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Egypt Hit by Three Brazen Attacks in New Mayhem Egyptian Attacks Are Escalating Amid Stalemate
(about 1 hour later)
CAIRO — Deadly violence against the government broke out around Egypt on Monday as health officials raised to 53 the number said to have been killed the day before in clashes between supporters and opponents of the military takeover that ousted President Mohamed Morsi three months ago. CAIRO — The lethal conflict between Egypt’s military-backed government and its Islamist opponents escalated on Monday, with an expansion of attacks against government targets, signs that the authorities have failed to secure the streets, and a refusal by either side to back down.
Unidentified gunmen in the Suez Canal city of Ismailia killed six soldiers, including a lieutenant, in a drive-by shooting, while a car bomb at the security headquarters in the southern Sinai town of El-Tor killed two police officers and injured nearly 50 other people, state media reported. In Cairo, assailants fired at least one rocket-propelled grenade through a satellite dish used to transmit Egyptian state television. Three brazen attacks across the country included a drive-by shooting near the Suez Canal that killed six soldiers, a car bomb that killed two police officers and wounded dozens near the Red Sea resort area, and the first rocket-propelled grenade launched in the struggle, exploding near an elite enclave of the capital and damaging a satellite transmitter.
The grenade attack was reported to have caused only minor damage, but it was the first time since the before the revolt against President Hosni Mubarak nearly three years ago that anyone had used such a heavy weapon in the vicinity of the capital. The attacks came a day after security forces killed 53 protesters, many shot in the head and chest, in the worst outbreak of street mayhem in Cairo since mid-August.
It took place in Maadi, an affluent enclave up the Nile from downtown that is the home to many embassies and diplomats and is considered among the most secure precincts of the city. Three months after the military ouster of President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, the violence was the latest evidence that the new government installed on July 3 by Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi had failed to neutralize the Islamist opposition even after arresting its leadership and demonstrating its willingness to use lethal force. To many in the new government, the protests and attacks only seemed to underscore the need to redouble its fight against Brotherhood, which officials quickly blamed for Monday’s attacks.
Coming in the aftermath of the previous day’s clashes, the attacks were among the strongest indications yet that the new government appointed on July 3 by Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi had not yet secured full control of the streets. To the Islamist opposition, however, a heavy turnout for a day of protests on Sunday despite the deadly reprisals only proved the resilience of their “anti-coup” movement — even with no obvious leadership. Faced with a return to decades of repression, Islamists said, they had no choice but to continue their protests even if they risked death and stood little chance of reversing the takeover.
The new government has sought to crush the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist supporters of Mr. Morsi with a level of violence without precedent in modern Egyptian history. It has killed more than 1,000 protesters in mass shootings in the streets, imprisoned almost all of the Brotherhood’s leaders and silenced much of allied news media. The seemingly random attacks on Monday, many analysts said, indicated that the violent backlash against the new government had taken on a momentum that the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood could no longer restrain even if they wanted to.
The Sunday protests against the military takeover took place on a national holiday celebrating the military, when the new government called its civilian supporters into the streets to push back the Islamists and threatened them with heavy retribution from security forces as well. While neither side could fully triumph, neither could see room to pull back, setting the stage for further bloodshed, said Emad Shahin, a political scientist at the American University in Cairo who has tried without success to broker steps toward compromise. “We have reached a bloody stalemate,” he said.
But the heavy turnout of pro-Morsi demonstrators, even at a time when the Muslim Brotherhood has been effectively decapitated, demonstrated the organization’s resilience in the face of the crackdown. Since Mr. Morsi was deposed, the killing of security officers has become an almost daily occurrence in the industrial canal-zone of the lawless Northern Sinai. But the car bomb Monday morning in the South Sinai town of El Tur, near the biblical Mount Sinai and the Sharm el-Sheik resort, was the first sign that such attacks might be spreading to what had been a pillar of the Egyptian economy, its Red Sea resorts.
The attacks on Monday morning were the latest indication that some opponents of the government are also resorting to random or isolated acts of violence, suggesting that Egypt could face a prolonged period of turmoil. And the rocket-propelled grenade attack was the first time in years that such a heavy weapon had been used in the vicinity of the capital. The grenade tore a foot-wide hole in a satellite-transmission dish, and its explosion an hour before dawn sent shivers through the affluent neighborhood of Maadi, a heavily guarded precinct that is home to many embassies and diplomats.
The location of the El-Tor bombing on Monday raised the possibility that radical Islamists who have been carrying out frequent attacks against targets in the northern Sinai had now expanded their range into the southern Sinai, home to Egypt’s famed Sharm el-Sheik resort, a major tourist attraction. No one claimed responsibility for the attacks, nor did they need to. The attacks were universally assumed to be the work of Islamists angry at Mr. Morsi’s ouster, and, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized as spokesmen, two senior government officials blamed the Muslim Brotherhood despite its repeated public disavowals of such tactics.
The military-backed government that replaced Mr. Morsi has tried to project an aura of stability in Egypt, hoping to lure back the tourists and investors who were scared off by several years of turmoil in the country. “Blackmail by terrorism,” said one of the officials, a senior military officer.
In a new sign of the military-appointed government’s increased embrace of Saudi Arabia, which supported the decision to depose Mr. Morsi, the interim president, Adly Mansour, made his first foreign trip abroad on Monday to Riyadh, the Saudi capital. Suggesting the Brotherhood was almost predisposed to violence, he argued that the violence might have been worse if not for the crackdown, in which security forces have killed more than 1,000 protesters and jailed hundreds of Islamist leaders. If the violence was this severe with the leaders behind bars, the officer asked, how much worse might it be if leaders were released?
Saudi Arabia’s ruling monarchy, long opposed to the Arab Spring revolutionary movements that led to Mr. Morsi’s election last year, has provided the interim government that replaced him with billions of dollars’ worth of emergency grants and loans. The Muslim Brotherhood’s “anti-coup” alliance, meanwhile, saluted what it called the courage and sacrifice of “unprecedented numbers” who had turned out the day before. In a statement on Monday, the alliance called for student protests at schools and universities on Tuesday “to denounce the continuation of the massacres.”

