#libyan uprising

[guardian]

[newstfionline]

Why Libyans Have Fallen Out of Love with Qatar

By Steven Scotloff, TIME, January 02, 2011 When Libya's cashed-strapped rebels needed financial support to bankroll their revolution last spring, they did not look to Western powers such as the U.S. and England for aid. Instead they turned to tiny Qatar. The Persian Gulf emirate provided the struggling rebels everything from weapons to heating oil. During the eight-month revolution, Libyans in rebel-held areas praised Qatar. But after the capital of Tripoli fell and the country's leader, Muammar Gaddafi, was killed, Libyans turned on their benefactor, accusing Qatar of a hidden agenda: getting a small faction of Islamists to implement its agenda.

Qatar's role was crucial during the early days of the revolution. It spearheaded the Arab League's effort to urge the U.N. to establish a no-fly zone in Libya. The resolution paved the way for the NATO air campaign that turned the tide of the war and sealed Gaddafi's fate.

Qatar provided the rebels with weapons and supplies they needed to fight the Libyan leader's troops. Early on, the Qataris delivered logistical provisions, ranging from walkie-talkies to Chevrolet SUVs. As it became clear that the rebels were underequipped and no match for Gaddafi's better-outfitted troops, the Qataris sent heavy weaponry like French Milan antitank missiles. The Qataris also trained the rebels, taking hundreds to Doha while sending their officers to Libya to provide battlefield expertise. Today, they are preparing to fund a program to send Libyan troops to train in France.

Qatar did much more than finance weapons purchases and provide battlefield training. With no access to money and facing legal difficulties in selling oil, the rebels' political body--known as the National Transitional Council (NTC)--could not pay Libyan salaries and fund the wide-ranging subsidies on everything from bread to gas, which grease the economy. Qatar stepped in by offering to market 1 million barrels of oil for the NTC, which brought in about $100 million. Later, the small but immensely rich country delivered four consignments of refined petroleum products, such as diesel and gasoline. When international oil firms refused to offload oil shipments in Benghazi's port until the NTC paid for them, Qatar intervened and pledged to do so if the Libyan council could not.

Qatar also helped launch a Libyan satellite channel, Libya al-Ahrar, by providing it office space in Doha and transmitting its signal. The network was established in March to chip away at Gaddafi's support in areas still under his control. After the Arab League instructed Arab satellite providers to stop transmitting Gaddafi's state-run Libyan television on their frequencies in May, many of the country's residents relied on Libya al-Ahrar and its prorebel slant for their news. In explaining that his country's aid was purely altruistic, the Qatari emir said he wanted "to ease the suffering of the Libyan brethren and to meet their humanitarian needs."

But with Gaddafi dead and his regime a distant memory, many Libyans are now complaining that Qatari aid has come at a price. They say Qatar provided a narrow clique of Islamists with arms and money, giving them great leverage over the political process. "I think what they have done is basically support the Muslim Brotherhood," says former NTC Deputy Prime Minister Ali Tarhouni, referring to the Islamist organization that has won elections in Egypt and Tunisia. "They have brought armaments and they have given them to people that we don't know." Some Qatari officials have indeed exerted influence in Libyan politics. During deliberations to choose a new Cabinet in September, a senior Qatari official was seen huddled with the outgoing Defense Minister, allegedly trying to guide appointments to sensitive security positions.

NTC members complain that actions like these are undermining the fragile transition to democracy the NTC has promised. "Qatar is weakening Libya," says an NTC member who requested anonymity because he was speaking about a sensitive topic. "In funding the Islamists, they are upsetting the balance of politics and making it difficult for us to move forward. They need to stop their meddling." Senior military officials sidelined by Qatar's cronies are just as blunt. "If aid comes through the front door, we like Qatar," says General Khalifa Hiftar. "But if it comes through the window to certain people [and] bypassing official channels, we don't want Qatar."

But senior NTC officials scoff at the suggestion that Qatar is unduly influencing Libyan politicians and weakening the new government. "People say Qatar has an agenda. There is no proof of this," says NTC Vice Chairman Abd al-Hafiz Ghoga. "They just had a big role in the revolution."

