What did happen to the police vehicle?
Jcustis remarked in Post 26 partly about:
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We can pick up a few clues of the nature of the response, from the footage and stills that are out there of the crack down. One specific one that comes to mind are the sequence of pics of the armored 4-wheel vehicle spilling off of the 4-story overpass.
I've only seen headlines about this incident, so EA Worldview provide a very short video clip before the 'spilling off' and this commentary:
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One of the dramatic stories during Wednesday’s mass killings in Egypt was that anti-regime protesters had pushed a police vehicle off a bridge in a Cairo suburb of Nasr City, near the sit-in that was being attacked by security forces.
We featured a picture of the incident, which supposedly killed several officers, and video which showed the vehicle on the ground as clashes raged around it.
This morning, however, a video has been posted which appears to give a very different version of the event — amid congestion on the 6 October Bridge in Nasr City, the police vehicle hits a bus. It then reverses and skids off the bridge.
While men are following the police van as it backs up, they are not close enough to have “pushed” the vehicle.
Link:http://eaworldview.com/2013/08/egypt...-on-wednesday/
What did one General say?
Egyptian police General Amr in an interview:
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We are 90 million Egyptians and there are only 3 million Muslim Brotherhood We need six months for. liquidate or imprison all this is not a problem, as we have already done in the 1990s.
Link to Le Monde, French newspaper, to a IMO badly structured article, which includes this quote:http://www.lemonde.fr/afrique/articl...3103_3212.html
No wonder some speculate the 'Algerian model' maybe followed:http://blogs.aljazeera.com/blog/midd...erian-playbook
The Brotherhood :Americas Next Great Enenmy
Interview of Author Eric Stakelback Author of The Brotherhood a book about the Muslim Brotherhood and how dangerous they are and their links all the way back to NAZI Germany!
http://www.booktv.org/Watch/14856/Th...eat+Enemy.aspx
Batons not bayonets mattered
A powerful Reuters special report, their title is 'The real force behind Egypt's 'revolution of the state':http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/...99908D20131010
It starts with (minus one passage):
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Little attention was paid when a group of Muslim Brotherhood leaders broke free from their cells in a prison in the far off Wadi el-Natroun desert. But the incident, which triggered a series of prison breaks by members of the Islamist group around the country, caused panic among police officers fast losing their grip on Egypt.
In all, 200 policemen and security officers were killed that day, Jan 28, called the Friday of Rage by anti-Mubarak demonstrators. Some had their throats slit. One of the Muslim Brotherhood leaders to escape was Mohamed Mursi, who would become president the following year.
As Egypt appeared to move towards the removal of President Mursi's MB government, much was made of the potential for interaction with the Egyptian military by the US military - was there a relationship with the "batons".
Sinai: a strategic peninsula
For sometime I have wondered about the level of political violence in the Sinai peninsula. During the Mubarak era there were irregular terrorist attacks on the tourist areas along the eastern shoreline (Gulf of Aqaba) and sometimes violent clashes with others, including the Bedouin. For details try a search on BBC News. Wiki:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinai_Peninsula
Today:
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A suicide bomber drove his explosives-laden car on Thursday into a checkpoint outside a coastal city (El-Arish) in Egypt's volatile Sinai Peninsula and detonated it, killing three soldiers and a policeman..
Link:http://www.statesman.com/ap/ap/relig...liceman/nbKnf/
Strategic why? Aside from geography there are the tourists from West European, with some Russians too, are a major employer and a key source of foreign exchange. Egypt's main foreign exchange source is the Suez Canal, which remains a key global shipping route and last month Jihadists claimed responsibility for RPGs fired at a container ship:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-23918642
Then there is the running sore of the Gaza Strip, with a Hamas government and the problems of border control - the smuggling via tunnels into Gaza. Egypt of course signed the 1979 peace agreement with Israel, which imposes limits on the number of Egyptian troops allowed and the presence of the partly-US observer mission MFO:http://mfo.org/
In August 2013 it is suspected Israel launched an air strike on suspected Islamic militants, illustrating patience may be limited when Egypt's capability to exert control is limited:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-23642422
This week I learnt from an observer of another factor - the presence before Mursi fell of thousands of Jihadist militants. These are not the "usual suspects" i.e. AQ as the vast majority of Egypt's jihadists renounced the violent jihad, in an agreement with state security many years ago. Those who did not agree remained in prison, two thousand were released by Mursi's government and eighteen thousand who had emigrated were allowed home.
Some of these ex-Jihadists reportedly went to the Sinai, where the MB was training its own street fighters (although I am sure they had another name).
A nice "cocktail" and fully stirred up by the removal of Mursi's government, with the follow-on action taken to ban the MB.
A place to watch.
To kill or not to kill: Army and politics in post-revolution Egypt
Dr Omar Ashour, Exeter University, always gives a valuable insight into his home country and this time seeks to answer:
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what explains the decision to stage a coup and the repressive follow-up? Political science can offer a few explanations.
Just in case you forgot or preferred to not know:
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in the post-coup environment, the levels of repression and bloodshed are unprecedented in its modern history.
The number of victims killed by security forces in less than 7 hours on August 14 in Raba al-Adawiyya and al-Nahda Squares exceeds the number of victims of Muammar al-Qaddafi's two-day massacre in Abu Selim Prison in June 1996 (1269 victims), and Napoleon's massacre in the process of storming al-Azhar Mosque in 1799 (around 600 deaths). The Abu Zaabal massacre [Ar] in which 38 anti-coup political prisoners were killed inside a prison transport van, exceeded the number of victims of a 1957 massacre committed by Nasser's security forces in Tora prison.
Link:http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opi...113526674.html
As others have asked - will Egypt follow the Algerian way?