Police in civilian cloth beating a protester in Cairo 1

Baltagiya or Baltageya ( ) is an Egyptian

slang A slang is a vocabulary (words, phrases, and linguistic usages) of an informal register, common in everyday conversation but avoided in formal writing and speech. It also often refers to the language exclusively used by the members of pa ...

word that generally means " goons", " thugs", "

gang A gang is a social group, group or secret society, society of associates, friends, or members of a family with a defined leadership and internal organization that identifies with or claims control over Wiktionary:territory#Noun, territory in a ...

s" or "

criminal In ordinary language, a crime is an unlawful act punishable by a State (polity), state or other authority. The term ''crime'' does not, in modern criminal law, have any simple and universally accepted definition,Farmer, Lindsay: "Crime, definiti ...

s", who are hired to attack the political opposition or civic protesters. Meanwhile, '' "Baltaga" '' ( ), that etymologically derives from the Turkish word "baltacı" signifying an axeman,PGMD 2.0 (Pro-Government Militias Project): Mubarak's Thugs/Baltagiya (Egypt) Basic Group Information
/ref> means doing harm or participating in

collusion Collusion is a deceitful agreement or secret cooperation between two or more parties to limit open competition by deceiving, misleading or defrauding others of their legal right. Collusion is not always considered illegal. It can be used to att ...

against someone or some people. Nonpolitical Baltagiya gangs appeared in Egypt in the 1980s; in the 1990s the Egyptian police decided to hire them, "outsourcing coercion to these Baltagiya, paying them well and training them to use sexualized brutality (from groping to

gang rape In scholarly literature and criminology, gang rape, also called serial gang rape, party rape, group rape, or multiple perpetrator rape,Ullman, S. E. (2013). 11 Multiple perpetrator rape victimization. Handbook on the Study of Multiple Perpetrato ...

) in order to punish and deter female protesters and male detainees, alike".

Recent history

A scholar from

Cambridge University The University of Cambridge is a Public university, public collegiate university, collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209, the University of Cambridge is the List of oldest universities in continuous operation, wo ...

estimated in 2011 that during Mubarak’s reign, the police informally employed 1.5 million Baltagy and informers.

Amnesty International Amnesty International (also referred to as Amnesty or AI) is an international non-governmental organization focused on human rights, with its headquarters in the United Kingdom. The organization says that it has more than ten million members a ...

and other watchdogs bemoaned Baltagiya interference both in the 2005

parliamentary In modern politics and history, a parliament is a legislative body of government. Generally, a modern parliament has three functions: Representation (politics), representing the Election#Suffrage, electorate, making laws, and overseeing ...

and presidential elections as well as in the 2010

elections. Baltagiya gained international media attention when fighting on the

Tahrir Square Tahrir Square (, ; ), also known as Martyr Square, is a public town square in downtown Cairo, Egypt. The square has been the location and focus for political demonstrations. The 2011 Egyptian revolution and the resignation of President of Egypt, ...

during the

2011 Egyptian Revolution The 2011 Egyptian revolution, also known as the 25 January Revolution (;), began on 25 January 2011 and spread across Egypt. The date was set by various youth groups to coincide with the annual Egyptian "Police holiday" as a statement against ...

. In the Port Said Stadium disaster on 1 February 2012, eyewitnesses accused the police of allowing Baltagiya in plain clothes into the stadium with weapons and then not intervening to stop the violence. Egyptian politician Ahmed Tantawi claimed that his supporters were attacked by pro-government thugs during his campaign in the 2023 Egyptian presidential election. On 13 June 2025 a group of Baltagiya in

Ismailia Ismailia ( ', ) is a city in north-eastern Egypt. Situated on the west bank of the Suez Canal, it is the capital of the Ismailia Governorate. The city had an estimated population of about 1,434,741 according to the statistics issued by the Cen ...

attacked international activists supporting the Soumoud Convoy trying to reach

Rafah border crossing The Rafah Border Crossing () or Rafah Crossing Point is the sole crossing point between Egypt and Palestine's Gaza Strip. The Rafah crossing was opened by Israel after the Egypt–Israel peace treaty, 1979 peace treaty and remained under Isra ...

in an attempt to break the

Blockade of the Gaza Strip The restrictions on movement and goods in Gaza imposed by Israel date to the early 1990s. After Hamas took over in 2007, Israel significantly intensified existing movement restrictions and imposed a complete blockade on the movement of good ...

