History > 2011 > USA > International (XVI)

A man takes pictures

of the bodies of pro-Khadafy soldiers killed

when rebel fighters seized control

of the center of the strategic coastal city of Zawiyah

on August 20, 2011.

Bob Strong/Reuters

Boston Globe > Big Picture > Libya on the brink of change

August 22, 2011

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2011/08/libya_on_the_brink_of_change.html

Files Note Close C.I.A. Ties to Qaddafi Spy Unit

September 2, 2011
The New York Times
By ROD NORDLAND

TRIPOLI, Libya — Documents found at the abandoned office of Libya’s former spymaster appear to provide new details of the close relations the Central Intelligence Agency shared with the Libyan intelligence service — most notably suggesting that the Americans sent terrorism suspects at least eight times for questioning in Libya despite that country’s reputation for torture.

Although it has been known that Western intelligence services began cooperating with Libya after it abandoned its program to build unconventional weapons in 2004, the files left behind as Tripoli fell to rebels show that the cooperation was much more extensive than generally known with both the C.I.A. and its British equivalent, MI-6.

Some documents indicate that the British agency was even willing to trace phone numbers for the Libyans, and another appears to be a proposed speech written by the Americans for Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi about renouncing unconventional weapons.

The documents were discovered Friday by journalists and Human Rights Watch. There were at least three binders of English-language documents, one marked C.I.A. and the other two marked MI-6, among a larger stash of documents in Arabic.

It was impossible to verify their authenticity, and none of them were written on letterhead. But the binders included some documents that made specific reference to the C.I.A., and their details seem consistent with what is known about the transfer of terrorism suspects abroad for interrogation and with other agency practices.

And although the scope of prisoner transfers to Libya has not been made public, news media reports have sometimes mentioned it as one country that the United States used as part of its much criticized rendition program for terrorism suspects.

A C.I.A. spokeswoman, Jennifer Youngblood, declined to comment on Friday on the documents. But she added: “It can’t come as a surprise that the Central Intelligence Agency works with foreign governments to help protect our country from terrorism and other deadly threats.”

The British Foreign Office said, “It is the longstanding policy of the government not to comment on intelligence matters.”

While most of the renditions referred to in the documents appear to have been C.I.A. operations, at least one was claimed to have been carried out by MI-6.

“The rendition program was all about handing over these significant figures related to Al Qaeda so they could torture them and get the information they wanted,” said Peter Bouckaert, emergencies director of Human Rights Watch, who studied the documents in the intelligence headquarters in downtown Tripoli.

The documents cover 2002 to 2007, with many of them concentrated in late 2003 and 2004, when Moussa Koussa was head of the External Security Organization. (Mr. Koussa was most recently Libya’s foreign minister.)

The speech that appears to have been drafted for Colonel Qaddafi was found in the C.I.A. folder and appears to have been sent just before Christmas in 2003. The one-page speech seems intended to depict the Libyan dictator in a positive light. It concluded, using the revolutionary name for the Libyan government: “At a time when the world is celebrating the birth of Jesus, and as a token of our contributions towards a world full of peace, security, stability and compassion, the Great Jamhariya presents its honest call for a W.M.D.-free zone in the Middle East,” referring to weapons of mass destruction.

The flurry of communications about renditions are dated after Libya’s renouncement of its weapons program. In several of the cases, the documents explicitly talked about having a friendly country arrest a suspect, and then suggested aircraft would be sent to pick the suspect up and deliver him to the Libyans for questioning. One document included a list of 89 questions for the Libyans to ask a suspect.

While some of the documents warned Libyan authorities to respect such detainees’ human rights, the C.I.A. nonetheless turned them over for interrogation to a Libyan service with a well-known history of brutality.

One document in the C.I.A. binder said operatives were “in a position to deliver Shaykh Musa to your physical custody, similar to what we have done with other senior L.I.F.G. members in the recent past.” The reference was to the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which was dedicated to the overthrow of Colonel Qaddafi, and which American officials believed had ties to Al Qaeda.

When Libyans asked to be sent Abu Abdullah al-Sadiq, another member of the group, a case officer wrote back on March 4, 2004, that “we are committed to developing this relationship for the benefit of both our services,” and promised to do their best to locate him, according to a document in the C.I.A. binder.

Two days later, an officer faxed the Libyans to say that Mr. Sadiq and his pregnant wife were planning to fly into Malaysia, and the authorities there agreed to put them on a British Airways flight to London that would stop in Bangkok. “We are planning to take control of the pair in Bangkok and place them on our aircraft for a flight to your country,” the case officer wrote.

Mr. Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch said he had learned from the documents that Sadiq was a nom de guerre for Abdel Hakim Belhaj, who is now a military leader for the rebels.

In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. Belhaj gave a detailed description of his incarceration that matched many of those in the documents. He also said that when he was held in Bangkok he was tortured by two people from the C.I.A.

On one occasion, the Libyans tried to send their own plane to extradite a member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, Abu Munthir, and his wife and children, who were being held in Hong Kong because of passport irregularities.

The Libyan aircraft, however, was turned back, apparently because Hong Kong authorities were reluctant to let Libyan planes land. In a document labeled “Secret/ U.S. Only/ Except Libya,” the Libyans were advised to charter an aircraft from a third country. “If payment of a charter aircraft is an issue, our service would be willing to assist financially,” the document said.

While questioning alleged terror group members plainly had value to Western intelligence, the cooperation went beyond that. In one case, for example, the Libyans asked operatives to trace a phone number for them, and a document that was in the MI-6 binder replied that it belonged to the Arab News Network in London. It is unclear why the Libyans sought who the phone number belonged to.