Average Libyans, however, do not buy Ghoga's argument. Outside the courthouse in Benghazi, where the revolution began on Feb. 15, street peddlers hawk everything from key chains to bracelets emblazoned with the rebels' tricolor flag. For most of the revolution, they did a brisk trade in Qatari flags. But with the town abuzz about Qatar's meddling in Libyan affairs, vendors like Abdallah Mahmud have stopped selling Qatari products. "We fought to be free," he explained, "not so that new rulers from abroad will take away our freedom." It was a refrain seldom heard during the revolution. But with Libyan politicians taking an increasingly vocal stance against Qatar, the tiny Gulf emirate whose friendship Libya was proud of has become an obtrusive guest that many wish would leave.

[newstfionline]

In Strikes on Libya by NATO, an Unspoken Civilian Toll

By C. J. Chivers and Eric Schmitt, NY Times, December 17, 2011 TRIPOLI, Libya--NATO's seven-month air campaign in Libya, hailed by the alliance and many Libyans for blunting a lethal crackdown by Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi and helping to push him from power, came with an unrecognized toll: scores of civilian casualties the alliance has long refused to acknowledge or investigate.

By NATO's telling during the war, and in statements since sorties ended on Oct. 31, the alliance-led operation was nearly flawless--a model air war that used high technology, meticulous planning and restraint to protect civilians from Colonel Qaddafi's troops, which was the alliance's mandate.

"We have carried out this operation very carefully, without confirmed civilian casualties," the secretary general of NATO, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, said in November.

But an on-the-ground examination by The New York Times of airstrike sites across Libya--including interviews with survivors, doctors and witnesses, and the collection of munitions remnants, medical reports, death certificates and photographs--found credible accounts of dozens of civilians killed by NATO in many distinct attacks. The victims, including at least 29 women or children, often had been asleep in homes when the ordnance hit.

In all, at least 40 civilians, and perhaps more than 70, were killed by NATO at these sites, available evidence suggests. While that total is not high compared with other conflicts in which Western powers have relied heavily on air power, and less than the accounts circulated by the Qaddafi government, it is also not a complete accounting. Survivors and doctors working for the anti-Qaddafi interim authorities point to dozens more civilians wounded in these and other strikes, and they referred reporters to other sites where civilian casualties were suspected.

Two weeks after being provided a 27-page memorandum from The Times containing extensive details of nine separate attacks in which evidence indicated that allied planes had killed or wounded unintended victims, NATO modified its stance.

"From what you have gathered on the ground, it appears that innocent civilians may have been killed or injured, despite all the care and precision," said Oana Lungescu, a spokeswoman for NATO headquarters in Brussels. "We deeply regret any loss of life."

She added that NATO was in regular contact with the new Libyan government and that "we stand ready to work with the Libyan authorities to do what they feel is right."

NATO, however, deferred the responsibility of initiating any inquiry to Libya's interim authorities, whose survival and climb to power were made possible largely by the airstrike campaign. So far, Libyan leaders have expressed no interest in examining NATO's mistakes.

The failure to thoroughly assess the civilian toll reduces the chances that allied forces, which are relying ever more heavily on air power rather than risking ground troops in overseas conflicts, will examine their Libyan experience to minimize collateral deaths elsewhere. Allied commanders have been ordered to submit a lessons-learned report to NATO headquarters in February. NATO's incuriosity about the many lethal accidents raises questions about how thorough that review will be.

NATO's experience in Libya also reveals an attitude that initially prevailed in Afghanistan. There, NATO forces, led by the United States, tightened the rules of engagement for airstrikes and insisted on better targeting to reduce civilian deaths only after repeatedly ignoring or disputing accounts of airstrikes that left many civilians dead.

In Libya, NATO's inattention to its unintended victims has also left many wounded civilians with little aid in the aftermath of the country's still-chaotic change in leadership.

