and military officers in the two countries seemed to be talking past each other.

“The million-dollar question now,” said one American military officer, “is where is the threshold of violence for cutting ties?”

David D. Kirkpatrick reported from Cairo, and Peter Baker and Michael R. Gordon from Washington. Reporting was contributed by Eric Schmitt, Mark Mazzetti and Thom Shanker from Washington; Mark Landler from Chilmark, Mass.; and Steven Erlanger from London.

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Video: In Little Egypt, Echoes From Home
http://www.nytimes.com/video/2013/08/17/nyregion/100000002393814/egypt-echoed-in-new-yorks-little-egypt.html

Video: Two Narratives of the Violence in Egypt
http://www.nytimes.com/video/2013/08/15/world/middleeast/100000002391446/two-narratives-of-the-violence-in-egypt.html

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Related

Soldiers Storm a Mosque in Cairo, as Egyptian Leaders Struggle for Order (August 18, 2013)
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/world/middleeast/standoff-in-cairo-as-security-forces-surround-mosque.html

News Analysis: Ties With Egypt Army Constrain Washington (August 17, 2013)
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/17/world/middleeast/us-officials-fear-losing-an-eager-ally-in-the-egyptian-military.html

Political Memo: Attacks on Protesters in Cairo Were Calculated to Provoke, Some Say (August 17, 2013)
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/17/world/middleeast/attacks-on-protesters-in-cairo-were-calculated-to-provoke-some-say.html

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© 2013 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/world/middleeast/pressure-by-us-failed-to-sway-egypts-leaders.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/world/middleeast/pressure-by-us-failed-to-sway-egypts-leaders.html?pagewanted=all ] [with comments]


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Egypt Security Kills 36 Held in Its Custody


Supporters of the ousted president, Mohamed Morsi, marched through the streets of the Maahdi neighborhood of Cairo on Sunday.
Bryan Denton for The New York Times

By ROD NORDLAND
Published: August 18, 2013

CAIRO — The Egyptian government acknowledged that its security forces had killed 36 Islamists in its custody Sunday, as the military leaders and the country’s Islamists vowed to keep up their fight over Egypt’s future.

The news of the deaths came on a day in which there appeared to be a pause in the street battles that have claimed more than 1,000 lives in recent days, most of them Islamists and their supporters gunned down by security forces. The Islamists took measures on Sunday to avoid confrontations, including canceling several protests of the military’s ouster of a democratically elected Islamist-led government.

While confirming the killings of the detainees on Sunday, the Ministry of the Interior said the deaths were the consequence of an escape attempt by Islamist prisoners. But officials of the main Islamist movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, described the deaths as “assassinations,” and claimed that the victims, which it said numbered 52, had been shot and tear-gassed through the windows of a locked prison van.

The government offered conflicting details throughout the day, once saying the detainees had suffocated to death in the van from tear gas to suppress an escape attempt, but later insisting that the Islamists died in a prison where they were taken.

In either case, the deaths were the fourth mass killing of civilians since the military took control on July 3, but the first time those killed were in government custody at the time.

The Islamists, followers of the once-banned Muslim Brotherhood, have vowed to continue their protests, both against the military’s ouster of President Mohamed Morsi and the violence of recent days that started with the bloody crackdown on Brotherhood sit-ins that left hundreds dead.

Although it appeared that security forces were more restrained on Sunday — with no immediate reports of killings in the streets — Maj. Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi, the country’s military leader, spoke out on national television in defiant and uncompromising tones, condemning the Islamists again as “terrorists,” but promising to restore democracy to the country.

The government has been pursuing a relentless campaign to paint the Islamists as pursuing violence, and has increasingly lashed out at journalists who do not echo that line, especially the foreign media.

Acknowledging but rejecting the widespread criticism in Egypt and worldwide of the security force’s actions, the general said that “citizens invited the armed forces to deal with terrorism, which was a message to the world and the foreign media, who denied millions of Egyptians their free will and their true desire to change.” In a sign of increasing frustration with the government, the European Union, an important trading partner for Egypt, announced Sunday that it would “urgently review” its relations with the country because of the bloodshed, and said the interim government bore the responsibility for bringing violence to an end.