The document also suggested signs of agency rivalries over Libya. In the MI-6 binder, a document boasted of having turned over someone named Abu Abd Alla to the Libyans. “This was the least we could do for you to demonstrate the remarkable relationship we have built over recent years,” an unsigned fax in 2004 said. “Amusingly, we got a request from the Americans to channel requests for information from Abu Abd through the Americans. I have no intention of doing any such thing.”

 

Scott Shane contributed reporting from Washington.

    Files Note Close C.I.A. Ties to Qaddafi Spy Unit, NYT, 2.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/03/world/africa/03libya.html

Libya Rebels Say Qaddafi Is Cornered in Town

August 31, 2011
The New York Times
By ROD NORDLAND

TRIPOLI, Libya — Rebel fighters believe they have cornered Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in the desert town of Bani Walid, only 150 miles from the capital, and have called on him to give up peacefully to avoid further bloodshed, a top official of the transition government said Wednesday.

“Since today we have learned that he is staying in Bani Walid,” said Abdul Hafith Ghoga, the deputy chairman of the Transitional National Council, in a telephone interview from his home in Benghazi. “We are waiting to give him a chance to surrender.”

There was no way to corroborate Mr. Ghoga’s claim on the location of Colonel Qaddafi, whose ability to outrun the rebel forces that toppled him last week has prevented them from claiming absolute victory in the struggle in Libya, the Arab Spring’s most violent uprising. Previous assertions by rebel forces concerning the whereabouts of Colonel Qaddafi and his family, routed from their Tripoli compound on Aug. 23, have proved premature or false.

But Mr. Ghoga’s claim, if true, would represent the first information on the location of the fugitive former leader who ruled Libya for 42 years.

The transition government formed by the rebels has given recalcitrant Qaddafi relatives and their loyalists until this Saturday to stop fighting without conditions.

Mr. Ghoga also confirmed reports that a Qaddafi son, Saadi el-Qaddafi, had offered to negotiate a coalition government with the rebels, but that the rebels rejected that out of hand.

Mr. Ghoga laughed out loud when asked about Saadi el-Qaddafi’s overtures. “They have no choice, Qaddafi has no choice, he has to surrender by Saturday.”

Bani Walid, a town of about 50,000 people southeast of Tripoli, is a stronghold of Libya’s largest tribe, the Warfallah, who have traditionally been strong supporters of the regime. Oddly, it is located in the Misurata District, which includes the coastal city of Misurata, a focal point of fierce fighting through much of the six-month rebellion.

Another Qaddafi son, Khamis, was reported killed when he and a group of bodyguards tried to break through a rebel checkpoint on the road to Bani Walid, rebel fighters in the area have told journalists, but his death has never been verified. A rebel spokesman, Col. Ahmed Bani, quoted survivors of that incident as saying they were escorting Khamis, once the head of the feared Khamis Brigade guarding Tripoli, to refuge in Bani Walid.

In addition, there have been unverified reports that Colonel Qaddafi’s second wife, daughter and two of his sons, who fled to Algeria earlier this week, went through Bani Walid, south to the oasis town of Sabha, and then to a remote desert crossing into Algeria. They were granted asylum on humanitarian grounds there earlier this week, infuriating the rebel forces, who have demanded that Algeria repatriate them.

Rebel forces have massed on the outskirts of Bani Walid, but have stopped advancing during a unilateral ceasefire declared by the rebels for the three-day-long Id al-Fitr holiday.

The rebels also have moved closer to the coastal city of Surt, Mr. Qaddafi’s hometown, another one of his rumored refuges.

Mr. Ghoga said the rebel ceasefire has been holding and there have been no reports of major fighting on its first full day.

The call to surrender was rejected by a spokesman for Colonel Qaddafi, Moussa Ibrahim, in a telephone call to The Associated Press headquarters in New York. “No dignified, honorable nation would accept an ultimatum from armed gangs,” the A.P. quoted him as saying.

Rebel officials have expressed hope that their ceasefire would persuade Colonel Qaddafi to surrender and avoid the bloodshed of a last stand. Their announcement of his location may have been calculated to pressure him into taking their Saturday ultimatum seriously.

A spokesman for the NATO operational command in Naples, speaking on condition of anonymity as a matter of alliance policy, said that its operations in Libya were continuing normally. "Our mission continues, our mission is still ongoing as long as there is a threat against civilians." However, the spokesman refused to confirm specifically whether there were any air strikes on Wednesday.

Mr. Ibrahim told The A.P. that that a missile attack possibly from NATO warplanes had killed 1,000 people in Surt — a tally that could not be independently verified. Throughout the six-month conflict, Colonel Qaddafi’s government has exaggerated the extent of casualties it says have been inflicted by NATO bombings.

As they secure growing acceptance abroad, the rebels’ readiness to press their demands showed the extent to which they have been emboldened by the NATO-backed military advances that helped to sweep them into Tripoli.

At the same time, the rebel leadership, struggling to unite bands of fighters and ensure security in the capital and elsewhere in the country, appeared to reject the need for international peacekeepers. “We don’t now expect military observers to be requested,” said Ian Martin, a United Nations special envoy for post-conflict planning in Libya, Reuters reported. “It’s very clear that the Libyans want to avoid any kind of military deployment of the U.N. or others.”

The rebels’ growing confidence came as anxiety eased in Tripoli, more than a week after rebel forces seized Colonel Qaddafi’s compound here in heavy fighting.

With the sounds of gunfire trailing off in Tripoli, banks reopened on Tuesday and residents who had been terrified of venturing outside calmly lined up to withdraw money. More shops opened for business, just in time for Id al-Fitr, the holiday that comes at the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

The international momentum to provide financial assistance to the rebels has also accelerated, with the Libya sanctions committee at the United Nations approving the unfreezing of $1.6 billion worth of Libyan dinars held in Britain. William Hague, Britain’s foreign secretary, said it was “another major step forward in getting necessary assistance to the Libyan people, building on the remarkable progress in recent days.”

