She thought of turning back. She and others nearly did before one of the women in the crowd said, “No, I’m not going back! I will continue. If everyone says they’re going back, then our country is ruined. We can’t go back.”

Nihal related this story during an interview with Samar Media TV:

“Imagine the scene. We were getting hit by teargas, we had to hide in a building and close the door behind us, because of the gas; people were crying, they were getting shot at, and there is this girl shouting, ‘No, I’m not going back!’ This scene stayed with me.”

After the fall of Mubarak, Nihal continued to participate in demonstrations at Tahrir, the epicenter of the revolution. Nine months post-revolution, the familiar scent of teargas returned during the Battle of Mohamed Mahmoud Street, a five-day clash of protestors and police that was the deadliest Egypt had seen at the time. Protestors organized the clashes in hopes of accelerating the presidential election, which was successfully moved from June 2013 to April 2012. Police fired teargas, rubber bullets and buckshot at unarmed protesters under the pretext that they were preventing them from attacking the Ministry of Interior. But Nihal says that was never their intention. The ministry’s headquarters lie on a parallel street to Mohamed Mahmoud—close to Tahir.

For five days Nihal shouted at police who answered her cries with canisters of teargas falling like tiny rockets from the sky.

“The teargas is the thing I remember most,” she said. “I opened my mouth and it burned. The pain was so big that I could not move. I cried involuntarily. I poured water over my skin, but no relief. Water only fueled the fire.”

Nihal could see clouds of tear gas hanging ominously in the air. Sometimes protestors picked up the canisters and threw them back at police. Sometimes the smoky gas was so dense that only the lights of ambulances were visible. At least 50 protestors lost their lives, while several others lost their eyes. First lieutenant Mohamed el-Shenway intentionally targeted protestors’ eyes with rubber bullets. In a video that has widely circulated social media, the baby-faced el-Shenway rushes to the front of a group of police officers engaged in a clash with protestors. He fires several shots, with the posture of an expert. Other officers congratulate him as he returns to the back of the pack. “In his eye! It was in his eye! Bravo, my friend!” A video by Simon Hanna, a journalist documenting the clashes, shows the inside of a makeshift field hospital housing Mohamed Mahmoud Street’s injured. Quietly lying on a rug in the midst of chaos, a man wearing a white button-up shirt stained with blood falls in and out of consciousness while a volunteer holds gauze over his ruined left eye.

After the battle at Mohamed Mahmoud, protestors bandaged the eye of one of the lions guarding the Qasr-el-Nil Bridge near Tahrir. Others painted murals of 31-year-old Ahmed Harara. Harara lost one eye during the revolution and the other at Mohamed Mahmoud. The dates he lost each eye are written on the patches he wears.

The field hospitals smelled of sodium chloride, vinegar and alcohol, all used to reduce the effect of teargas. Nihal was volunteering at one of the field hospitals when police raided it. Fifteen protestors, including Nihal, ran into a nearby building to escape. They climbed to the top floor—a dead end—where a woman opened up her home to all of them. They hid there for an hour. On television they watched army officers attack protesters, “beating and killing those who were not fast enough getting away,” Nihal later blogged.

She returned to her home on Mohamed Mahmoud street that night, but she could still hear the battle cries outside. She was unaware then that teargas had infiltrated the air intact of buildings along Mohamed Mahmoud, including her place. It infected her home, latching onto the walls like a virus to a cell. The poison soaked into Nihal’s skin as she slept. For the next six months she suffered bouts of illness. Charcoal pills were prescribed to pull the toxins from her body, which constantly ached. She barely ate.

Share this Story