Thirteen candidates, who include Islamists, liberals and Mubarak regime figures, are contesting the election. No outright winner is expected to emerge from the two-day vote starting Wednesday. So, a runoff between the two top finishers will be held June 16-17. The winner will be announced on June 21.

“It’s a miracle,” said Selwa Abdel-Malik, a 60-year-old Christian from the Mediterranean port city of Alexandria as she was about to vote. “And it’s a beautiful feeling too.”

For most of his 29-year rule, Mubarak — like his predecessors — ran unopposed in yes-or-no referendums. Rampant fraud guaranteed ruling party victories in parliamentary elections. Even when, in 2005, Mubarak let challengers oppose him in elections, he ended up not only trouncing his liberal rival but jailing him.

Egypt’s next president will be the nation’s fifth since the monarchy was toppled following a 1952 coup that ushered in six decades of de facto military rule. Like his three predecessors — Anwar Sadat, Gamal Abdel-Nasser and Mohammed Naguib — Mubarak has a military background.

Many of the candidates in the race have called for amendments in Egypt’s 1979 peace treaty with Israel, which most Egyptians continue to view as their nation’s number one enemy. Though none will likely to dump the pact, a victory by any of the Islamist or leftist candidates could mean strained ties with Israel and a stronger backing for the Palestinians in the peace process.

The generals who have taken over from Mubarak after an 18-day uprising forced him to step down 15 months ago have promised to hand over power by July 1, ending a turbulent transitional period defined by deadly street clashes, a faltering economy, a dramatic surge of crime and human rights abuses.

The military has said it has no intention to cling on to power, but it is not clear what authority it wants to retain after the election of a new president. The generals have said they have no preferred candidate, but they are widely thought to be favoring Ahmed Shafiq, a former air force commander and Mubarak’s last prime minister who has steadily gained in opinion polls over the past week.

Other front-runners are Mubarak’s foreign minister of 10 years Amr Moussa, Mohammed Morsi of the powerful Muslim Brotherhood and Abdel-Moneim Abolfotoh, a moderate Islamist whose inclusive platform has won him the support of some liberals, leftists and minority Christians.

The election comes less than two weeks before Mubarak, 84, is due to be sentenced after he was tried on charges of complicity in the killing of some 900 protesters during the uprising against his rule. He also faced corruption charges, along with his two sons, one-time heir apparent Gamal and wealthy businessman Alaa.

Whoever wins will face the unenviable task of having to tackle a host of formidable problems, ranging from economic, a tenuous security and soaring unemployment. The next president will serve a four-year term.

“May God help the new president,” said Zaki Mohammed, a teacher in his 40s as he waited to vote in a district close to the Giza Pyramids. “There will be 82 million pair of eyes watching him.”

Another voter in line, tour agent Salah Ali, said: “We need someone who works more than he talks.”

___

Associated Press writer Aya Batrawy contributed to this report from Alexandria, Egypt.

So, it’s not a real thing. There’s no such law or even any evidence that anyone proposed said law, and even if someone had proposed such a law, there is not even a remote possibility that the Egyptian Parliament would consider it. It’s total bullshit. It’s the Daily Mail overhyping a story Al-Arabiya took from a newspaper opinion column written by a dedicated Hosni Mubarak supporter.

The Christian Science Monitor’s Dan Murphy explained as much yesterday, but the people who highlight specious stories like this don’t actually care about “accuracy”; they are just engaged in a propaganda campaign designed to tar all Muslims as violent radical pervert monsters who are slowly taking over the West.

That is actually not the case, and anyone who’s ever met a Muslim could probably tell you!

It’s important to remember that the structure of the Muslim clergy is, by and large, like that of a number of Protestant Christian sects. Anyone can put out a shingle and declare themselves a preacher. The ones to pay attention to are the ones with large followings, or attachment to major institutions of Islamic learning. The preacher in Morocco is like the preacher in Florida who spent so much time and energy publicizing the burning of Qurans.

This seems like a really staggeringly obvious point — there are mainstream Muslim clerics and nutty fringe ones, just like in Mormonism and Judaism and all forms of Christianity! — but the Islamophobia industry has spent years trying to make sure that Americans by and large don’t understand this.