The Muslim Brotherhood had announced that it would stage nine protest marches in and around Cairo on Sunday as part of its “week of departure” campaign that began Friday to protest the military’s deposing of Mr. Morsi.

All but three of the marches were canceled, and even those were rerouted to avoid snipers who were waiting ahead, along with bands of government supporters, police and the military, some in tanks on the streets. The authorities, too, appeared to avoid aggressively enforcing martial law provisions that would have led to clashes with the protesters.

Protesters who gathered at the Al Rayyan mosque in the Maadi area of Cairo had aimed to march from there to the Constitutional Court, Egypt’s supreme court, whose chief justice, Adli Mansour, has been appointed interim president by the country’s military rulers.

Marching in the 100-degree heat of late afternoon, the protestors were fatalistic about the threats they faced. Mohammad Abdel Tawab, who said his brother was killed Friday at Ramses Square, had heard the reports of pro-government snipers and gangs ahead. “They will kill us, I know, everybody knows, but it doesn’t matter,” he said.

A woman, Samira, dressed in an abaya with only her eyes visible, marched holding her 1-year-old daughter, Sama. “Whatever will happen to us, will happen,” she said. “God has written it already.”

Protest leaders, however, were more cautious, and repeatedly re-routed the march at the last moment to avoid confrontations, turning down narrow lanes where residents in upper stories sprayed them with water — it was not always clear whether the gesture was in support or in contempt.

In the last mile, the leader of the march, Mohammad Salwan, ordered everyone to get on the metro train for the final approach to the court, and then the protestors dissipated instead of trying to breach barricades set up by pro-military factions.

“We know there are snipers along the route, and we want to avoid losing any more lives,” he said.

Similarly, a protest in Giza was called off after it was threatened by military supporters, and the only other one to be held was in a strongly pro-Brotherhood area, Helwan, in south Cairo. Another march, to the presidential palace in Heliopolis, was also canceled.

“The leadership decided things were getting out of control and they couldn’t afford more casualties,” said a Brotherhood member who writes for one of the group’s publications and who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak for the organization.

Even on Saturday, which had seemed relatively quiet, 79 people were killed in violence around Egypt, according to the government press agency, MENA, in an announcement Sunday. It provided few details.

Brotherhood leaders in particular have paid a heavy price, with the children of many top officials among the dead. They include Asmaael-Beltagy, the son of a senior Brotherhood leader, Mohamed el-Beltagy killed at Rabaa Square Wednesday; Ammar Badie, 38, son of Brotherhood spiritual leader Mohamed Badie, shot during clashes Friday in Ramses Square; Habiba Abd el-Aziz, 26, the daughter of Ahmed Abd el-Aziz,the media consultant to ousted President Morsi, killed at Rabaa from a bullet wound to the head on Wednesday; and the grandson of the movement’s founder.

There were scant details on the prison killings on Sunday, and no explanation for why the victims were inside a prison van and had reportedly taken a prison official hostage.

The Ministry of the Interior issued conflicting and confusing accounts of what had happened, at one point claiming the prisoners had taken a guard hostage, then saying militants attacked the prison van to free the prisoners, who were killed in the process, and then saying that tear gas used to suppress the escape caused the prisoners to suffocate. Later, the ministry claimed the deaths happened in the prison, not in the van.

The violence came a day after a blistering speech in support of the Muslim Brotherhood by Turkey’s Islamist prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who likened Egypt’s military leader, General Sisi, to President Bashar al-Assad of Syria.

“There are currently two paths in Egypt: those who follow the pharaoh, and those who follow Moses,” he said. Speaking before the European Union’s announcement of a review of relations [ http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-13-749_en.htm?locale=en ], he also criticized other countries’ position regarding the military government.

“The Organization of the Islamic Conference and the European Union have no face left to look at in the mirror,” he said.

Mayy El-Sheikh, Kareem Fahim, and David Kirkpatrick contributed reporting.