But Russia has put a hold on the release of an additional 2.5 billion euros by Germany and France for the time being, diplomats said. Vitaly Churkin, the Russian ambassador to the United Nations, said it was important not to rush to release assets before checks were in place to ensure that it was not squandered, lost or stolen.

 

Reporting was contributed by Kareem Fahim and David D. Kirkpatrick from Tripoli, Libya, Alan Cowell from London, Neil MacFarquhar from the United Nations, and Rick Gladstone from New York.

    Libya Rebels Say Qaddafi Is Cornered in Town, NYT, 31.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/01/world/africa/01tripoli.html

Tripoli Divided as Rebels Jostle to Fill Power Vacuum

August 30, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and ROD NORDLAND

TRIPOLI, Libya — Fighters from the western mountain city of Zintan control the airport. The fighters from Misurata guard the central bank, the port and the prime minister’s office, where their graffiti has relabeled the historic plaza “Misurata Square.” Berbers from the mountain town Yafran took charge of the city’s central square, where they spray-painted “Yafran Revolutionaries.”

A week after rebels broke into Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s former stronghold, much of its territory remains divided into fiefs, each controlled by quasi-independent brigades representing different geographic areas of the country. And the spray paint they use to mark their territory tells the story of a looming leadership crisis in the capital, Tripoli.

The top civilian officials of the Libyan rebels’ Transitional National Council — now styling itself as a provisional government to be based in the capital — are yet to arrive, citing personal safety concerns even as they pronounce the city fully secure.

There are growing hints of rivalry among the various brigades over who deserves credit for liberating the city and the influence it might bring. And attempts to name a military leader to unify the bands of fighters have instead exposed divisions within the rebel leadership, along regional lines but also between secularists and Islamists.

They were all signs, one influential member of the council said, that point to a continuing “power vacuum” in the civilian leadership of the Libyan capital. But the jockeying for power also illustrates the challenge a new provisional government will face in trying to unify Libya’s fractious political landscape.

The country was little more than a loose federation of regions and tribes before Colonel Qaddafi came to power. His reliance on favoritism and repression to maintain control did little to bridge Libya’s regional, ethnic and ideological divisions. Nor did the rebels who ousted Colonel Qaddafi ever organize themselves into a unified force. Rebels from the western mountains, the mid-coastal city of Misurata and the eastern city of Benghazi each fought independently, and often rolled their eyes in condescension at one another.

And although the transition so far has been surprisingly orderly — almost no looting and little violence — Tripoli has become an early test of the revolution’s ability to bridge those divisions because in contrast to other Libyan cities liberated by their own residents, Colonel Qaddafi was ousted from Tripoli by brigades from other regions, and most remain in the streets.

Early steps toward unifying the brigades under a common command have brought out latent divisions among rebel leaders. Some became apparent when a fighter named Abdel Hakim al-Hasadi, sometimes known as AbdelHakim Belhaj, was named commander of a newly formed Tripoli Military Council.

Several liberals among the rebel leadership council complained privately that Mr. Hasadi had been a leader of the disbanded Libyan Islamist Fighting Group, which rebelled against Colonel Qaddafi in the 1990s. Some said they feared it was the first step in an attempt at an Islamist takeover. They noted that Mr. Hasadi was named commander by the five battalions of the so-called Tripoli Brigade, rather than by any civilian authority. And they complained about the perceived influence of Qatar, which helped train and equip the Tripoli Brigade and also finances Al Jazeera.

“This guy is just a creation of the Qataris and their money, and they are sponsoring the element of Muslim extremism here,” another council member from the western region said. “The revolutionary fighters are extremely unhappy and surprised. He is the commander of nothing!”

Mixed with the ideological concerns, however, was an equal measure of provincial rivalry over who did more to liberate Tripoli. Not only was Mr. Hasadi an Islamist, the council member argued, but he had done less than the western rebels in the fight for the capital.

“People in the west were saying to each other, ‘What? This kid? This is rubbish! What about our top commanders?’ ” the council member said.

Mr. Hasadi could not be reached for comment, in part because he was attending meetings in Doha, Qatar. Mustafa Abdel Jalil, chairman of the Transitional National Council, said he made a point to take Mr. Hasadi along to a meeting with their NATO allies in Doha to show that despite his background, he poses “no danger to international peace and stability.”

Hints of another schism appeared this week after news reports that the council’s prime minister, Mahmoud Jibril — who, like Mr. Jalil, is not present in Tripoli — was naming a former Libyan Army general, Albarrani Shkal, as the chief of the capital’s security.

Fighters from Misurata, considered to the rebels’ most formidable force, refused to accept his appointment, arguing that he was complicit in Colonel Qaddafi’s vicious crackdown on their city. In Misurata, about 500 protesters took to its central square to chant that the appointment would betray “the blood of the martyrs,” a correspondent for The Guardian reported, noting that the city’s local council registered a formal complaint with the national leadership.

By Tuesday night, Mr. Jabril had taken back his decision, said Alamin Belhaj, a Tripoli member of the transitional council.

Both conflicts over the selection of military leaders recall the uproar sparked by the murder of the rebels’ top military commander in Benghazi, General Abdul Fattah Younes. The murder, still unresolved, touched off allegations by some rebel leaders that he was killed by a brigade of Islamists, which they said sought revenge for his previous role as a top aide to Colonel Qaddafi. No one has been charged in the case.

Libyan Islamists say they just want a chance to compete in an open democracy, and they argue that they are more qualified than the liberals to disarm the fighters in the streets.

“They trust us more,” said Mr. Belhaj, the council member and a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood here, arguing that many Libyans fear that the revolution would be “stolen” by rich, Westernized and often expatriate liberals on the council.