Number 2: That Obama EPA person said they were going to “crucify” the oil industry. This is a much bigger story (though it is still limited almost entirely to the conservative press) because it was first spread by an actual senator: James Inhofe, the Senate’s worst pilot and best friend of oil and gas. And then it was on Fox, obviously.

And it has now become a regular talking point, that Obama’s EPA is “crucifying” oil companies. (Which is bad because oil companies give us our precious life-giving oil!)

Of course the guy, an administrator named Al Armendariz, was specifically talking about going after companies that broke the law. The idea is that the EPA would punish companies that violated the law, because that is the EPA’s whole deal. (Some people think there shouldn’t be any environmental laws and no EPA, but instead of making that argument, they are instead making the untrue claim, based on words taken out of context, that Obama’s EPA is unfairly punishing all oil companies for no reason.)

It is also sort of weird that everyone thinks it’s a political winner to say Obama is being too tough on oil companies when no one likes oil companies, but what do I know.

Kagan wasn’t the first to make this argument. Bush’s deputy national security advisor Elliott Abrams wrote in January 2011 that “the revolt in Tunisia, the gigantic wave of demonstrations in Egypt and the more recent marches in Yemen all make clear that Bush had it right.” Bush speechwriter Peter Wehner claimed “vindication for Bush’s freedom agenda” when the uprising began. Even Dick Cheney said that “I think that what happened in Iraq, the fact that we brought democracy, if you will, and freedom to Iraq, has had a ripple effect on some of those other countries.”

Few things could be more condescending than the argument that Middle Easterners had never thought of freedom or democracy before George W. Bush began speaking about it. Countries from Algeria to Iran had held elections or saw large-scale protests long before any former Texas governor illegally invaded Iraq.

But the idea that the Iraq War had a galvanizing effect on the freedom movements under way in the Middle East is best refuted by simply listening to the movements’ leaders. Those individuals leading the protests from Iran in 2009 to Syria in 2012 are unanimous: the Iraq War hurt, not helped, the cause of democracy in the Middle East. By unleashing anarchy and a civil war that caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, the invasion in 2003 actually discredited democracy, if anything.

Here is leading Iranian dissident Akbar Ganji: “Since Iranians, in particular opposition groups, do not want to see a repeat of Afghanistan or Iraq in Iran, they’ve actually had to scale back their opposition to the government … The belligerent rhetoric of Bush didn’t help us [the Iranian democracy movement], it actually harmed us during that period.” In fact, what helped facilitate the large-scale protests in 2009 was the Obama administration’s engagement with Iran. According to Ganji, “the mere fact that Obama didn’t make military threats made the Green Movement possible.”

Or consider Wael Ghonim, who helped foment the Egyptian revolution and was imprisoned for his deeds. Asked if the cause of Egyptian self-determination was helped by the Iraq War, he was succinct: “Not at all.” He continued: “The war in Iraq killed so many innocent people, and it’s not something that any civilized nation should be proud of.” His thoughts on revolution represent the views of almost all Middle Easterners: “People who live in a country are the ones to decide their destiny because they are the ones who eventually pay the price for whatever choices they make.”

Leadership aside, it is clear that few people in the region take seriously the claim that the Iraq War sparked a wave of inspiration, for the simple reason that they see the war as a disaster for the Iraq people. A November 2011 conducted by Zogby found that most people in Iran, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates believed that Iraq was worse off as a result of the American invasion. Even most Iraqis — those who are said to have received the blessing of democracy — agreed that their country was worse off as a result of the war. If those in the Middle East believe the American-led war was a calamity for Iraqis, it is hard to believe they would think it was a model to be emulated in their own respective countries.

Of course, none of this will change the mind of those desperate to retrospectively justify the Iraq invasion. If an Arab Spring had broken out in 2050 instead of 2011, some student of a current neoconservative would have claimed Iraq was the spark the caused the fire. That fallacy may be pleasing for Bush’s intellectuals and policymakers unable to face the consequences of their decision to push for war in Iraq, but those in the region are under no such delusion. Nobody else should be either.