These victims include a boy blasted by debris in his face and right eye, a woman whose left leg was amputated, another whose foot and leg wounds left her disabled, a North Korean doctor whose left foot was crushed and his wife, who suffered a fractured skull.

The Times's investigation included visits to more than 25 sites, including in Tripoli, Surman, Mizdah, Zlitan, Ga'a, Majer, Ajdabiya, Misurata, Surt, Brega and Sabratha and near Benghazi. More than 150 targets--bunkers, buildings or vehicles--were hit at these places.

NATO warplanes flew thousands of sorties that dropped 7,700 bombs or missiles; because The Times did not examine sites in several cities and towns where the air campaign was active, the casualty estimate could be low.

There are indications that the alliance took many steps to avoid harming civilians, and often did not damage civilian infrastructure useful to Colonel Qaddafi's military. Elements of two American-led air campaigns in Iraq, in 1991 and 2003, appear to have been avoided, including attacks on electrical grids.

Such steps spared civilians certain hardships and risks that accompanied previous Western air-to-ground operations. NATO also said that allied forces did not use cluster munitions or ordnance containing depleted uranium, both of which pose health and environmental risks, in Libya at any time.

The investigation also found significant damage to civilian infrastructure from certain attacks for which a rationale was not evident or risks to civilians were clear. These included strikes on warehouses that current anti-Qaddafi guards said contained only food, or near businesses or homes that were destroyed, including an attack on a munitions bunker beside a neighborhood that caused a large secondary explosion, scattering warheads and toxic rocket fuel.

Moreover, the scouring of one strike site found remnants of NATO munitions in a ruined building that an alliance spokesman explicitly said NATO did not attack.

That mistake--a pair of strikes--killed 12 anti-Qaddafi fighters and nearly killed a civilian ambulance crew aiding wounded men. It underscored NATO's sometimes tenuous grasp of battle lines and raised questions about the forthrightness and accuracy of the alliance's public-relations campaign.

The second strike pointed to a tactic that survivors at several sites recounted: warplanes restriking targets minutes after a first attack, a practice that imperiled, and sometimes killed, civilians rushing to the wounded.

Pressed about the dangers posed to noncombatants by such attacks, NATO said it would reconsider the tactic's rationale in its internal campaign review. "That's a valid point to take into consideration in future operations," Colonel Julian said.

That statement is a shift in the alliance's stance. NATO's response to allegations of mistaken attacks had long been carefully worded denials and insistence that its operations were devised and supervised with exceptional care. Faced with credible allegations that it killed civilians, the alliance said it had neither the capacity for nor intention of investigating and often repeated that disputed strikes were sound.

The alliance maintained this position even after two independent Western organizations--Human Rights Watch and the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, or Civic--met privately with NATO officials and shared field research about mistakes, including, in some cases, victims' names and the dates and locations where they died.

Organizations researching civilian deaths in Libya said that the alliance's resistance to making itself accountable and acknowledging mistakes amounted to poor public policy. "It's crystal clear that civilians died in NATO strikes," said Fred Abrahams, a researcher for Human Rights Watch. "But this whole campaign is shrouded by an atmosphere of impunity" and by NATO's and the Libyan authorities' mutually congratulatory statements.

Mr. Abrahams added that the matter went beyond the need to assist civilians harmed by airstrikes, though he said that was important. At issue, he said, was "who is going to lose their lives in the next campaign because these errors and mistakes went unexamined, and no one learned from them?"

Human Rights Watch and Civic also noted that the alliance's stance on civilian casualties it caused in Libya was at odds with its practices for so-called collateral damage in Afghanistan. There, public anger and political tension over fatal mistakes led NATO to adopt policies for investigating actions that caused civilian harm, including guidelines for expressing condolences and making small payments to victims or their families.

"You would think, and I did think, that all of the lessons learned from Afghanistan would have been transferred to Libya," said Sarah Holewinski, the executive director of Civic, which helped NATO devise its practices for Afghanistan. "But many of them didn't."

NATO's planning or restraint did not protect the family of Ali Mukhar al-Gharari when his home was shattered in June by a phenomenon as old as air-to-ground war: errant ordnance.