All sides agreed, however, that the conquest of Tripoli has made it a crucible of regional rivalries. Although the early fighting was in the east, the final assault on Tripoli was led by rebel groups in the west and finished by seasoned fighters from Misurata.

Now members of nearly every brigade in Tripoli assert their group played the most heroic role in taking the city, or in breaking into the Qaddafi compound, or in taking the central square.

“We have it on video,” insisted Mahdi al-Harati, the deputy leader of the Tripoli Military Council, defending his claim that his brigade was first to the central square.

More than pride may be at stake, said Anwar Fekini, a French-Libyan lawyer with ancestral ties to the mountains who is a member of the national leadership council. “The people in the west say, ‘We paid a huge price, and we want to be in charge,’ and Misurata the same,” he said, adding that he argued Libyans should select their leaders on the basis of competence regardless of region.

Mr. Belhaj had another idea. He said he had asked the other local councils to withdraw their brigades from the city limits, to leave the capital to the Tripolitans.

    Tripoli Divided as Rebels Jostle to Fill Power Vacuum, NYT, 30.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/31/world/africa/31tripoli.html

Inside a Libyan Hospital, Proof of a Revolt’s Costs

August 25, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and KAREEM FAHIM

TRIPOLI, Libya — Word raced through Tripoli Central Hospital as fast as the bloody gurneys rushing through the entrance on Thursday carrying wounded fighters from the front: perhaps this was Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s last stand.

The hospital’s doctors — soldiers of another sort in their own underground resistance to Colonel Qaddafi during the six-month revolt — knew the battle would not be easy, whether or not the colonel had been located. By virtue of their work receiving the dead and the wounded, they have developed a special perspective on the rebels’ blitz of Tripoli this week and the continuing toll of the fighting.

Their morgue was already overflowing, with more than 115 bodies of fighters and civilians still unclaimed. Two doctors said the hospital had treated as many as 500 patients a day this week for gunshot wounds as the rebels struggled to overcome the Qaddafi loyalists who stubbornly continued to fight.

“I haven’t left in six days,” said Dr. Nabil Bay. “Qaddafi controlled the hospital on Saturday and Sunday, and the rebels took over Monday, and every day we are overwhelmed with patients.”

Of the six days since the revolt reached Tripoli, the capital, Thursday may have been the bloodiest. Doctors and journalists reported evidence of fresh massacres by both sides around the city, while the battle to establish full control of Colonel Qaddafi’s breached compound, Bab al-Aziziya, raged on.

In their drive to take command of Tripoli, the rebels concentrated their forces on a block-by-block battle for the streets of the Abu Salim neighborhood, a center of Colonel Qaddafi’s support. By late afternoon, the fighting had once again swamped Tripoli Central Hospital with wounded civilians and combatants.

From his hiding place, Colonel Qaddafi taunted the rebels with a speech carried over loyalist radio channels urging Libyans to cleanse Tripoli of the “rats, crusaders and unbelievers” — his favorite terms for the rebels and their Western allies. Deprived of state television, Colonel Qaddafi has turned to the radio at least twice this week to remind the world that he has not given up.

His government spokesman, Moussa Ibrahim, apparently also in hiding, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview that Colonel Qaddafi was still in command of his forces and was capable of withstanding any rebel onslaught for “weeks, months and years.”

Colonel Qaddafi’s loyalists delivered the same message by waging an intense gunfight outside the Corinthia Hotel here, where many journalists have taken up residence — and where the rebels’ governing body, the Transitional National Council, is expected to settle as well.

Intensifying their quest to find Colonel Qaddafi and his sons, rebel leaders said their forces had attacked Sabha, a town in the south that is a stronghold of the Qaddafis’ tribe. And Britain’s defense secretary, Liam Fox, said Thursday that NATO was trying to help, apparently deviating from NATO’s nominal mission to protect civilians. “I can confirm that NATO is providing intelligence and reconnaissance assets” to the insurgents “to help them track down Colonel Qaddafi and other remnants of the regime,” Mr. Fox told Sky News.

In a sign of the rebels’ growing confidence, cabinet members of the Transitional National Council appeared at a news conference in Tripoli on Thursday to announce that they were formally moving their operations from the eastern city of Benghazi to Tripoli.

During an emotional address, the oil and finance minister, Ali Tarhouni, praised the rebel fighters, asked police officers to get back to work and called on Qaddafi loyalists to put down their arms and go home.

“There will not be any revenge,” he said. “The law will be between us.”

But that pledge may already have been violated. Reuters reported the discovery of the bullet-ridden bodies of more than 30 pro-Qaddafi fighters in a military encampment in Tripoli. At least two had been bound with plastic handcuffs, five were in a field hospital at the camp and one was still strapped to a gurney with an intravenous drip in his arm.

Among the hundreds of bodies in the Tripoli Central Hospital morgue — some in wall drawers, but many lying on the floor barely covered — at least one was bound at the hands, although it was unclear which side he fought for or whether he had been wounded before he was bound.

Doctors at another hospital in Tripoli said they had received the bodies of 17 men who witnesses said were executed by Colonel Qaddafi’s soldiers as rebels stormed the leader’s compound, Bab al-Aziziya, on Tuesday. The men, held in a makeshift detention near the compound, had been shot in the upper body, neck and chest, doctors at Mitiga Hospital said.

Outside the emergency room, rebels brought in at least two of Colonel Qaddafi’s soldiers wounded in the battle for the Abu Salim neighborhood, evidence of the closeness and intensity of the combat there.

Inside, doctors described their distinctive perspective on the revolution. Dr. Essam Ben Masoud, 34, said that when the first protests broke out in February, doctors at the hospital called human rights activists and journalists abroad to report the death toll from Colonel Qaddafi’s crackdown. Soldiers, he said, roamed the hospitals, dragging out patients who had been shot in the protests. Many were never seen again.