Asma al-Assad is British born and, yes, a former banker. She worked at Deutsche Bank and J.P. Morgan before marrying Bashar and moving to Syria to be that country’s first lady-for-life. Because she grew up in secular, liberal Britain, and is worldly and cosmopolitan, lots of people assumed, without much in the way of evidence, that she’d help her husband “modernize” Syria, and push him to support women’s rights and more civil freedoms. Now he’s clinging to power by any means necessary, and thousands of people are dead.

The fact that Asma al-Assad is “one of us” — a native English-speaker with a finance background, the sort of person a globetrotting journalist would probably get along with — led a lot of very bad journalists to assume that the Assads were not actually that bad; “This man is not like Qaddafi,” in the words of Barbara Walters, who vacationed — actually vacationed! — with the Assads in 2008. Here’s Ann Curry’s glowing profile of the glamorous Syrian first lady from the NBC Nightly News back in 2008:

Asma Assad is a revelation — with a competitive edge learned on Wall Street, a light-up-the-room charisma, and a down-to-earth touch. Born and raised in Britain, she is now the modern face of Syria.”

(Ann Curry’s second-best line: “Do you ever pinch yourself, stop and say look, I am the first lady of Syria?”)

Even more embarrassing, somehow, was Vogue’s Asma al-Assad profile, which, unfortunately for Vogue, ran shortly after the bloody crackdown began, at the beginning of last year. The magazine has disappeared the story, but it’s readily available online. Assad’s brutality made the entire thing read like a sick joke — a thousand dead rebels, civilians and children make it much harder to understand why it’s admirable or impressive that the wife of Syria’s autocratic leader is glamorous and modern. (“On Friday, the Muslim day of rest, Asma al-Assad opens the door herself in jeans and old suede stiletto boots, hair in a ponytail, the word happiness spelled out across the back of her T-shirt. At the bottom of the stairs stands the off-duty president in jeans—tall, long-necked, blue-eyed.” All three of the Assad’s children, we also learn, attend Montessori school.)

It turned out, of course, that the Syrian government had contracted with a major American and British P.R. firm to help convince Vogue to run that glamorous photo shoot and soft-focus profile. (The same P.R. firm that reps for MEK. It’s a small world, and one full of so many deplorable people.) It seems weirdly appropriate for such a “modern” dictator that the increasingly isolated Assad relies more and more on the counsel of various young women with P.R. experience.

Well, it turned out that when Asma al-Assad, in Vogue, described her household as “wildly democratic,” she was being not just viciously ironic but also facetious. She described herself, with a particularly poor choice of words in an email to a friend, as “the REAL dictator” in the Assad household, because she makes her actual dictator husband listen to her. Oh, those Assads.

The good news is that the EU has decided to make it marginally more difficult for Asma al-Assad to buy things on the Internet. But the Assads are a useful object lesson for future dictators: Good P.R. and Western elite consumer habits will go a long way to convince certain people that you can’t be that bad.

Our goal was to learn, and then report, who was in control of Brega.

We were getting nervous. We knew the boys driving were scouting the road ahead, and maybe on their own initiative. Anton, the most experienced journalist in the group, mumbled something about it being risky. We could feel our guts begin to tighten. Manu and I looked at each other. But said nothing.

Two armed trucks raced toward us from behind, filling up our back window before soaring past. This was how the rebel convoys seemed to form, like schools of fish that hunted together, but have no clear leader or command structure.

Over a small hill we saw some men, boys really, standing around a sedan. We leaped out to do some interviews. Clare asked how far away Gadhafi’s forces were. The boy said 300 meters. 300 meters? I looked at Clare. It seemed impossible. But as a precaution, we hustled off to the side of the road. A static mortar or a rocket position could have easily dialed in on us from that distance. The small convoy rolled ahead, leaving us behind in what we thought was relative safety.

We watched the rebels push forward. They weren’t 200 meters away, at the rise of the next hill, when they sped back around. We watched for a second as they beared back down on us, followed by a barrage of machine gun fire. The loudest I had ever heard. Our small group of journalists — Anton, Clare, my fellow American, and Manu, a Spanish photographer — took off running.

