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Rabia al-Adawiya square: Indeed an attack on the barracks by armed men
(Informed Comment) – However, it also seems likely that there was in fact an attack on the barracks by armed men. Some accounts say that they were riding motorcycles through the non-combatant crowd after dawn prayers had ended, firing at the troops and clearly intending to storm the barracks (where they believe deposed president Muhammad Morsi is being held).
The New Yorker found an eyewitness, a physician:
” I heard people through megaphones encouraging jihad. Then I saw four to six motorcycles coming from the direction of the Rabaa intersection to the Republican Guard barracks. Some people were still praying, some were not, because the dawn prayer had finished by then. The men on the motorcycles were all masked, and it was hard to see them through the dark and the tear-gas smoke, but they seemed to be shooting, they were coming from behind the protesters, so they were shooting toward the protesters and the Army.”
The troops should have had rubber bullets, not live ammunition, for crowd control, and should have blocked off the roads so that a motorcycle cavalcade couldn’t come barreling down toward the barracks, guns blazing.
Another eyewitness account, in Arabic on Facebook by Omar Ahmed (known to Egyptian friends whom I trust) can be found here.
He says that the army did use a microphone to demand that the crowd near the Republican Guards Barracks disperse, and that the Brotherhood used their microphones to announce that martyrdom so near Ramadan would be a great thing. The army fired tear gas.
Then Omar heard firing at the troops and screams from the military side. The sniping was coming from al-Mustafa Mosque. The troops were also being hit with molotov cocktails. Then the microphone of the mosque threatened the troops, saying they are baby-killers.
Then a Brother began firing wildly with an automatic weapon. The troops returned fire and after that there were just bodies falling and men being taken into custody by the army. At 5 am, an hour into the clashes, reinforcements of more police and military showed up, and the Brotherhood militants withdrew to the Rabia al-Adawiya square or found refuge …