the shifting battlefields of downtown Cairo

All the friends and family who kindly worry about me every time they read a dangerous-sounding story about Cairo are unaware of a very remarkable fact. Namely, the violence in Cairo is always so localized.

Just as the Confederacy and the Union clashed at shifting sites in the mid-Atlantic region –Manassas, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville– the battle between protestors and security forces has constantly shifted at each new stage of the conflict.

In January/February, once Tahrir was occupied for good, most of the big battles were in Tahrir.

In October, Maspero (the Nile-side area of the TV station) was the bloodiest location.

In November, Mohamed Mahmoud Street. This seems to have been the result of chance. Sheikh Rihan one block south would have been a more logical battlefield: it’s wider and less tree-lined, and is also where the Interior Ministry is actually located. But I was right there on November 19, and it looked to me like Mohamed Mahmoud was the battlefield simply because that was the initial route of the tear gas-firing Interior Ministry troops, and thereafter became the chief battlefield even as nothing at all was happening on Sheikh Rihan.

And now it’s Qasr el-Aini street, which runs north-south parallel to the Nile, with only the Garden City neighborhood separating the street from the river. That neighborhood is where the heavily protected U.S. and British Embassies can be found (and the not-so-protected Canadian Embassy). But these clashes are connected with Parliament, which is on the east side of Qasr el-Aini.