Asmaa Waguih/Reuters
Supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood walked past tanks outside the Egyptian presidential palace in Cairo on Thursday. More Photos »
CAIRO — An elite Egyptian unit deployed tanks outside the presidential palace on Thursday after a night of battles between Islamists and secular protesters that left five people dead and 450 wounded, spreading chaos in one of Cairo’s wealthiest suburbs and leaving streets littered with debris and burned-out cars.
Angry mobs of Islamists battled the secular protesters with fists, rocks and firebombs in the first major outbreak of violence between political factions here since the revolt against the ousted President Hosni Mubarak began nearly two years ago.
With at least 12 tanks drawn up near the palace, troops from the presidential guard hammered stakes into the ground to string barbed wire to separate Islamists camping outside the palace and secular protesters chanting slogans urging the guardsmen to choose “between the revolutionaries and the killers.” Other armored units were sent to guard the headquarters of state television, an important symbol of government power. The severity of the clashes — and their potential political impact — became apparent when three senior advisers to Mr. Mubarak’s successor, Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s first freely elected president, resigned during the clashes Wednesday, blaming him for the bloodshed. Mr. Morsi’s prime minister implored both sides to pull back in order to make room for “dialogue.”
Graffiti on the walls of the presidential compound, mocking President Morsi, had been covered by Thursday morning with patches of white paint.
The scale of the fighting, in the affluent Heliopolis neighborhood just outside Mr. Morsi’s office in the presidential palace, raised the first doubts about Mr. Morsi’s effort to hold a referendum on Dec. 15 on a draft constitution approved by his Islamist allies over the objections of his secular opposition and the Coptic Christian Church.
Hundreds of Islamist supporters of Mr. Morsi spent the night outside the palace, and on Thursday some awoke with head bandages covering their wounds. Many said they were members of the Muslim Brotherhood from other provinces and they vowed to stay in Cairo until the draft constitution was approved.
They said they had come to defend Egypt’s democracy from a conspiracy by foreign powers, corrupt businessmen and cynical opposition leaders, insisting that their secular opponents were fighting for money, and not for sincere beliefs.
In a token of the deep suspicions since Egypt’s revolution, some maintained that Mr. Morsi could not rely on the police force to defend him and his palace because its leaders were holdovers from the old government trying to position themselves to be on the winning side of the political battle.
“We must take our freedom; it will not be given to us on a golden platter,” said Mohamed Hassan Awad Rashid, 54, a schoolteacher and member of the Muslim Brotherhood from Sharqiya in the Nile Delta who said he had arrived Wednesday and would stay until the referendum. “If we don’t complete our revolution now, then we are digging our own graves.”
In the early afternoon, the hundreds of Islamists supporting Mr. Morsi abruptly abandoned their encampment outside the presidential palace, possibly signaling a tactical shift by the president, who said through state media that he would address the nation later on Thursday.
State media also reported that in midafternoon, the presidential guard, which reports directly to the president, would clear the streets around the palace. Overnight, periodic gunshots could be heard at the front lines of the fight, and secular protesters displayed birdshot wounds and pellets. But it could not be determined whether the riot police or Islamists or the opposition had fired the guns.
Many in both camps brandished makeshift clubs, and on the secular side a few carried knives. Thousands joined the battle on each side. The riot police initially tried to fight off or break up the crowds with tear gas, but by midevening on Wednesday, the security forces had all but withdrawn. They continued to try to separate the two sides across one boulevard but stayed out of the battle that raged on all around.
In a city square on the Islamist side of the battle lines, a loudspeaker on the top of a moving car blared out exhortations that the fight was about more than politics or Mr. Morsi.
“This is not a fight for an individual, this is not a fight for President Morsi,” the speaker declared. “We are fighting for God’s law, against the secularists and liberals.”
Protesters reportedly set fire to Muslim Brotherhood political offices in the cities of Suez and Ismailia.
Egyptian Forces Deploy Tanks as President Mohamed Morsi’s Backers Clash With Rivals
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Egyptian Forces Deploy Tanks as President Mohamed Morsi’s Backers Clash With Rivals