A retiree in Tripoli, Mr. Gharari owned a three-story house he shared with his adult children and their families. Late on June 19 a bomb struck it squarely, collapsing the front side. The rubble buried a courtyard apartment, the family said, where Karima, Mr. Gharari's adult daughter, lived with her husband and two children, Jomana, 2, and Khaled, 7 months.

All four were killed, as was another of Mr. Gharari's adult children, Faruj, who was blasted from his second-floor bed to the rubble below, two of his brothers said. Eight other family members were wounded, one seriously.

The Qaddafi government, given to exaggeration, claimed that nine civilians died in the airstrike, including a rescue worker electrocuted while clearing rubble. These deaths have not been independently corroborated. There has been no dispute about the Gharari deaths.

Initially, NATO almost acknowledged its mistake. "A military missile site was the intended target," an alliance statement said soon after. "There may have been a weapons system failure which may have caused a number of civilian casualties."

Then it backtracked. Kristele Younes, director of field operations for Civic, the victims' group, examined the site and delivered her findings to NATO. She met a cold response. "They said, 'We have no confirmed reports of civilian casualties,' " Ms. Younes said.

The reason, she said, was that the alliance had created its own definition for "confirmed": only a death that NATO itself investigated and corroborated could be called confirmed. But because the alliance declined to investigate allegations, its casualty tally by definition could not budge--from zero.

"The position was absurd," Ms. Younes said. "But they made it very clear: there was no appetite within NATO to look at these incidents."

The position left the Gharari family disoriented, and in social jeopardy. Another of Mr. Gharari's sons, Mohammed, said the family supported the revolution. But since NATO's attack, other Libyans have labeled the family pro-Qaddafi. If NATO attacked the Ghararis' home, the street logic went, the alliance must have had a reason.

Mohammed al-Gharari said he would accept an apology from NATO. He said he could even accept the mistake. "If this was an error from their control room, I will not say anything harsh, because that was our destiny," he said.

But he asked that NATO lift the dishonor from the family and set the record straight. "NATO should tell the truth," he said. "They should tell what happened, so everyone knows our family is innocent."

On Aug. 8, NATO hit buildings occupied by civilians again, this time in Majer, according to survivors, doctors and independent investigators. The strikes were NATO's bloodiest known accidents in the war.

The attack began with a series of 500-pound laser-guided bombs, called GBU-12s, ordnance remnants suggest. The first house, owned by Ali Hamid Gafez, 61, was crowded with Mr. Gafez's relatives, who had been dislocated by the war, he and his neighbors said.

The bomb destroyed the second floor and much of the first. Five women and seven children were killed; several more people were wounded, including Mr. Gafez's wife, whose her lower left leg had to be amputated, the doctor who performed the procedure said.

Minutes later, NATO aircraft attacked two buildings in a second compound, owned by brothers in the Jarud family. Four people were killed, the family said.

Several minutes after the first strikes, as neighbors rushed to dig for victims, another bomb struck. The blast killed 18 civilians, both families said.

The death toll has been a source of confusion. The Qaddafi government said 85 civilians died. That claim does not seem to be credible. With the Qaddafi propaganda machine now gone, an official list of dead, issued by the new government, includes 35 victims, among them the late-term fetus of a fatally wounded woman the Gafez family said went into labor as she died.

The Zlitan hospital confirmed 34 deaths. Five doctors there also told of treating dozens of wounded people, including many women and children.

All 16 beds in the intensive-care unit were filled with severely wounded civilians, doctors said. Dr. Ahmad Thoboot, the hospital's co-director, said none of the victims, alive or dead, were in uniform. "There is no doubt," he said. "This is not fabricated. Civilians were killed."

Descriptions of the wounds underscored the difference between mistakes with typical ground-to-ground arms and the unforgiving nature of mistakes with 500-pound bombs, which create blast waves of an entirely different order.

Dr. Mustafa Ekhial, a surgeon, said the wounds caused by NATO's bombs were far worse than those the staff had treated for months. "We have to tell the truth," he said. "What we saw that night was completely different."