“We expressed ourselves,” Dr. Masoud said. “Since then the Qaddafi people treated us badly.”

The Qaddafi government went into the hospitals and removed the televisions on which the doctors and others had furtively watched the independent news channel Al Jazeera. Closed-circuit television cameras appeared everywhere. Soldiers stationed in the hospital intimidated the doctors, threatening them with weapons and even hitting them, Dr. Masoud and others said.

Dr. Masoud said he kept working surreptitiously for the rebels. In preparation for the final uprising, he said, he and other doctors from Tripoli Central Hospital helped set up 15 makeshift field hospitals of a network of 30 in homes around Green Square, where they treated wounded rebels last weekend. That way they could avoid sending patients to Qaddafi-controlled hospitals and could ship those needing serious care out of town. “The rebels can’t come here or the Qaddafi people would shoot them,” Dr. Masoud said.

For the first two days of the Tripoli fighting, Tripoli Central Hospital treated soldiers all but exclusively, several doctors said. “We have seven operating rooms, and they were all busy from 9 p.m. to 2 p.m. the next day,” Dr. Masoud said.

About 30 people died at the hospital on Sunday, one doctor said, and the hospital had run out of basic supplies like antibiotics. The doctors slept, as they have since then, on eight bunk beds without sheets in a narrow hall with a puddle on the tile floor from a leak in the ceiling.

Then everything changed. At about 4 a.m. Monday, Colonel Qaddafi’s soldiers abruptly fled, prompting cheers and even songs from the doctors.

The next day, after a television announcement, volunteers flooded in to help with cleaning, cooking and other chores, two doctors said. Pharmacists and medical supply companies donated drugs and equipment. Dr. Bay, who also owns a pharmacy, donated antibiotics.

By then, bodies had already begun to pile up at the morgue. On Tuesday, when rebels stormed Bab al-Aziziya, the flow of patients surged, and as many as 40 died at the hospital or arrived dead, doctors said, all of them rebels. The next day “we found a refrigerator truck — like a refrigerator for transporting cheese — with 28 dead bodies in it,” Dr. Masoud said, suggesting that the Qaddafi forces had killed people in the street and hid the bodies.

On Thursday, as bodies began to pile up again from the fighting in Abu Salim, rebels returning from the front said they were surprised by the depth of the loyalists’ resistance. But by nightfall, the flood of patients began to slow, said Dr. Bay, chasing after a gurney. “Abu Salim is over now,” he said, optimistically.

 

Rick Gladstone contributed reporting from New York.

    Inside a Libyan Hospital, Proof of a Revolt’s Costs, NYT, 25.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/26/world/africa/nato-joins-hunt-for-qaddafi-gadhafi-gaddafi.html

Gaza and Israel Exchange Retaliatory Fire

August 25, 2011
The New York Times
By FARES AKRAM

GAZA — Nine Gazans have been killed in Israeli strikes since Wednesday night, with Israel’s southern communities withstanding 20 rockets from Gaza over the same 24-hour period.

Warning sirens repeatedly sent Israelis across the south into bomb shelters, but most of the rockets landed in empty fields near the Israeli cities of Ofakim, Ashkelon and Beersheva. However, a nine-month-old baby was slightly hurt in Ashkelon when a car was hit with shrapnel.

The recent round of violence started a week ago, after a terrorist attack on southern Israel in which eight Israelis were killed. Israeli forces pursuing suspects killed five Egyptian security officers in the Egyptian Sinai, creating a furor within Egypt.

Israeli officials said the perpetrators and planners of the terrorist attack were originally from Gaza, and Israel has retaliated with strikes that have killed at least 23 Palestinians. Gazan officials say they know nothing about the source of the attack.

Israel’s first retaliatory strike killed leaders from the Popular Resistance Committees, a pro-Hamas militant group that Israel said was behind the terrorist attack.

On Wednesday, an Israeli airstrike killed an Islamic Jihad leader, Ismail al-Asmar, 34; the group said Thursday that it had fired several of the missiles at Israel in retaliation.

Early Thursday, Israelis struck a smuggling tunnel that crossed under Gaza’s southern border with Egypt, killing four.

A third airstrike — on a sports club the Israeli military said held a weapons storage facility — killed two in northern Gaza: a member of Islamic Jihad, and a Palestinian man, 22, who died hours after he was wounded.

Adham Abu Selmia, a Palestinian medical spokesman, said 29 Palestinians were wounded in those three assaults.

Thursday evening, as Gazans were beginning to break their Ramadan fasts, an Israeli plane fired a missile at a motorbike in northern Gaza, killing two Palestinian militants, witnesses and medical sources said. The Israeli military said that the two had fired a mortar shell at the Erez crossing, damaging it. There were about 10 Palestinians inside the crossing terminal at the time, en route back to Gaza, the Israelis said, but none were hurt.

Earlier in the week, Gaza’s Hamas rulers said a ceasefire agreement had been reached through Egyptian efforts, but Israel said it was retaliating for rocket fire and working to stop attacks in preparation.

 

Ethan Bronner contributed reporting from Jerusalem.

    Gaza and Israel Exchange Retaliatory Fire, NYT, 25.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/26/world/middleeast/26gaza.html

NATO Helps in Hunt for Qaddafi as Rebels Gain Momentum

August 25, 2011
The New York Times
By KAREEM FAHIM, ALAN COWELL and RICK GLADSTONE

TRIPOLI, Libya — Rebels intensified their hunt for Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi and his sons on Thursday, engaging in an intense fight with loyalists in a neighborhood of apartment blocks near his former Tripoli fortress, as Western officials said NATO was actively helping in the effort to find the elusive leader. But in a new taunt, Colonel Qaddafi urged Libyans in a brief audio broadcast to cleanse Tripoli of the insurgents, whom he called “rats, crusaders and unbelievers.”

