the sounds of Cairo gunfire

Tarek Nasr has posted THIS 20-SECOND SAMPLE of gunfire from Giza tonight.

We’ve heard a lot from Pentagon think tank types over the past decade about the birth of “low-intensity warfare” dominated by Special Forces raids rather than massive battlefield actions. It occurs to me that Egypt right now may be in a sort of “low-intensity civil war.”

That is to say, on any given night an otherwise normal Cairo neighborhood can have automatic weapons shootouts or samurai swordfights, and with murderous results. But somehow it hasn’t ever quite reached the level of scaring everyone the hell out of the city. Cairo is still somehow a livable city, as long as you know what situations to avoid. There aren’t things (knock on wood) like highway checkpoints where people are massacred, as was seen during the Lebanese Civil War. Nor do we see the outright battles and atrocities familiar from recent Syria.

True, it could just be that Egypt hasn’t gotten there yet. But it’s also possible that the present situation of intermittent deadly force will continue indefinitely, with the city remaining basically livable as long as you don’t get involved in the street combat in person.

It’s a strange situation, and I should re-emphasize that I’m not in Egypt at the moment. But nothing I’ve read in the news or heard from friends so far suggests that the situation is fundamentally different from when I left town.