In previous statements, NATO said it watched the homes carefully before attacking and saw "military staging areas." It also said that it reviewed the strikes and that claims of civilian casualties were not corroborated by "available factual information." When asked what this information was, the alliance did not provide it.

Mr. Gafez issued a challenge. An independent review of all prestrike surveillance video, he said, would prove NATO wrong. Only civilians were there, he said, and he demanded that the alliance release the video.

Ms. Younes said the dispute missed an essential point. Under NATO's targeting guidelines and in keeping with practices the alliance has repeatedly insisted that it followed, she said, if civilians were present, aircraft should not have attacked.

The initial findings on the Majer strikes, part of the United Nations' investigation into actions by all sides in Libya that harmed civilians, have raised questions about the legality of the attack under international humanitarian law, according to an official familiar with the investigation.

[cisrjmu]

By LEE FERRAN | Dec. 12, 2011 

American and Libyan explosive disposal teams have rounded up more than 5,000 powerful shoulder-fired missiles that went missing in the chaos of the Libyan uprising and "thousands more" have already been destroyed in previous NATO bombing runs, a top U.S. official said over the weekend.

Andrew Shapiro, assistant secretary of state for political and military affairs, made the assertion Sunday during a one-day visit to Libya during which he witnessed the safe detonation of dozens of the weapons.

The U.S. State Department planned to put 50 weapon specialist teams on the ground in Libya and to invest at least $10 million in its race to secure as many of the shoulder-fired missiles, called MANPADS, as possible can before they can fall into the hands of terrorist groups. Though Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi had an estimated 20,000 missiles before the uprising began, a State Department official told ABC News today the teams on the ground are "still working to assess" how many stray missiles could still be out there.

Read more...

[newstfionline]

This was always a civil war, and the victors are not merciful

Patrick Cockburn, The Independent, 24 November 2011 The detention of 7,000 people in prisons and camps by the anti-Gaddafi forces is not surprising. The conflict in Libya was always much more of a civil war between Libyans than foreign governments pretended or the foreign media reported.

The winning anti-Gaddafi militia are not proving merciful. Often they have had relatives killed in the fighting or imprisoned by the old regime who they want to avenge. Sometimes they come from tribes and towns traditionally hostile to neighbouring tribes and towns. Gaddafi supporters are being hunted down. According to one person in Gaddafi's home town of Sirte, they are facing a "continuing reign of terror".

"There is a deep and spreading frenzy, particularly among some of the youth militia and the Islamists, to hunt down anyone associated with the former regime," the source said.

The National Transitional Council, whose control is largely theoretical, is not in a position to stop this purge because many of its members are themselves frightened of being accused of links with the old regime.

Some groups are particularly vulnerable. The then-rebels were convinced earlier this year that many of those they were fighting were mercenaries recruited in Central or West Africa. But when these alleged "mercenaries" were arrested in Tripoli, many turned out to be black migrant labourers without identity papers.

According to Amnesty International, some of those who were put on television by the rebels as mercenaries were later quietly freed because they were migrant workers. Others faced mob justice before they were able to prove their identities.

The international media was overwhelmingly hostile to Gaddafi's regime and tended to highlight atrocities committed by it and disregard or underplay human rights violations carried out by his opponents. An example of this occurred when eight or nine bodies of Libyan soldiers were found who appeared to have been executed. The rebels claimed they had been shot by Gaddafi's men because they tried to change sides. But Amnesty located a film of the soldiers being captured alive by the rebels and it was presumably the rebels who killed them.

The purge of Gaddafi supporters is made more dangerous by the infighting between the militias, and between them and the politicians. Association with the old regime can be used to discredit an opponent. There may also be self-interest since death squads are reported to be taking their property.

[newstfionline]

Qaddafi Is Killed as Libyan Forces Take Surt

By Kareem Fahim and Rick Gladstone, NY Times, Oct. 20, 2011 TRIPOLI, Libya--Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the former Libyan strongman who fled into hiding after an armed uprising toppled his regime two months ago, met a violent death Thursday in the hands of rebel fighters who stormed his final stronghold in his Mediterranean hometown Surt.