Rick Gladstone contributed reporting from New York.

And it all but dared the government to continue the violence against protesters by calling for new marches on Friday to Tahrir Square, the symbolic center of the 2011 revolt against President Hosni Mubarak and more recently the staging ground for rallies in support of General Sisi. It was the attempt by pro-Morsi marchers to reach Tahrir Square on Sunday, when it was the site of a pro-military celebration, that set in motion the day of deadly violence, and the opposition alliance’s plans to try again this Friday appeared to set the stage for more.
“Nobody will keep us from the square no matter what the sacrifices,” the alliance said in its statement.
Leaders and supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood have said repeatedly for weeks that they have no choice but to continue their street protests regardless of the odds, because the new government has so far shown every intention of suppressing Egyptian democracy as well as their movement.
“This is a final ultimate battle with the military,” Ahmed el-Erainy, 42, a business consultant and Brotherhood member recently released from prison after his arrest at anti-government sit-in, said on Monday. “It is the ultimate battle between us and them, and by us I don’t just mean the Brothers — I mean the civil state versus the military state.”
Like others in the Brotherhood, he dismissed the idea that its members could ever hope for fairness under the military-led government, and after his turn through Egypt’s capricious and politicized judicial system he laughed with particular relish at the idea that instead of street protests they might put their trust in the law and the courts. “What judiciary?,” he asked, “There is no judiciary in Egypt.”
H.A. Hellyer, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who is based in Egypt, argued that the Brotherhood’s approach was tragically short sighted. Egypt’s security forces were likely to meet almost any mass demonstration with violence and bloodshed, and the Islamists end up taking the blame for the loss of life, the chaos and any subsequent retaliation like the attacks on Monday.
“Who do you think will be blamed for that RPG attack? “ he said. “More people will die, you will have violence in other parts of the country, and all that will be blamed on the Muslim Brotherhood.”
“It is only a question of whether the Brotherhood are pummeled out of the political arena, or if they withdraw on their own terms,” he added.
But Professor Shahin of the American University in Cairo argued that by harassing the government the protests gave the Islamists some leverage, and that the current government was also in a battle it could never fully win. “You can’t just say, ‘I have half the population on my side and with it I can crush the other half,’ and go on like that indefinitely,” he said. “This military-backed government cannot consolidate on the basis of repression and he authoritarian measures of the ‘50s and ‘60s. That is a bygone era.”

Mayy El Sheikh contributed reporting.