The broadcast, carried on loyalist channels, came amid other indications that even with an accelerated momentum by the rebels in the Libyan uprising, strong pockets of resistance remained in Tripoli and other parts of the country, which Colonel Qaddafi ruled for the past 42 years.

Hundreds of wounded fighters and civilians streamed into Tripoli hospitals from the new clashes in Tripoli’s Abu Salim neighborhood of apartment blocks, adjacent to Colonel Qaddafi’s former Bab al-Aziziya compound, which was overrun by rebels on Tuesday. Rumors swirled in the capital that insurgents fighting in Abu Salim had cornered Colonel Qaddafi or at least one member of his family. The claims were impossible to verify.

There were reports, too, that the bullet-riddled bodies of more than 30 pro-Qaddafi fighters had been found at a military encampment in central Tripoli. At least two were bound with plastic handcuffs, suggesting that they had been executed, Reuters reported.

Five of the dead were found at a field hospital, one strapped to a gurney in an ambulance with an intravenous drip still in his arm, Reuters said.

The rebels claimed breakthroughs on other fronts on Wednesday, saying their fighters had started battling for Sabha, another of the colonel’s strongholds in the south, and in Zuwarah in the west. Cranking up the pressure, Libyan businessmen put together a $1.7 million bounty for Colonel Qaddafi’s capture — dead or alive.

But even in parts of the capital thought to be in rebel hands, there were new outbursts of fighting on Thursday. In one episode an intense gun battle broke out near the Corinthia hotel housing many foreign journalists here. The hotel is also where the provisional post-Qaddafi government, based in Benghazi, was planning to relocate in coming days.

“This is not over yet,” said Foreign Secretary William Hague of Britain, which has played leading diplomatic and military roles in the effort to end Colonel Qaddafi’s dictatorship. “There are huge numbers of weapons out there and some thousands of forces are continuing to fight for a regime that is finished,” Mr. Hague said, speaking of loyalist resistance in the south of Tripoli and in Surt, Colonel Qaddafi’s tribal home. Britain’s defense secretary, Liam Fox, said Thursday that NATO was trying to help the rebels locate Colonel Qaddafi, apparently breaking from the frequent Western assertion that it adheres to its United Nations mandate to protect civilians.

“I can confirm that NATO is providing intelligence and reconnaissance assets” to the insurgents “to help them track down Colonel Qaddafi and other remnants of the regime,” Mr. Fox told Sky News.

But he withheld comment on a report in The Daily Telegraph that British special forces on the ground were involved in the hunt for Colonel Qaddafi. He also said there were “absolutely no plans” to commit British ground forces to Libya in the future.

In diplomatic and financial terms, the rebel cause seemed to be facing a setback after South Africa refused to endorse an American effort at the United Nations Security Council to unblock frozen Libyan funds worth $1.5 billion for the rebels. The impasse provoked sharp exchanges with the rebels’ Western allies.

“I think there will be huge moral pressure on South Africa,” Mr. Fox said on the BBC. “They wanted the world at one point to stand with them against apartheid. They now need to stand with the Libyan people.”

Later, Mr. Hague, the foreign secretary, said South Africa had agreed to endorse the release of $500 million to meet humanitarian needs after Prime Minister David Cameron telephoned President Jacob Zuma to discuss the issue. And Turkey, which has played an important diplomatic role in seeking to end the Libyan conflict, announced at a donors conference it is hosting in Istanbul that it already sent $200 million to the Transition National Council, the Libyan rebel leadership group in Benghazi.

“Today we are all proud and pleased with the developments on the ground,” Ahmet Davutoglu, Turkish foreign minister, told the conference in a speech.

There were other signs that efforts to unblock Libyan government funds, frozen initially to bring pressure on Colonel Qaddafi, were gathering pace. After visiting Paris on Wednesday, Mahmoud Jibril, the de facto rebel prime minister, met in Milan on Thursday with Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy, which has long had close economic ties with its former colony. Mr. Berlusconi said later that Italy would begin unfreezing some $505 million in Libyan assets.

Mr. Jibril told a news conference in Milan that “the biggest destabilizing element” would be the failure of the rebel administration to deliver services and pay the salaries of government officials who had not been paid for months. “Our priorities cannot be carried out by the government without having the necessary money immediately,” he said, according to Reuters.

The quest for an injection of cash coincides with reports of ever-increasing shortages of essential supplies in Libya.

South Africa’s United Nations ambassador, Baso Sangqu, told reporters that his government was concerned about the humanitarian situation there but, before agreeing to a broader release of frozen assets, wanted to await the outcome of an African Union meeting to discuss recognition of the fledgling rebel administration.

.

Many African nations, long the recipients of Colonel Qaddafi’s largesse, have not so far recognized the rebels. Mr. Zuma has been at the forefront of African efforts to broker a ceasefire on terms favorable to Colonel Qaddafi, but those efforts have produced no visible results, beyond souring relations with the West.

A ship sent by the International Organization for Migration to pluck migrant workers to safety finally docked in Tripoli on Thursday after days of waiting offshore, and it boarded 200 passengers, including Egyptians, Filipinos, Canadians, Algerians, Moroccans and an Italian, for the return voyage to Benghazi, where they were to receive assistance to travel home. A second boat chartered by the Geneva-based organization was planning to dock this weekend in Tripoli, where many more migrants have been urgently waiting to leave.

“It has not been easy to do this operation,” Pasquale Lupoli, the organization’s regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, said in a statement.