© 2013 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/19/world/middleeast/morsi-supporters-vow-to-defy-egypts-military.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/19/world/middleeast/morsi-supporters-vow-to-defy-egypts-military.html?pagewanted=all ]


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Muslim Brotherhood supporters face murder, terrorism probe: state media

CAIRO | Sat Aug 17, 2013 4:05pm EDT


(Reuters) - Egyptian prosecutors have placed 250 Muslim Brotherhood supporters under investigation for murder, attempted murder and terrorism, the state MENA news agency said on Saturday.

Police arrested more than 1,000 Brotherhood sympathizers in the wake of clashes on Friday that pitted followers of deposed Islamist President Mohamed Mursi against the security forces. More than 170 people died nationwide in the violence that day.

(Reporting by Yasmine Saleh, writing by Crispian Balmer; Editing by Jon Boyle)

Copyright 2013 Thomson Reuters

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/17/us-egpyt-protests-investigation-idUSBRE97G09U20130817 [with comment]


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Egypt: Islamists Hit Coptic Christian Churches, Torch Franciscan School

By HAMZA HENDAWI
08/17/13 08:13 PM ET EDT

CAIRO — After torching a Franciscan school, Islamists paraded three nuns on the streets like "prisoners of war" before a Muslim woman offered them refuge. Two other women working at the school were sexually harassed and abused as they fought their way through a mob.

In the four days since security forces cleared two sit-in camps by supporters of Egypt's ousted president, Islamists have attacked dozens of Coptic churches along with homes and businesses owned by the Christian minority. The campaign of intimidation appears to be a warning to Christians outside Cairo to stand down from political activism.

Christians have long suffered from discrimination and violence in Muslim majority Egypt, where they make up 10 percent of the population of 90 million. Attacks increased after the Islamists rose to power in the wake of the 2011 Arab Spring uprising that drove Hosni Mubarak from power, emboldening extremists. But Christians have come further under fire since President Mohammed Morsi was ousted on July 3, sparking a wave of Islamist anger led by Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood.

Nearly 40 churches have been looted and torched, while 23 others have been attacked and heavily damaged since Wednesday, when chaos erupted after Egypt's military-backed interim administration moved in to clear two camps packed with protesters calling for Morsi's reinstatement, killing scores of protesters and sparking deadly clashes nationwide.

One of the world's oldest Christian communities has generally kept a low-profile, but has become more politically active since Mubarak was ousted and Christians sought to ensure fair treatment in the aftermath.

Many Morsi supporters say Christians played a disproportionately large role in the days of mass rallies, with millions demanding that he step down ahead of the coup.

Despite the violence, Egypt's Coptic Christian church renewed its commitment to the new political order Friday, saying in a statement that it stood by the army and the police in their fight against "the armed violent groups and black terrorism."

While the Christians of Egypt have endured attacks by extremists, they have drawn closer to moderate Muslims in some places, in a rare show of solidarity.

Hundreds from both communities thronged two monasteries in the province of Bani Suef south of Cairo to thwart what they had expected to be imminent attacks on Saturday, local activist Girgis Waheeb said. Activists reported similar examples elsewhere in regions south of Cairo, but not enough to provide effective protection of churches and monasteries.

Waheeb, other activists and victims of the latest wave of attacks blame the police as much as hard-line Islamists for what happened. The attacks, they said, coincided with assaults on police stations in provinces like Bani Suef and Minya, leaving most police pinned down to defend their stations or reinforcing others rather than rushing to the rescue of Christians under attack.

Another Christian activist, Ezzat Ibrahim of Minya, a province also south of Cairo where Christians make up around 35 percent of the population, said police have melted away from seven of the region's nine districts, leaving the extremists to act with near impunity.

Two Christians have been killed since Wednesday, including a taxi driver who strayed into a protest by Morsi supporters in Alexandria and another man who was shot to death by Islamists in the southern province of Sohag, according to security officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to release the information.

The attacks served as a reminder that Islamists, while on the defensive in Cairo, maintain influence and the ability to stage violence in provincial strongholds with a large minority of Christians.

Gamaa Islamiya, the hard-line Islamist group that wields considerable influence in provinces south of Cairo, denied any link to the attacks. The Muslim Brotherhood, which has led the defiant protest against Morsi's ouster, has condemned the attacks, spokesman Mourad Ali said.

