They are a bedraggled front line, shock troops with scabbed faces and gunshot wounds, many of them boys with runny noses and sandaled feet, standing beyond police barricades with gasoline bombs, swords and stones.
They are legion, angry young men and grade school dropouts without jobs, prospects or political ideologies. They battle Egyptian police through the fog of tear gas, advancing and retreating over charred streets and shattered glass. They are as persistent as horseflies, an endless buzz at the edge of protest.
"We have no other choice but to fight. The political powers don't represent me," said Ahmed Rifai, pulling up his shirt to show off a belly speckled with birdshot wounds. He pointed to a homeless boy at his side. "A child like this shouldn't even be fighting, but he has nothing else."
The forces arrayed against President Mohamed Morsi and his party linked to the Muslim Brotherhood are many: opposition politicians, protest movements, unions and activists. But one of the most volatile threats to the Islamist-led government is embittered youths roaming like ragged armies and harboring little hope two years after the revolution that overthrew Hosni Mubarak.
That passion and despair played out Friday as tens of thousands of Egyptians protested across the country after a week of deadly riots. Rising dissatisfaction with Morsi was evident as firebombs were tossed over the wall of the presidential palace in Cairo and demonstrators in Port Said, where more than 40 people have died, chanted for their coastal city to secede.
Echoing through the protests were voices from a disparate collection of lost boys and anarchists, including jobless waiters and laborers, university students, hard-core soccer fans known as Ultras, looters and thugs. Their ranks also comprise a new group of youths known as the Black Bloc, whose masked members despise the Brotherhood and suddenly appear in streets and alleys to besiege security forces.
The public prosecutor's office has characterized the Black Bloc as an "organized group that participates in terrorist acts ... and [commits] crimes that affect national security."