“We need to get to the vehicles,” Anton shouted. But the rebel trucks were retreating too fast and the ones in pursuit were firing wildly. There were two Gadhafi military pickups — tan with large machine guns mounted on the back. The trucks were overflowing with armed men.

With all the bullets flying, we pressed ourselves as close to the ground as possible. The rebels faded into the distance and the Gadhafi trucks slowed to a stop. The shooting continued. The roar of bullets overhead sounded like machines eating up metal. AK-47 rounds ripped past us from less than 50 meters.

Libya: Tripoli scenes from the uprising:

I crawled back toward Clare and Manu, who were under several small trees. The shooting intensified. We tried to speak, to yell for each other. But the bullets tearing overhead deafened everything. In a corner of my mind I hoped that we were in a cross fire, that behind us the rebels were shooting back. I crawled forward toward a larger sand dune with my camera rolling. Anton crouched in front of me. The bullets streamed directly over my helmet and shoulders. This was no crossfire. They were shooting at us, and they were shooting to kill.

“Help, help,” I heard Anton cry. His voice was weak. My mind tried to convince me of something I knew was not true. Maybe he had just fallen and twisted something. Another barrage of bullets passed over me. “Anton, are you OK?” I shouted between bursts of fire.

“No,” he said, in a much weaker voice.

****

I’ve heard journalists say that Libya was the perfect war. A reporter could get to the front line, close enough to hear the shells coming in, and back to a comfortable hotel in Benghazi, with a solid Internet connection, by evening.

But in reality, this war was anything but perfect — something I’d soon come to learn. It was a war led by confusion, abductions and an oppressive sense of the unknown. This latest spasm of the Arab Spring had none of the idealism of Tunis or Cairo. For me, it began with a rifle butt to he head, which bled into weeks of uncertainty, crushing captivity and ended, however improbably, in a four-star hotel in the besieged Libyan capital.

Along the way, between blindfolds and quiet conversations with fellow captives deep inside the country’s brutal prison system, I witnessed the last gasps of the Gadhafi regime — a corrupt and corrupted system that for more than 40 years ruled this tribal, oil-rich land.

I had done several tours as an embedded reporter with U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. So, for me, the frontlines felt natural. And I believed it was my job. But the freedom with which you could maneuver was deceptive. There was no highly-trained U.S. platoon to escort you. And the rebels were said to be some of the worst trained soldiers in the world. Most had never held a gun before the end of February, when they stormed Benghazi’s “katiba” and took them by force.

I tried to hold farther back after a few close calls — a near miss by a Girad rocket, for instance, or a tank shell ripping over the heads of Manu and I outside Ajadibya. Our ears popped. But the front kept calling.

As is common among freelancers, Clare Gillis, a 34-year-old from Connecticut, Manu Brabo, a 29-year-old from Gijon, Spain, and myself had been sharing rides and interviews together for several weeks. Anton Hammerl, a South African photographer who covered much of Africa — from the townships during Apartheid to child soldiers in the Congo — came late to our little group.

With all the rebel offensives and retreats along the coastal highway, we felt we had to get to the front every few days or risk completely losing track of the story. So on April 5, we headed out.

Our plan was to try to get a sense of who was really controlling Brega, a strategic oil town that had been the scene of some of the most deadly fighting since the uprising began several months earlier. A rebel general told us that if the rebels took Brega, they would hold it without advancing right away, thus learning from earlier mistakes where they stretched themselves too thin and were forced into whole scale retreats.

But Brega was dangerous. Manu and I had been caught in heavy shelling outside the town days before. I had seen two shells bounce off the ground a hundred meters away. A rebel was killed by shrapnel to the head in the truck Manu and I had leaped into for escape. We went with them to the hospital, hugged the bawling comrades afterwards and shot some eerie photos of them washing blood off their grenades.

Still, Brega was where the front was, so we woke up early to beat the crush of reporters. The four of us went in a Mercedes van piloted by a teen. We stopped at the only manned checkpoint some 20 kilometers outside town, where a crowd of the usual disheveled men, many of them teens, milled about waiting for the real fighters to assemble. We got out into the early sunshine and told our driver he could leave us there. It was just after 10 a.m.

