Gadhafi loyalists beat back assault on strongholds

HADEEL AL-SHALCHI, RYAN LUCAS

Asso­ci­ated Press

SIRTE, Libya (AP) — Moam­mar Gadhafi’s fight­ers beat back an attempt by Libya’s new gov­ern­ment Fri­day to crush rem­nants of the old regime, forc­ing rev­o­lu­tion­ary troops into retreat in the moun­tains and turn­ing Gadhafi’s sea­side home­town into an urban bat­tle­field of snipers fir­ing from mosques and heavy weapons rat­tling main boulevards.

The tough defense of the hold­out towns of Sirte and Bani Walid dis­played the fire­power and resolve of the Gad­hafi fol­low­ers and sug­gested Libya’s new rulers may not eas­ily break the back of regime hold­outs. It also raised fears the coun­try could face a pro­tracted insur­gency of the sort that has played out in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“The Gad­hafi loy­al­ists have so many weapons,” cried Maab Fatel, a 28-year-old rev­o­lu­tion­ary fighter on the front lines in the moun­tain enclave of Bani Walid, 90 miles (140 kilo­me­ters) south­east of Tripoli.

“This bat­tle is really crazy,” Fatel said, his uni­form splat­tered with blood from car­ry­ing a wounded comrade.

Rev­o­lu­tion­ary forces began the day by stream­ing into Bani Walid but pulled back after intense fight­ing failed to dis­lodge pro-Gadhafi snipers and gun­ners from strate­gic posi­tions. The two sides traded relent­less mor­tar and rocket fire across a 500-yard-wide desert val­ley called Wadi Zeitoun that divides the town between north and south.

Mohaned Ben­dalla, a doc­tor at a field hos­pi­tal in nearby Wish­tata, said at least six rebels were killed and more than 50 were wounded.

Inside the town, a radio sta­tion believed linked to one of Gadhafi’s main pro­pa­gan­dist kept up a steady stream of appeals to fight and rants that demo­nized the rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies as trai­tors who did not honor Islamic values.

“These rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies are fight­ing to drink and do drugs all the time and be like the West, dance all night,” the announcer claimed. “We are a tra­di­tional tribal soci­ety that refuses such things and must fight it.”

Ahmed Omar Bani, a mil­i­tary spokesman for Libya’s tran­si­tional gov­ern­ment, dis­missed such alle­ga­tions, say­ing the rev­o­lu­tion­ary forces’ only goal was “to lib­er­ate our people.”

In Sirte, Gadhafi’s birth­place on the Mediter­ranean coast, his back­ers rained gun­fire down from mosque minarets and high-rise build­ings on fight­ers push­ing into the city from the west. In the streets the two sides bat­tered each other with high-caliber machine guns, rock­ets and rocket-propelled grenades.

At one point, a pickup truck filled with rev­o­lu­tion­ary forces rushed back to the rear lines, its bed blood­ied and strewn with the body parts and man­gled face of a fighter who had been man­ning a machine gun. Other fight­ers shout­ing “God is great” pulled out his life­less remains and com­forted his part­ner, the pickup driver.

NATO war­planes swept over­head, but it was unclear whether there were fresh airstrikes to help the anti-Gadhafi advance. The alliance said it struck mul­ti­ple rocket launch­ers, air mis­sile sys­tems, armored vehi­cles and a mil­i­tary stor­age facil­ity in Sirte on Thurs­day when rev­o­lu­tion­ary units launched the offensive.

Gadhafi’s spokesman, Moussa Ibrahim, said loy­al­ist forces inflicted a heavy blow Fri­day on their ene­mies, killing many and tak­ing many oth­ers hostage.

“We have the abil­ity to con­tinue this resis­tance for months,” he said in a phone call to Syrian-based Al-Rai TV, which has become the mouth­piece for the for­mer regime.

Ibrahim said some Gad­hafi sup­port­ers have infil­trated the rev­o­lu­tion­ary forces and were work­ing to sab­o­tage them from the inside.

Despite the lat­est set­back, Bani, the mil­i­tary spokesman, said Libya’s new rulers hoped to lib­er­ate the whole coun­try by the end of this month.