Notable Baltagiya

*Sabry Nakhnok is a leader of Baltagiya who currently runs a

private security company A private security company is a business entity which provides armed or unarmed security services and expertise to clients in the private or public sectors. Overview Private security companies are defined by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statisti ...

. In the Mubarak era, he was a key player in

vote rigging Electoral fraud, sometimes referred to as election manipulation, voter fraud, or vote rigging, involves illegal interference with the process of an election, either by increasing the vote share of a favored candidate, depressing the vote share o ...

and political repression as well as a procurer. *Sayed Al Esawy was a Baltagy nicknamed the "lion wrestler" due to his alleged fitness, who was know for his involvement in the Tamarod

protest A protest (also called a demonstration, remonstration, or remonstrance) is a public act of objection, disapproval or dissent against political advantage. Protests can be thought of as acts of cooperation in which numerous people cooperate ...

laying the political foundations for the mid-2013 ouster of president Morsi by the army. He was paralyzed during a fight and later died from gunshot wounds in a clash with the

Muslim brotherhood The Society of the Muslim Brothers ('' ''), better known as the Muslim Brotherhood ( ', is a transnational Sunni Islamist organization founded in Egypt by Islamic scholar, Imam and schoolteacher Hassan al-Banna in 1928. Al-Banna's teachings s ...

. *The notorious auxiliary camel riders on

assisting Mubarak's attempts to crush the 2011

Arab spring The Arab Spring () was a series of Nonviolent resistance, anti-government protests, Rebellion, uprisings, and Insurgency, armed rebellions that spread across much of the Arab world in the early 2010s. It began Tunisian revolution, in Tunisia ...

were perceived as an embodyment of Baltagiya.

Weaponry

Baltagiya use

blade weapons An edged weapon, or bladed weapon, is a hand-to-hand combat weapon with a cutting edge. Bladed weapons include swords, daggers, knives, and bayonets. Edged weapons are used to cut, hack, or slash; some edged weapons (such as many kinds of swords) ...

as well as

Molotov cocktails A Molotov cocktail (among several other names – ''see '') is a hand-thrown incendiary weapon consisting of a frangible container filled with flammable substances and equipped with a fuse (typically a glass bottle filled with flammable l ...

and

improvised firearms Improvised firearms (sometimes called zip guns, pipe guns, or slam guns) are firearms manufactured by an entity other than a registered firearms manufacturer or a gunsmith. Improvised firearms are typically constructed by adapting existing mater ...

. The

pocket knife A pocketknife (also spelled as pocket knife) is a knife with one or more blades that fold into the handle. They are also known as jackknives, folding knives, EDC knife, or may be referred to as a penknife, though a penknife may also be a specif ...

became a symbol of baltagiya, with the Okapi knife being so popular that rapper Ahmed Mekky made a song about it.

In media

The Baltagiya character was depicted many times in Egyptian movies and series to the point of being considered an entire genre. The Baltagy is usually depicted as a villain or an

anti-hero An antihero (sometimes spelled as anti-hero or two words anti hero) or anti-heroine is a character in a narrative (in literature, film, TV, etc.) who may lack some conventional heroic qualities and attributes, such as idealism and morality. Al ...

, with the most notable works in this genre being: * Ibrahim Labyad starring Ahmed El-Sakka and Amr Waked * El Ostoura starring Mohamed Ramadan In 2011/12, the Egyptian government denounced both political and poverty protest as Baltagiya, with the accused being tried before military courts. There is an ongoing yet volatile reception of the phenomenon in Western media and academia, from the mid-90s onwards.Documentation for Mubarak's Thugs/Baltagiya
/ref>

Research

* Ghannam, Farha (2012): "Meanings and feelings: Local interpretations of the use of violence in the Egyptian revolution.", in: American Ethnologist 39 (1), pp. 32-36. * Wahbe, Dina (2020): "A Thug, a Revolutionary or Both? Negotiating Masculinity in Post-Revolutionary Egypt.", in: Middle East - Topics & Arguments. DOI: https://doi.org/10.17192/meta.2020.14.8265.

References