Al Jazeera television showed gruesome footage of what appeared to be Colonel Qaddafi, alive but bloody, being dragged around by armed men in Surt. The television also broadcast a separate clip of his half-naked body, with lifeless open eyes and an apparent gunshot wound to the side of the head, as jubilant fighters fired automatic weapons in the air.

Conflicting accounts quickly emerged about whether Colonel Qaddafi was executed by his captors, died from gunshot wounds sustained in a firefight, was mortally wounded in a NATO bomb blast or bled to death in an ambulance. But the images broadcast by Al Jazeera punctuated an emphatic and violent ending to his four decades in charge of Libya.

"We have been waiting for this moment for a long time. Muammar Qaddafi has been killed," Mahmoud Jibril, the prime minister of the Transitional National Council, the interim government, told a news conference in Tripoli. Mahmoud Shammam, the council's chief spokesman, called it "the day of real liberation. We were serious about giving him a fair trial. It seems God has some other wish."

Libyan television also reported that one of Colonel Qaddafi's feared fugitive sons, Muatassim, was killed in Surt, showing what it said was his lifeless bloodied body on a hospital gurney. There were also unconfirmed accounts that another feared son, Seif al-Islam, had been captured and possibly wounded.

In Washington, President Obama said in a televised statement that the death of Colonel Qaddafi signaled the start of a new chapter for Libya. "We can definitely say that the Qaddafi regime has come to an end," he said. "The dark shadow of tyranny has been lifted and with this enormous promise the Libyan people now have a great responsibility to build an inclusive and tolerant and democratic Libya that stands as the ultimate rebuke to Qaddafi's dictatorship."

Colonel Qaddafi had defied repeated attempts to corner and capture him, taunting his enemies with audio broadcasts denouncing the rebel forces that felled him as stooges of NATO, which has conducted a bombing campaign against his military during the uprising under the auspices of a Security Council mandate to protect Libyan civilians.

Colonel Qaddafi's ability to have remained at large for so long had clearly vexed the Transitional National Council, and even with his death on Thursday it was unclear whether he had been deliberately targeted or simply found by accident. Since the fall of Tripoli, American military and intelligence officials have sought to help the post-Qaddafi leaders find him but had little hard information on his possible whereabouts.

[newstfionline]

Battle for a Holdout City Stalls Healing in Libya

By Kareem Fahim, NY Times, October 18, 2011 SURT, Libya--The commander, defying a shower of bullets, urged his men to train their heavy weapons on a nest of pro-Qaddafi snipers in a school down the street. But then someone said that the loyalists had asked to surrender, and he told his men to hold their fire. It was a hopeful moment. After weeks of violence, the fighters were exhausted, the city was destroyed and hundreds of civilians were trapped in their homes in the area.

But someone fired shots and the moment passed. The commander, Ali Imrakibi, declared that there would be no truce. "They can't be trusted," he said during the fighting on Thursday. "They're all traitors."

The battle for Surt was supposed to be a postscript to the Libyan conflict, a moment before revolutionaries unified the country and started the process of electing a government. Instead, it has stretched into one of the war's most bitter periods, threatening the prospects for reconciliation as new tales of violence and revenge have drifted through the country.

While the long fight is now winding down, it has underscored the problem Libya's weak transitional government faces as it tries to stitch together a country divided by the war into competing regions and factions and racked by the vendettas emerging after Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi's four decades of rule.

High on the agenda of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton for her surprise visit to Libya on Tuesday was a discussion of ways to heal the fissures, to protect civilians from human rights abuses at the hands of unaccountable militias and to help the provisional government establish political control of the country. As the weeks go by, and with Colonel Qaddafi still at large, these tasks are beginning to seem formidable.

As Mrs. Clinton said before meeting with Libya's new leaders, "Now the hard part begins."

The problems seem to multiply by the day. After months of relative calm in the east, former rebel leaders have been caught off guard by the depth of the divisions in western Libya, where the colonel's policy of playing favorites and stoking rivalries has resulted in a series of violent confrontations.