On Wednesday, Colonel Qaddafi’s loyalists abruptly released more than 30 foreign journalists they had held captive in the Rixos Hotel here. Over the weekend, they were taken captive at gunpoint as the rebels advanced on the capital and left in the Rixos.

Later in the day, four Italian journalists were abducted and their driver killed outside of Tripoli, and the captives were taken to an apartment near Colonel Qaddafi’s former compound, Italian consular officials said. The captives were released on Thursday, the Italian daily newspaper Corriere della Sera reported on its Web site. Two of the journalists worked for Corriere della Sera, while the others were reporters for La Stampa and Avvenire newspapers.

“I am fine now,” said Domenico Quirico of La Stampa, according to the Web posting. “An hour ago, I thought I was dead.”

 

Kareem Fahim reported from Tripoli, Alan Cowell from Paris and Rick Gladstone from New York. Reporting was contributed by David D. Kirkpatrick from Tripoli, Elisabetta Povoledo from Rome, Sebnem Arsu from Istanbul and Dan Bilefsky from the United Nations.

    NATO Helps in Hunt for Qaddafi as Rebels Gain Momentum, NYT, 25.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/26/world/africa/nato-joins-hunt-for-qaddafi-gadhafi-gaddafi.html

After Arab Revolts, Reigns of Uncertainty

August 24, 2011
The New York Times
By ANTHONY SHADID

DJERBA, Tunisia — The idealism of the revolts in Egypt and Tunisia, where the power of the street revealed the frailty of authority, revived an Arab world anticipating change. But Libya’s unfinished revolution, as inspiring as it is unsettling, illustrates how perilous that change has become as it unfolds in this phase of the Arab Spring.

Though the rebels’ flag has gone up in Tripoli, their leadership is fractured and opaque; the intentions and influence of Islamists in their ranks are uncertain; Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi remains at large in a flight reminiscent of Saddam Hussein’s; and foreigners have been involved in the fight in the kind of intervention that has long been toxic to the Arab world.

Not to mention, of course, that a lot of young men have a lot of guns.

No uprising is alike, but Libya’s complexities echo in the revolts in Bahrain, Syria and, most of all, Yemen, suggesting that the prolonged transition of Arab countries to a new order may prove as tumultuous to the region as Egypt’s moment was stirring.

Unlike at the start of the year, when the revolutionary momentum seemed unstoppable, uncertainty is far more pronounced today, as several countries face the prospect of stalemate, sustained conflict or power vacuums that may render them ungovernable. Already in Yemen, militant Islamists have found a haven. Across the region, the repercussions of the uprisings are colliding with the assumptions of the older, American-backed system: control of oil, the influence of a reactionary Saudi Arabia, an Arab-Israeli truce, and the maintenance of order at the expense of freedom in a region that for decades has been, at least superficially, one of the world’s most stable.

In just the past week, Colonel Qaddafi lost his capital, Tripoli; the United States and European countries called on President Bashar al-Assad of Syria to step down; the president of Yemen, still recovering from burns suffered in an attack, has promised to return; and the relationship between Egypt and Israel descended into crisis, to the jubilation of many Egyptians who saw a more assertive government as a windfall of Mr. Mubarak’s fall.

“There is going to be a transfer of power in our societies, and a new order has begun to take shape in the region,” said Michel Kilo, an opposition figure in Damascus, Syria.

Already, Israel has begun to face what it feared the revolts might unleash: foreign policies in the Arab world that reflect deep popular resentment over the plight of Palestinians. The most puritanical Islamists, known by their shorthand as Salafists, have emerged as a force in Egypt, Libya, Syria and elsewhere, with suspicions that Saudi Arabia has encouraged and financed them. Alliances have begun to be redrawn: Turkey and Syria’s growing partnership ruptured over Mr. Assad’s ferocious crackdown, which has provoked international condemnation but shows no signs of ending.

As with all the revolutions, the fall of the leaders will be seen as the easiest step in a long, rocky and wrenching struggle to build anew.

“The question of the successor government in Libya is going to prove far more difficult than ousting the old government,” said M. Cherif Bassiouni, an expert in international law who has led human rights commissions in Bahrain and Libya.

Nothing feels certain these days, not least in Egypt and Tunisia, and conversations about the uprisings often mention the French Revolution, which required long years to usher in a new order. No one talks in terms of months about these revolts, given the seismic forces at play, from the empowerment of Islamists to the economic trauma.

“We’re heading toward the unknown,” said Talal Atrissi, a political analyst in Lebanon. “The next era will witness battles and conflicts between actors inside countries bent on crushing each other and proving their existence on the political scene.”

“It will be full of challenges, large and severe,” he added.

As unpredictable as Libya’s revolution may prove, it still unleashed jubilation across the region. Yemen’s beleaguered government flooded the capital with troops over the weekend to stanch more demonstrations inspired by Colonel Qaddafi’s fall. On Al Jazeera, images of the Libyan leader were interspersed with lines from a song played during Egypt and Tunisia’s revolts: “I am the people, the people of honor and struggle,” sang Um Kalthoum, an Egyptian diva of another era. In Damascus, an activist saw the intertwined fates of Mr. Assad and Colonel Qaddafi, who in a defiant message broadcast Wednesday called the people who overthrew him rats and traitors.

“We don’t want a merciful end for Qaddafi and his sons,” said Aziz al-Arabi, a 30-year-old Syrian. “Please keep him alive. We’d love to see them humiliated.”

Across the region, young people who have driven the revolts have shared vocabulary as well as tactics. “Irhal,” or leave, has skipped from Egypt to Yemen and Bahrain, where in the streets of Sitra, strewn with rocks from nightly clashes with the police, protesters have made it plural — not only must the king go, but his family as well. Walls there read “silmiya,” or peaceful, recalling similar slogans in Syria. Residents there have imported the Egyptian term “baltagiya” to describe the state-sponsored thugs they face.

