Who is the hero Ahmed Abdel Aziz?

CAIRO - 18 June 2019: In continuation of Egypt Today’s series of famous streets in Egypt, in the following lines Egypt Today shed light on another hero in the Egyptian history. He is the hero Ahmed Abdel Aziz (El-Batal Ahmed Abdel Aziz in Arabic).

A very famous street in Cairo’s upscale Mohandeseen district is named after him. Abdel Aziz was born on July 29, 1907, in the city of Khartoum in neighboring Sudan, where his father the Amirlai Mohammad Abdul Aziz was commander of the eighth battalion in a military mission in Sudan, in which he returned back to Egypt after his task was completed.


Part of the famous street in El-Mohandeseen

Since a very young age, his patriotism and love for his country was very clear. At the age of twelve, he joined in the revolution of 1919 while he was still a student at the secondary school.

Another part of the famous street
In 1923, the hero was imprisoned for murdering an English officer, then released and deported to Mansoura. Abdel Aziz then joined the military school and was a distinguished officer of the cavalry unit. He also joined the Air Force, and was one of the brightest Egyptian pilots.

When the decision to partition Palestine was issued in 1947, the hero (Ahmed Abdel Aziz) was the first Egyptian officer to request his own assignment, creating his own team of volunteers to save Palestine from the hands of the Jews.

A different angle of the significant street in El-Mohandeseen
Despite the small size of his forces and the lower level of armament and training compared to the Jews, the hero broke into the land of Palestine, where a vicious battle between his forces and the jews took place, starting from Arish and moving to the battle of Khan Younis.

Ahmed Abdel Aziz in Palestine during his heroic acts
Also despite the procrastination of officials in Cairo in sending weapons to the volunteers, the forces of the Egyptian guerrillas led by the hero has achieved amazing victories over the Jews, where they destroyed their communication lines and many of their supplies, contributing to the preservation of large areas of Palestinian lands, and entering the holy city of Jerusalem raising both the Palestinian flag and the Egyptian flag side by side, re-mapping the battle sites in light of the Jewish presence, which effectively facilitated the task of the Arab forces that later fought in the 1948 war.

Abdel Aziz was strongly opposing the idea of the Egyptian army entering the war, on the grounds that fighting the Jews should be carried out by the martyrs group and volunteer battalions. The hero thought that way because the entry of Arab national armies gives the Jews a great opportunity to declare themselves as a nation with a strong force that obliges the Arab armies to confront and address them as an approved nation.

However, his opposition did not prevent him from fighting alongside the national Arab armies. On May 16, 1948, he presented himself to the headquarters of the Egyptian Command and gave the Commander-in-Chief all his information about the enemy.

Ahmed Abdel Aziz - Press Photo
He is said to have been accidentally shot by an Egyptian bullet (friendly fire). When he was on his way with Yuzbashi Salah Salem (a member of the Revolutionary Command Council in Egypt later) to the Egyptian leadership in Majdal on the night of August 22, 1948, and arriving near the positions of the Egyptian army in Fallujah, one of the guards (named Corporal Bakr al-Saidi) fired at the jeep that Ahmed Abdul Aziz was traveling in as he became wary and suspicious by it.

Unfortunately, the bullet hit the chest of the heroic leader, who then died and his soul rose to its creator. His body was reportedly moved to Bethlehem where he was buried in the Raheel cemetery north of the city, where a monument was erected, in acknowledgment of the heroic acts he presented on the land of Palestine, the land that witnessed his patriotism and honorable struggle in his deadly defense of a fellow Arab and Muslim land.

There are various accounts of his current burial place, where many claim the Egyptian government transferred his corpse with his fellow martyrs to Egypt later.