The question of loyalty to the old government has fueled a series of tribal, racial and ethnic disputes, pitting Arab villages against Berber hamlets, militias from the mountains against those from the coast and lighter-skinned Libyans against their black neighbors.

The new authorities have presided over their own divisive policies, failing to curb harassment and violence against black people in the territory they control or to rein in their militiamen, some of whom have looted or burned loyalist homes and mimicked the techniques of the former government by detaining suspects arbitrarily and torturing prisoners.

After Surt finally falls, the chairman of the Transitional National Council, Mustafa Abdel-Jalil, is supposed to declare the country liberated, starting a timetable that will to lead to elections for a national council within eight months and an elected government of an unknown complexion a year after that.

That process is likely to bring its own sticking points, questions about how different parts of the country should be represented in the national council, including cities like Surt that supported the former government.

For the moment, though, civilian rule still feels far away. The fighting has given the country a martial character, marked by men in fatigues, religious battle cries and the suspicions nurtured by war.

Tripoli's impoverished Abu Salim neighborhood was recovering on Saturday from a virtual invasion the day before by anti-Qaddafi militiamen who claimed that they had been fired upon by armed supporters of Colonel Qaddafi holding a demonstration.

Residents of the neighborhood told a different story. They said that on Friday a group of 20 or so unarmed young men had held a pro-Qaddafi rally, and that the anti-Qaddafi fighters had responded with gunfire. There were no signs of armed resistance to the anti-Qaddafi fighters, who had no obvious single commander and who fired heavy weapons repeatedly at the apartment blocks where the demonstration was supposed to have taken place.

"We want change," said Nasser Salah, a longtime resident of the area, as he watched a group of fighters fire their weapons in a courtyard next to his apartment. "We want a good life. But not like this."

The next day, the fighters returned to the residential neighborhood, a new front line, aiming antiaircraft guns at the buildings as their colleagues kicked down doors while searching houses for weapons. There was little sympathy for the idea that Colonel Qaddafi's partisans had any right to demonstrate.

The legacy of mistrust was starkly apparent on the outskirts of Surt last week, where fleeing residents said they had been afraid to leave the city, convinced by the former government that the anti-Qaddafi fighters were waiting to steal from them, or worse.

At the same time, the former rebels treated nearly every man as a potential enemy. Fighters wandered down the halls of Surt's hospital, interrogating patients. At a checkpoint on the edge of town, young fighters questioned residents who were leaving, focusing on a man driving alone in a Volkswagen.

A few of the fighters grabbed him by his collar, examining his neck, where they found burns. "My house is on fire," the man said. They rifled through his belongings, holding up an X-ray and plastic ties that the fighters suspected were used as handcuffs.

"You're not clean," a young anti-Qaddafi fighter told the man.

"I swear to God, I am," the man replied. "My hands aren't stained with blood."

"You don't know God," the fighter said, and told him to be quiet.

On the streets of the shattered city, some rivalries gained new steam. Fighters from Misurata who favor virile phrases to describe their town--like "factory of men"--chided their colleagues from the eastern city of Benghazi for lacking bravery. The Benghazi fighters complained that they were often left to face the pro-Qaddafi soldiers alone.

Disorganized, they accidently fired at one another from behind their own lines. Then many were killed or wounded during a fight that their leaders had repeatedly promised would end quickly.

The battle in Surt turned nearly two weeks ago, after a prolonged stalemate, when the anti-Qaddafi fighters laid siege to an enormous convention center that the pro-Qaddafi troops had used as a base.

The former rebels said they had held off their advance for fear of harming civilians trapped in the fighting. There was no sign of restraint as they shelled the conference center, some nearby apartment blocks and the city beyond.

"Surt is on fire," said Jamal Tunally, a fighter from Misurata who sat with his son, Mustafa, watching tanks pound a group of apartment buildings as they waited for a path into the city on Oct. 7. "A lovely view."

A day later, the elder Mr. Tunally was dead, killed by a mortar shell that landed in a crowd, and his son had moved on to fight in the narrow confines of the center of the city.