Sister Manal is the principal of the Franciscan school in Bani Suef. She was having breakfast with two visiting nuns when news broke of the clearance of the two sit-in camps by police, killing hundreds. In an ordeal that lasted about six hours, she, sisters Abeer and Demiana and a handful of school employees saw a mob break into the school through the wall and windows, loot its contents, knock off the cross on the street gate and replace it with a black banner resembling the flag of al-Qaida.

By the time the Islamists ordered them out, fire was raging at every corner of the 115-year-old main building and two recent additions. Money saved for a new school was gone, said Manal, and every computer, projector, desk and chair was hauled away. Frantic SOS calls to the police, including senior officers with children at the school, produced promises of quick response but no one came.

The Islamists gave her just enough time to grab some clothes.

In an hourlong telephone interview with The Associated Press, Manal, 47, recounted her ordeal while trapped at the school with others as the fire raged in the ground floor and a battle between police and Islamists went on out on the street. At times she was overwhelmed by the toxic fumes from the fire in the library or the whiffs of tears gas used by the police outside.

Sister Manal recalled being told a week earlier by the policeman father of one pupil that her school was targeted by hard-line Islamists convinced that it was giving an inappropriate education to Muslim children. She paid no attention, comfortable in the belief that a school that had an equal number of Muslim and Christian pupils could not be targeted by Muslim extremists. She was wrong.

The school has a high-profile location. It is across the road from the main railway station and adjacent to a busy bus terminal that in recent weeks attracted a large number of Islamists headed to Cairo to join the larger of two sit-in camps by Morsi's supporters. The area of the school is also in one of Bani Suef's main bastions of Islamists from Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood and ultraconservative Salafis.

"We are nuns. We rely on God and the angels to protect us," she said. "At the end, they paraded us like prisoners of war and hurled abuse at us as they led us from one alley to another without telling us where they were taking us," she said. A Muslim woman who once taught at the school spotted Manal and the two other nuns as they walked past her home, attracting a crowd of curious onlookers.

"I remembered her, her name is Saadiyah. She offered to take us in and said she can protect us since her son-in-law was a policeman. We accepted her offer," she said. Two Christian women employed by the school, siblings Wardah and Bedour, had to fight their way out of the mob, while groped, hit and insulted by the extremists. "I looked at that and it was very nasty," said Manal.

The incident at the Franciscan school was repeated at Minya where a Catholic school was razed to the ground by an arson attack and a Christian orphanage was also torched.

"I am terrified and unable to focus," said Boulos Fahmy, the pastor of a Catholic church a short distance away from Manal's school. "I am expecting an attack on my church any time now," he said Saturday.

Bishoy Alfons Naguib, a 33-year-old businessman from Minya, has a similarly harrowing story.

His home supplies store on a main commercial street in the provincial capital, also called Minya, was torched this week and the flames consumed everything inside.

"A neighbor called me and said the store was on fire. When I arrived, three extremists with knifes approached me menacingly when they realized I was the owner," recounted Naguib. His father and brother pleaded with the men to spare him. Luckily, he said, someone shouted that a Christian boy was filming the proceedings using his cell phone, so the crowd rushed toward the boy shouting "Nusrani, Nusrani," the Quranic word for Christians which has become a derogatory way of referring to them in today's Egypt.

Naguib ran up a nearby building where he has an apartment and locked himself in. After waiting there for a while, he left the apartment, ran up to the roof and jumped to the next door building, then exited at a safe distance from the crowd.

"On our Mustafa Fahmy street, the Islamists had earlier painted a red X on Muslim stores and a black X on Christian stores," he said. "You can be sure that the ones with a red X are intact."

In Fayoum, an oasis province southwest of Cairo, Islamists looted and torched five churches, according to Bishop Ibram, the local head of the Coptic Orthodox church, by far the largest of Egypt's Christian denominations. He said he had instructed Christians and clerics alike not to try to resist the mobs of Islamists, fearing any loss of life.

"The looters were so diligent that they came back to one of the five churches they had ransacked to see if they can get more," he told the AP. "They were loading our chairs and benches on trucks and when they had no space for more, they destroyed them."

© 2013 Associated Press

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/17/christians-in-egypt_n_3773991.html [with embedded video report, and (over 4,000) comments]


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