shots fired in Asyut

I can’t find the link anymore at the moment, but earlier today I read that shots were fired at the Yemeni Ambassador to Egypt while he was visiting Yemeni nationals in Asyut, in the south of Egypt. There was no word as to the perpetrators or the possible motive at the time I read the story.

Asyut is believed by many to be the birthplace of Plotinus. It’s generally been considered not a safe place for Western tourists– like much of the central part of Egypt stretching from al-Minya down almost to Luxor. This had to do with a low-level insurrection in those parts, which in the early 1990’s led to attacks on several tourist buses and even shots fired at Nile cruises (which is why Nile cruises are now only between Aswan and Luxor: the extreme South of Egypt, where things are considered safe).

For some reason the train seems to be considered safe all the way down the Nile. I’ve made that train trip from Cairo to the South 2 or 3 times, and there seems not to be the slightest worry, though it is always said that if as a Western tourist you get off at Asyut or other such cities, the police will follow you everywhere and urge you to leave town as soon as possible.

I’ve only had one experience with this sort of thing. In 2003 I took a trip to al-Minya, since Tel-al-Amarna, the ruined capital of Akhenaten, is nearby. The security police did follow the tour group then, and they were pretty heavily armed. But I had been told that they would also follow you for protection if you left your hotel to wander around in al-Minya, and that didn’t happen. A few of us did leave the hotel, and no one seemed to follow us on the streets.

Everything from al-Minya northward to the Mediterranean has been considered completely safe, and that has always been my experience as well. I’ve traveled a moderate amount in the Nile Delta and never experienced any problems. In fact, I’ve had only a few minor bad incidents anywhere in Egypt in more than a decade of living here: certainly fewer bad incidents than I had in a comparable period in Chicago.

However, people are a bit edgier at the moment. Just yesterday many of us received a warning email about someone being mugged by heavily armed thieves in broad daylight just off Tahrir Square. That seems hard to imagine even now, but the report seemed sincere.