CAIRO — Egypt’s military-led government built three new walls of heavy concrete blocks surrounding Egypt’s Interior Ministry on Sunday. But they failed to stop a fourth night of violent clashes between security forces and protesters demanding an end to military rule. By late Sunday n
ight, the fighting in the streets of the capital had grown more intense than at any time since it began after a deadly riot at a soccer match on Wednesday night. Thousands of protesters alternately scurried and swarmed through the streets, hurling rocks and Molotov cocktails at rows of riot police officers.
The police chased protesters through the streets in at least three armored personnel carriers. They filled several blocks with thick clouds of tear gas, and walked through the white smoke blasting fleeing protesters with rubber bullets and birdshot.
The escalating violence raised new questions about the government’s ability to control the fighting, in part because it showed the failure of what has become the military’s favorite tactic in crowd control.
The military ultimately halted two previous outbreaks of street fighting, in November and December, by erecting 24-foot-tall concrete barriers bisecting streets leading from the symbolic center of the protests, Tahrir Square, to their most despised target, the Interior Ministry.
Before dawn on Sunday, the military erected three more, bringing the total number of walls to eight, including one that was partly toppled in protests this week. Along with the tableau of burned-out buildings and cars, rubble-strewn streets, and a thick dust of settled tear gas, the maze of barriers has completed the picture of a virtual war zone in the heart of the capital.
“It is a beautiful illustration of the poverty of political imagination in Egypt,” said Heba Morayef, a researcher for Human Rights Watch. “This is policy making? Building walls?”
The identity and demands of the protesters continuing to battle the police were also unclear. At the forefront of the violence were die-hard soccer fans, known as ultras, who are convinced that the police bore responsibility for the soccer riot that killed more than 70 fans Wednesday night.
But leaders of Cairo’s ultras, groups dedicated to the capital’s two rival teams, Al Ahly and Zamalek, had said they would not officially join the protests during a period of mourning for those killed in the riots. The ultras who were at the protests were joined by even less organized antagonists who were angry at the police for their own reasons.
All of them called for the end of military rule, often in chants about the execution of the top officer, Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi or, more obscenely, about his mother, but even the seasoned political activists who joined the fight did not agree on specific demands about how the military should give up power. Nor was it clear who could negotiate on their behalf to end the street fight.
During a lull in the fighting that prevailed for most of the day Sunday, newly elected members of Parliament, mothers who had lost sons in the fighting, and Muslim religious scholars all came to the scene to try to broker an end to the violence. But as the sun set and the crowds grew, a standoff in front of a line of riot police officers grew increasingly tense, and by about 7:30 p.m. the fight had resumed.