The opposing forces could not have been more different. The loyalists, disciplined but hemmed into an ever-shrinking corner of the city, held off hundreds of their opponents with steady sniper fire and precise mortar and rocket strikes.

Men like Mr. Imrakibi, who runs a successful business in Benghazi renting funeral tents, led the former rebels. Bravely, his men, some of whom had not been home in months, followed him into the sniper fire. They attacked with overwhelming firepower but little discipline.

After a week of trying, on Monday, they finally stormed the school.

[newstfionline]

Gaddafi home town largely destroyed

By Mary Beth Sheridan, Washington Post, October 15, 2011 SIRTE, Libya--After weeks of intense fighting, Moammar Gaddafi's home town appeared Saturday to have been largely destroyed, with most of its population fled and holes the size of manhole covers blown in apartment buildings and the ousted leader's showcase convention center.

Revolutionary forces are now battling to defeat the last of the pro-Gaddafi fighters in the strategically important coastal city 278 miles southeast of Tripoli. On Saturday, the thud of tank rounds and the whine of Katyusha rockets filled the air, and black smoke rose above a contested central neighborhood. But the Gaddafi fighters held on, setting up sniper lairs in a densely packed residential district, revolutionary fighters said.

For Libya's interim government, capturing the city is paramount and would effectively end the eight-month civil war. But the damage wreaked in Sirte raises the question of whether its residents will go quietly into the post-Gaddafi future--or retain a smoldering anger that could fuel an insurgency.

Under Gaddafi, Sirte grew from a sleepy fishing village to a city of 100,000, favored with some of the country's finest buildings and public services. Many residents were staunch supporters of the former Libyan leader.

One of them, Sadina Muhammed, said Saturday that she and other residents "will love Gaddafi until death." She fled Sirte a week ago, after a rebel rocket smashed into her house in the embattled city.

"My family's home was completely ruined," she said, standing at a checkpoint outside the city with her 18-year-old daughter, whose arm was in a sling from the blast.

At a field hospital closer to the city, a black-robed resident of Sirte complained that the revolutionaries were also looting. "They take things in the house. If they don't find something, they will destroy the house," she said. The woman, who gave her name only as Asma, left for a nearby village two weeks ago.

The ragtag anti-Gaddafi fighters are undisciplined and untrained, and journalists have spotted a number of them looting. They have battled Gaddafi fighters who have used civilian homes and institutions as cover.

A drive through some of Sirte's "liberated" neighborhoods revealed the pounding the city has taken. In one area, block after block of small mustard-yellow apartments were peppered with small-arms fire. Artillery fire had blasted holes in the walls, and front doors were ripped off their hinges. The burned-out carcasses of a truck and car littered one empty street.

At the nearby Ouagadougou convention center, a complex where Gaddafi once hosted Arab and African leaders, the beige walls were charred black, and windows were shattered.

Gabriele Rossi, the emergency coordinator in Sirte for the aid group Doctors Without Borders, said the city appeared to have sustained some of the greatest damage of the war. "The part we have seen is almost completely destroyed," he said.

Revolutionary forces blame the pro-Gaddafi fighters for some of the damage, saying they have also used heavy weapons and have spurned entreaties to surrender.

But the attacking forces clearly feel no need for restraint in bombarding the Gaddafi loyalists. That's especially true of the many fighters from Misurata, a city to the west scarred by a bloody siege by Gaddafi's troops in the spring.

The revolutionaries have been firing purloined antiaircraft guns and artillery at apartment buildings where pro-Gaddafi snipers have holed up, causing heavy damage.

One fighter, Mohamed Nijar, said he used the antiaircraft gun mounted on his pickup truck to attack snipers because "it works."

The pro-Gaddafi forces now seem to be battling impossible odds. But many of them appear to believe they have no way out, and so are fighting to the death.

Doctors fear thousands of civilians may be trapped in the small areas of the city still being contested.

"We are extremely concerned for those people that are inside [Sirte] and cannot get access to health care," Rossi said.