A few days after the revolutionary peak of the 2011 anti-regime protests in Cairo, which demanded the resignation of then-Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, the mood had changed.
The pro-government thugs unleashed on the crowd. They began addressing protesters, journalists covering the events, and Westerners. Some of them had entered our hotel.
We were told we would do things, get in cars and drive from the Hilton, overlooking Tahrir Square, to a relatively safer hotel a few miles away.
I shared a car with cameraman Joe Duran, who was sitting in the passenger seat, and CNN anchor Anderson Cooper in the back seat.
The bridge on October 6, a crowd forced our taxi to stop and surrounded us. They smashed the windows. They threw rocks at the car. The driver, surrounded by the violent attackers, appeared to be freezing.
In Arabic, I remember saying, “I’ll give you $ 500 for the windows if you keep going.” I ripped this figure out of nowhere. I still don’t know why this particular number came to my mind. When he left, I thought we were safe.
We entered the Marriott entrance with our wrecked car. Stunned, we headed to the lobby and checked into the front desk.
Shortly afterwards, New York Times columnist Nick Kristof told me that some journalists were changing the names under which they were registered, so that thugs entering the hotel demanding guest lists would not know which rooms there there was the foreign press.
My name is Arabic anyway, I thought, so it should be fine. “Does CNN say anywhere on the form?” I remember Kristof asking me. I wasn’t sure, but I decided to take a risk. It doesn’t make sense to linger too long at the front desk.
That night, we aired special CNN coverage from the floor of a hotel room. I remember thinking it looked like a hostage video. We would like to spend many more nights like this, including a particularly tense barricade evening at the CNN Cairo office, a couch closed with the door closed.
I anchored hours of live coverage with our office manager, the legendary Ben Wedeman and Cooper. We sat docked to the camera equipment boxes, lit up with as little light as possible, as the offices had to look unoccupied from the outside.
Hopes for democracy
The government’s retreat against the revolt lasted several days.
The regime and its supporters tried to defeat the popular movement, but the army was not on Mubarak’s side. As had been the case for decades in Egypt, it was the generals who maintained the reigns of power. When they dropped Mubarak, we all knew it wouldn’t last long.
On February 11, 2011, 17 days after the protests began, it ended: Hosni Mubarak left office. This would mark the beginning of a new era; the hope was that decades of nepotism, corruption, police brutality and repression would give way to something akin to democracy.
A few years later, I covered the 2013 Egyptian presidential election, which led to the victory of a Muslim Brotherhood president, Mohamed Morsi.
But ultimately, a revived army would crush the Islamists in 2013 and bring the army back to power. They had been there the whole time, tolerating what turned out to be just a brief experiment with democracy.
Lost, even crushed, in this tragic story are the original protesters who dreamed of a democracy that represented them.
Crushed optimism
During the first weeks of the uprising, journalists like us shared their optimism: it could really be the time when the Arab world would slowly and painfully evolve into a system that would serve its own people, rather than the unelected autocrats who had they drained their countries from drying up for decades?
Ten years ago we allowed ourselves to believe it.
Today, many of those who were at the forefront of the protests are in exile, imprisoned or worse.
Elsewhere in the region, there were much more tragic results.
In Syria, the regime crushed the cry of its own citizens for democracy with such brutality that peaceful protesters were quickly replaced by extremist rebels, fighting a government backed by external forces for control of a shattered land.
Today, those of us who covered Egypt in 2011 still deeply feel the intense excitement of those early days.
There were some moments of fear, but the historical significance of the events we documented acted as fuel for rockets as we fled from the people and went to the hotel rooms.
But for revolutionaries in Egypt and beyond, it was not meant to be.
The Arab world, in many ways worse than before the Arab Spring, will have to wait for another generation to demand freedom from its leaders. And one can only hope that this time they will be victorious, if only because the sacrifices of those who came before them would not have been in vain.