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the crowd; the praying ends, the crowds scatter. Police shoot a man in the face with a tear-gas grenade, point-blank (later, video footage of him on the operating table shows up on YouTube, smashed teeth protruding from a hole where his mouth had been). The crowd panics, pursued by four trucks and the far end of the bridge is engulfed in smoke, and now flames, as somebody has torched a car.
    It seems like game over, but it’s not. Soon the police are in full retreat, back across the bridge: the crowd has armed itself with traffic barriers and a tube-shaped metal kiosk, which they roll before them on its side like a tank. A water-cannon truck has been captured and the rioters turn this, too, into a moving barricade. The police beat a headlong, terrified retreat. If the crowd pursuing them look like football fans, that’s because many of them are: the ‘ultras’ of Zamalek Sporting Club.
    Mahmoud, who I met in Tahrir Square a few weeks later, draped in the flag of Zamalek SC, was among them. ‘There was me and about four thousand others at Qasr al-Nil bridge,’ he recalled. ‘It was a beautiful feeling: to know that Egypt is finally free of all the corruption, the rule of the iron fist.’
    The ‘ultras’—named after the notorious Italian football hooligan gangs—had organized for years in the face of police repression, at all big soccer clubs. The police accused the ultras of fostering terrorism and organized crime, and they, in turn, found ways of getting their banners, flares and weapons into the stadiums. They would meet up at pre-arranged venues, ready to fight each other and the cops. On 28 January they were initially summoned to go and smash the demonstration, says Mahmoud, in response to rumours that it was organized by foreign agents:
    We came down to see what was the truth behind what the media had been telling us, and found it was all wrong. The club HQ kept telling us the protesters were traitors, foreigners, and urging the ultras to go down there and do something about it. But when we got there, to Tahrir, we formed our own opinion: we bonded with the protesters and became part of them.
    Ultras from rival club al-Ahly also joined in the fighting. By the end of the day numerous police cars had been torched, the headquarters of Mubarak’s National Democratic Party was on fire, and protesters controlled Tahrir Square.
    He’s thin, Mahmoud, with a cheeky smile poking out from beneath his red-and-white Zamalek scarf. He says: ‘Why don’t you ask me about football?’ So I throw him some inane question about Zamalek’s position in the league. He chuckles: ‘Since the revolution I’ve been neglecting football hooliganism for a bigger cause: the revolution. I can speak for both myself and every ultra. We all have.’
    A soft coup
    On 29 January, with several hundred protesters killed across Egypt, the demonstrators forced the riot cops of the Central Security to vacate the streets; the ordinary police force withdrew too, in a calculated tactic to promote lawlessness. Army units were positioned at strategic points, but having refused an order from the interior ministry to use live ammo on the demonstrators, they took no part in the maintenance of law and order. All across Cairo, neighbourhoods responded by creating vigilante squads armed with clubs and small firearms. The main aim of these groups was to fend off the baltagiya —essentially a network of civilian thugs paid and organized by the police to carry out such beatings, rapes and tortures as are necessary to pacify a city of 22 million people without rights or decent livelihoods.
    The moment was essentially a soft coup by the army against the parts of the regime loyal to Mubarak, but at the same time it created ‘fragmented power’ on the streets: not so much the ‘dual power’ of Marxist theory, but the kind of deconstructed power we saw taking shape in the vacuum