We waited. Usually, with shouts of “Allah Akbar,” a convoy would push ahead, and we’d jump into one of the rebel vehicles heading to the front.

The red minibus started moving and we hustled on. It drove ahead with us as its only passengers, the young driver and his friend in front looked nervously from side to side. We stopped after a kilometer to inspect two smoldering pickup trucks, blackened crisps in the road. It appeared to have been a rebel ambush.

“Hit by a Sam 7,” Anton said pointing out the expended launcher and wire guidance system leading to the cindered vehicles. I took note of his wealth of knowledge. He’d been forced to join the South African infantry as a young man and hadn’t relished it.

****

The firing continued all around us. The men had gotten out of their vehicles and were now approaching. “Anton!” I shouted again. He was silent. The terrifying reality grabbed hold of me. The soldiers firing probably didn’t know that we were reporters. Rebels didn’t dress in regular uniforms and many were often not even armed. I had to surrender or we’d all be gunned down.

I leaped up from where my head had been buried in the sand to face the group of wild men shooting uncontrollably — it seemed our only hope. I held up my hands and yelled, “Sahafa! Sahafa!” It was one of the few Arabic words I knew. It means “journalist.” I walked slowly toward them.

There were three or four skinny, Arab-looking soldiers carrying AK-47s and a larger, darker one to the right. My eyes drifted toward Anton as I stumbled past the dune ahead of me. He was lying face down in the sand, his body askew, cameras still strapped around his shoulders, his legs splayed out.

As soon as I reached the soldiers, the dark one slammed me across the chin with the butt end of his AK-47. I dropped my camera. He smashed his rifle down on my head. My helmet and Oakley sunglasses were thrown off and he punched me in the eye. Another one crushed my head several more times with an AK-47. All my instincts for self-preservation gathered within me. I went completely limp and complacent. The adrenaline was coursing so heavily through my body. I felt no pain.

I was thrown into the back of one of the pickup trucks. An Army boot pushed my face onto the floor. I glanced back and saw Manu and Clare being pulled off the ground.

A crazed looking soldier looked down and jeered at me in English, “You go on patrol! You go on patrol!” as if he knew exactly what we’d been trying to do. A cell phone was pushed close to my face. A picture was snapped. “Gadhafi Meia Meia,” a younger one said, thumping his chest, “Gadhafi 100 percent.” These words terrified me. After weeks of being with rebels who said things like, “Fuck Gadhafi,” with regular consistency, we had now found ourselves with the other side, the ones who had pledged their dying allegiance to the country’s dictatorial leader of more than four decades.

Clare and Manu were also forced down into the bed of the truck. Manu was face down and Clare, pushed against his side, was facing me. I looked at her for the first time. She had a purpled eye. She saw blood running from my scalp.

“Jim, are you OK?” she said, pleadingly. I nodded, and took stock of the blood pooling in the back of the truck. With a boot again on my face, my hands were bound behind me with a plastic cord. We sped away from the scene.

You can read Part 2 of James Foley’s story here.

Four days later, however, GlobalPost returned to the area and encountered a very different scene.

The Syrian army had returned.

Turning off the Damascus highway east of the city, we were stopped by several soldiers manning a checkpoint of sorts. Our driver said we were foreign journalists. He looked in and waved us on. The same incident happened twice more. The soldiers had a yellow plastic ribbon tied to their jackets that clearly indicated they were on the side of the regime.

There was little sign of life other than a line of people waiting for bread outside a bakery. Parked next to them were an ambulance, a military jeep and an armored vehicle. Two men stared with open mouths as a truck laden with gas canisters entered the area, surprised they would now finally have gas with which to cook.

We continued on in search of Municipal square, where the anti-regime protesters had gathered with such hope only days before.

When we arrived, we found a scene of devastation. Whole sides of homes had caved in, exposing the everyday household items inside. An electricity pole was smashed in half close to the ground, splinters standing vertical high into the air. Only a tank shell could have caused such damage. Local men held up large shell casings for us to see.

