''The young people are still leading this''

By John Ballard

This morning, almost a week into events in Cairo, a group of young people tagging themselves the April 6 Movement, seems to be having a more than symbolic under the radar impact on what's unfolding in Egypt.

Young seize initiative after decades of ineffective opposition by David Kirkpatrick and Mona el-Naggar

Last Thursday, a small group of internet-savvy young political organisers gathered in the Cairo home of an associate of Mohamed ElBaradei, the diplomat and Nobel laureate.

They had come to plot a day of protests calling for the removal of Hosni Mubarak, but within days their informal clique would become the effective leaders of a decades-old opposition movement dominated by figures more than twice their age.

''Most of us are under 30,'' said Amr Ezz, 27, a lawyer who was one of the group as part of the April 6 Youth Movement, which had organised a day of protests last week through Facebook. More than 90,000 people signed up online to participate, emboldening others and bringing tens of thousands of people onto the streets.

Surprised by the turnout, older opposition leaders from across the spectrum - including the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood; the liberal protest group the Egyptian Movement for Change; and the umbrella group organised by Dr ElBaradei - joined in, vowing to turn out their supporters for another day of protest on Friday. But the same handful of young online organisers were still calling the shots.

They decided to follow a blueprint similar to their previous protest, urging demonstrators to converge on the central Tahrir Square. So they drew up a list of selected mosques around Cairo where they asked people to gather at Friday prayers before marching together towards the square. Then they distributed the list through email and text messages, which spread virally.

More than 100,000 people poured out into the streets, pushing back against battalions of police, until the police all but abandoned the city.

''The young people are still leading this,'' said Ibrahim Issa, a prominent opposition intellectual who attended some of the meetings.

The group's goal now, Mr Ezz said, was to guide the protesters' demands, chief among them the resignation of Mr Mubarak and the formation of an interim government.