The loy­al­ists still hold a swath of Libya along the cen­tral coast and into the south­ern deserts more than three weeks after rev­o­lu­tion­ary fight­ers swept into Tripoli and drove out Gad­hafi. The where­abouts of the ousted leader and sev­eral of his sons remain unknown.

Hun­dreds of for­mer rebels have massed deep in the south­ern desert and were try­ing to nego­ti­ate with vil­lagers in a pro-Gadhafi area to sur­ren­der peace­fully and avoid bloodshed.

The fight­ers cap­tured an air base about 45 miles (70 kilo­me­ters) north of the loy­al­ist strong­hold of Sabha on Thurs­day. Col. Bashir Awi­dat, who is from the Wadi Shati region, said they need to secure the area before mov­ing against Sabha.

Awi­dat said two for­mer rebels and four loy­al­ists were killed in the fight­ing, and that they had taken 14 prisoners.

He added that the vil­lagers had been iso­lated and believed Gadhafi’s propaganda.

“They think that we’ll raid their houses and rob them. The media cov­er­age here has been bad for 42 years and it has trained peo­ple to think a cer­tain way, and that will take time to change,” he told The Asso­ci­ated Press at the air base.

The new lead­er­ship has been gain­ing inter­na­tional sup­port in its cam­paign to root out the rest of Gadhafi’s regime and estab­lish author­ity. French Pres­i­dent Nicholas Sarkozy, British Prime Min­is­ter David Cameron and Turk­ish Prime Min­is­ter Recep Tayyip Erdo­gan all vis­ited Tripoli this week.

Erdo­gan joined Fri­day prayers in Tripoli’s Mar­tyrs’ Square, the heart of the city once known as Green Square where Gadhafi’s regime threw ral­lies of sup­port­ers before his fall.

“You have shown the whole world that no one can stand before the power and the will of the peo­ple,” Erdo­gan told a cheer­ing crowd of thou­sands. He pre­dicted the Syr­ian regime would be next to fall, say­ing “the era of autoc­racy is ending.”

The U.N. Gen­eral Assem­bly also voted Fri­day to give Libya’s seat in the world body to the National Tran­si­tional Coun­cil, which is the clos­est thing the oil-rich North African nation has to a government.

The vote means that a senior coun­cil offi­cial will be able to join world lead­ers and speak for Libya at next week’s min­is­te­r­ial ses­sion of the Gen­eral Assem­bly, and par­tic­i­pate in meetings.

Also Fri­day, the U.N. Secu­rity Coun­cil approved a new U.N. mis­sion in Libya and the unfreez­ing of assets of two major oil com­pa­nies. It also lifted a ban on flights by Libyan air­craft and mod­i­fied an arms embargo.

But the fierce resis­tance in Bani Walid and Sirte under­scored how dif­fi­cult the task of uproot­ing Gadhafi’s last bas­tions might be. The rev­o­lu­tion­ary forces have been loom­ing on the out­skirts of the two towns for weeks, and attempted another sig­nif­i­cant assault on Bani Walid last week, only to be repelled by unex­pect­edly strong loy­al­ist counterattacks.

The fight­ers made their first big foray into Sirte on Thurs­day but met a heavy back­lash. A road­side bomb struck a bus, killing 11 for­mer rebels on board.

On Fri­day, smoke rose above the city from heavy fight­ing, much of it along one of Sirte’s main roads, the First of Sep­tem­ber Street, a date that marks the anniver­sary of Gadhafi’s more than 40-year rule.

Rev­o­lu­tion­ary forces bar­raged by sniper fire and rock­ets let loose with machine guns fixed on the back of pickup trucks.

Nearby build­ings were pock­marked with bul­let holes. Com­man­ders said they had cap­tured the city’s old air­port on its west­ern edge.

In Bani Walid, fight­ers raised the new Libyan flag over an aban­doned elec­tric­ity build­ing before the order to pull back. Around the build­ings lay a huge Gad­hafi poster bent in half and torn bill­boards with pic­tures of the ousted dic­ta­tor. The walls were still sprayed with graf­fiti read­ing, “Long live Moammar.”

Posted by AP News on Sep 16 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.