“They arrived Saturday and blew us away. There were Hezbollah soldiers with them,” said one man, when asked about the nationality of the soldiers. He said he knew this because he recognized their accents.

We were taken to a mosque just off the square. A gaping hole had been blasted in the side of the mosque’s minaret. I asked if the rebels had been inside.

“There was no one there — if they [the rebels] were inside they would have been at the top,” said one man. The hole was about halfway down the minaret.

A man carrying a bag of fruit whistled to get my attention and gestured for me to follow him. I hesitated, more concerned with the crowds of men gathering around us. I warned them to disperse. Military vehicles were close by. Machine-gun fire crackled in the distance. It was cold. Several angry men asked if we were from Russia, one of a dwindling number of countries that still supports the Assad government.

The streets were almost empty. A carpet of glass, rubble and metal covered the wet concrete. Fear gripped me — the area was clearly under government control once more, and there may have been snipers looking out for any remnants of the rebels.

We walked briskly, one by one, down a side street and through narrow passages dividing houses. We came to a clearing and the man with us called to another now close by.

“Do you have the keys?” he asked the second man. He then opened a large metal door that appeared to me to be the entrance to a hospital. It was, in fact, a school, long closed down. In the corner were a half dozen pine trees. Under them was an uneven lump on the ground, covered in plastic. Another man joined us and began to peel back the plastic sheeting.

It was difficult to look at the disfigured, swollen faces. One body had its eyes missing. Another was blackened.

“They killed him as he was lighting a fire in his house. Then they threw him into it,” said one of our guides.

“There are six men here, they were all killed in the last few days,” said another.

“We are hiding them here so that we can bury them ourselves. If we go to a hospital [the security] will take them and we won’t even get a burial. They already took one body,” he added, anger deep in his voice.

There was no real smell — it was too cold. Their hands were bound, as is tradition with the dead here in order to avoid the effect of rigger mortis. Photos were taken and questions asked. There were several other sites where locals were holding their dead relatives in a state of limbo, they said.

“People are burying their dead under their houses — there is nowhere else to take them,” said one man. After about 10 minutes we left the communal grave. If the army or security found us we were likely to be shot too. We were now witnesses to the regime’s death squads.

We headed back in the direction of the square and our waiting car. On the way we walked over glass and mangled metal, shops without window fronts, televisions exposed to the rain. There were no people in these destroyed homes.

We jumped back into the car where our driver was waiting for us.

“Who will pay for all of this?” asked a young man passing by in his car, pointing at the destroyed buildings around us. “We will pay. I hate the Free Army — they brought death and destruction to our homes.”

“When the army comes and they see people on the streets with guns and shooting of course they will try to kill them. They think this is their job,” he added.

Through the square, a government convoy rolled by, made up of multi-purpose vehicles painted blue to give the impression they were police, as opposed to military. In a 32-seater bus sat dozens of soldiers, guns sitting on their laps. The young man crouched next to the car out of their view.

On the way out of the town, I spotted the green of the free Syria flag painted on a wall. We stopped at each checkpoint, and at one a soldier opened the glove compartment of the car. But he let us go. The soldier guarding the next checkpoint was Alawite, said our driver, able to tell from his accent. Alawite is a minority Shiite sect in Syria to which the ruling elites belong.

“Come over here and see what the fighters did here,” the Alawite soldier urged us. We declined, keen to get out of this fresh and bloody war zone. The bizarreness of returning to the center of Damascus, where life continued in apparent normalcy, was astounding.

The men I met in Saqba were not freedom fighters, and they were not political. But the death and violence brought on by Syria’s now civil conflict have tied them up in a struggle between life and death. For them to even be seen talking to journalists would in all likelihood lead them to a tortuous end. The other districts east of the capital, which were celebrated as new centers free from Assad last week, have also now fallen.

With the withdrawal of the Arab League monitors and most foreign journalists, Syrians are again on their own. Tanks and checkpoints have returned to several other towns around the capital. Locals fear the army is gearing up for more assaults, something it can now do uninterrupted and out of sight.