WATANI International
15 May 2011
The church of Mar-Mina stands in a small street in the overcrowded district of Imbaba in Giza. Typically, it is surrounded by houses that are mostly occupied by Coptic residents.
Last Saturday afternoon, at around 4:00pm, the Copts in the neighbourhood were surprised to find a group of some 25 Salafi Muslims converge on an empty church-owned plot of land in the vicinity and hold Muslim prayers there. They then began chanting Islamic slogans and shouting: “Allahu Akbar (Allah is the Greatest)”.
Where’s that woman?
At the same time, a group of some eight sheikhs and Muslim elders headed to Mar-Mina church and told the priest, Father Abanoub Gad al-Rub, that they had been informed that a young woman from Assiut, Upper Egypt, who had reportedly converted to Islam, was being held captive in the church. The Salafis demanded that the church should hand over to them that young convert. Fr Abanoub denied the church was holding anyone, and invited the Muslim group to search the church and its near-by community service centre to make sure no-one was being held there. This done, the sheikhs announced the young convert was not held there.
Meanwhile, the numbers of Salafis converging on the neighbourhood swelled into the thousands. They came carrying bags which the local Copts say held weapons.
Building defences
The local Copts, however, were very wary of the heavy Salafi presence; they understood it boded ill for the church and the Coptic residents. The young Coptic men therefore decided to fortify the defence of the church by taking out all the wooden pews and piling them in the streets leading to the church, in order to form a separating ‘safe barrier’ before anyone who wished to attack the church. A police truck which had been parked at the entrance to the street but was later abandoned by the police was used, together with a car owned by a Coptic teacher, to block the road. This created a good 50-metre barrier before anyone who wished to reach the church. The residents got ready to defend themselves and their homes with bottles, sticks, and stones—anything that may be used in self-defence—which they had already hoarded during the days of unrest following the 25 January Revolution.
By 7:00pm the attack started. The Salafis found it almost impossible to cross over to the church, even though they had surrounded it from several sides by then, but so had the Copts also fortified their defences on all sides. The Salafis began hurling fireballs and Molotov cocktails at the church and surrounding houses, but were hit with a barrage of glass and stones by the Copts. A few Copts who owned firearms fired in the air, but the 50m-defence barrier held the Salafis at bay. The Salafi fireballs, however, set ablaze several Coptic homes, shops and cars. There was no way any fire truck could venture into the neighbourhood, so the Copts had to depend on their own efforts to put out the fires.
The demonstrators allowed no ambulance car into the crowded area, so the locals had to carry the injured to the hospitals by private cars or on motorcycle.
Where are the weapons?
Unable to get to Mar-Mina’s, the Salafis moved further down Imbaba shouting provocative Islamic slogans. “We want it Islamic, Islamic [as opposed to a civic State],’ they screamed. “Christians are the enemies of Allah. Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar. Christians are a minority; we won’t let them rule over us.” They marched down to the Church of the Holy Virgin on al-Wihda Street and burned it down.
The Copts called the police and the military for help, but none arrived till around 10:00pm, and then it took them another hour to deal with the troublemakers. The figures until Wednesday morning indicated that thirteen were killed—eight of them Copts—and some 233 were injured. Among the dead was Saleh Aziz, the brother of Ishaq Aziz who works with Watani and who was burned inside the Church of the Holy Virgin. The after-death official report revealed that Aziz had been slain with a knife before being left to burn in the fire. A colleague who had been with Aziz said, on the satellite TV channel CTV, that the Salafis who attacked them asked them where they stocked the weapons in church. “If there were any weapons here,” the Copt answered, “D’you think you could have made your way to this spot unhindered? D’you think we would not be using them now to defend ourselves?”
Out of the balcony
The fighting lasted well into the early hours of Sunday. But it resumed again at dawn, only this time the Copts were depleted and the Salafis were able to break into several homes and shops, plundering and torching them. In one case they threw the new furniture of a couple who were to wed in a couple of weeks out of the window and into the street where it broke into splinters. In another tragic case, they attacked the owner of the house—Nash’at Rateeb, a trader in his fifties—and set his house on fire. Rateeb in terror, jumped out of his balcony to meet his death. As fate would have it, his three Salafi attackers turned back to leave the house but could not do so because of the fire they had started. They too then jumped out of the balcony and died.
On Sunday morning, the military cordoned off the main roads of Imbaba in an effort to prevent further crowds from going in. But the fighting continued in the side streets. The military broke into several Imbaba homes looking for weapons, and arrested anyone who owned a non-licensed gun.
Many Copts, especially those in the direct vicinity of churches, fled their homes to save their lives.