Iran’s revolution a generation ago was followed by a grinding war with Iraq, the birth of Hezbollah in Lebanon and the politicization of Shiite Muslims across the Persian Gulf. The Arab world is now embroiled in three revolutions (Tunisia, Egypt, Libya) and three full-fledged revolts (Syria, Yemen, Bahrain).

“Sometimes instability is a necessary evil, and you need it to have stability,” said Shadi Hamid, director of research at the Brookings Doha Center, a project of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution and that is based in Qatar. “To dislodge a brutal dictator is going to require bloodshed.”

So far, Libya’s revolution seems the most uncertain. Even now, parallels are being drawn to the fall of Mr. Hussein, who cast a long shadow before he was captured over a country whose divisions deepened, then erupted into civil war. The remnants of his regime were long underestimated, by Americans and others, until they contributed to an insurgency that remains a searing lesson in imperial folly.

“Some compare post-Qaddafi Libya to post-Saddam Iraq,” wrote Bashir al-Bakr in the leftist Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar. “The Libyans, according to that view, will not be in charge of their own decisions. They will find themselves shackled by heavy commitments, and they will lack the ability to escape them at the present.”

For many in the region, foreign intervention has deprived Libya’s revolt of the luster enjoyed by Egypt and Tunisia, inspiring suspicions, as in Iraq, that the West simply covets its oil. As Sateh Noureddine, a columnist, put it in another Lebanese newspaper, Al-Safir, NATO’s support “will not be for free, and Libya will pay for it.”

In that, he captured the ambiguity over what represents opposition these days in the Arab world, old labels defying their old assumptions. Syrian rebels denounce Hezbollah, which prides itself on its resistance to Israel. Bahrain withdrew its ambassador from Damascus as it carried out a crackdown on its Shiite majority that smacks of apartheid. And Colonel Qaddafi, in his message, praised his loyalists as revolutionary youths.

“Forward, forward,” he cried, his trademark refrain for never-ending struggle.

 

Nada Bakri contributed reporting from Beirut, Lebanon.

    After Arab Revolts, Reigns of Uncertainty, NYT, 24.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/25/world/africa/25arab.html

Libyans Face a New Challenge:

Expelling the Fear That Qaddafi Instilled in Them

August 24, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

TRIPOLI, Libya — When rebels broke through the gates of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s compound this week, Abdul Rahman Sharif was so moved that despite the gunfire he took his daughters, ages 11, 15 and 18, with him to see it for themselves. Then after dark he returned with his wife. And the next day, as more bullets flew, he visited the compound with his 90-year-old mother.

Looking back at the dizzying collapse of Colonel Qaddafi’s terrifying power as he and his mother drove home, he said, Libyans now face a more subtle challenge. “We need to get rid of the little Muammar el-Qaddafi inside each of us,” he said, describing a combination of anxiety, lawlessness and cynicism he attributed to four decades under Colonel Qaddafi’s arbitrary authoritarianism. “Some people hated him, some people would die for him, but even if you did not like him he affected you,” Mr. Sharif, 56, said.

Residents of Tripoli keep venturing out in the still-contested streets to gawk as jubilant rebels overrun the iconic backdrops of Colonel Qaddafi’s theatrical rule — his barracks and mansion at the Bab al-Aziziya compound, the old city square he named after his “green” revolution. And they reflected on the unexpected brittleness of his hold on the city. Many said that his power, like that of so many tyrants, was rooted mainly in the fear he had instilled in Libyans, until a few rebel victories kicked it away.

“When the rebellion started six months ago, we knew it would be bloody,” Mr. Sharif said. “We thought you were going to see more bloodshed here than you did, because he was a bloodthirsty man.” And even as Bab al-Aziziya fell, many in Tripoli still felt pangs of fear. False rumors swept the city that the colonel had poisoned the water in a final act of spite. “See what he has done?” Mr. Sharif asked.

Look at Libyan drivers, he said, pointing toward cars swerving by: no one followed the rules, because no expected them to be fairly enforced. “We did not feel like it was our country,” he said.

In the past few days, residents said, they watched in astonishment as the police and military forces they had dreaded for so long melted away in a matter of minutes. Ali el-Ayan, an aircraft maintenance engineer who was visiting the city’s Green Square in his neighborhood with his daughters, said that he had watched Colonel Qaddafi’s troops fill the area with soldiers and weapons on Saturday night in anticipation of a rebel uprising.

He was inside watching Al Jazeera when it reported that the rebels had reached the square. He ran out to watch as they arrived from four directions in a seemingly coordinated attack.

“It was a good plan,” Mr. Ayan said. “Within half an hour the square was clear of any Qaddafi army at all. They left their weapons and equipment and some of their uniforms and ran off, and it was a great night for Libyans.”

Like several other residents, Mr. Ayan said he had always felt a visceral shudder whenever he passed Bab al-Aziziya. When the walls of the compound finally broke open, he said, he thought of an iconic image from the end of the cold war, when Russians shook off their fear of the Kremlin. Just as Boris N. Yeltsin mounted a tank at the Russian Parliament, Libyans had taken their former tyrant’s house, he said. Then he recalled President Ronald Reagan’s words after he ordered a 1986 airstrike on the Libyan compound to punish Colonel Qaddafi for his support of terrorism abroad: “ ‘We have done what we had to do.’ ”

“The Libyan people did what needed to be done,” Mr. Ayan said.

A smaller re-enactment of the Qaddafi government’s collapse played out Wednesday at the Rixos Hotel, where a handful of guards had detained about 30 foreign journalists long after the senior officials working there had fled. It was at the hotel that Colonel Qaddafi’s son Seif al-Islam had made a surprise appearance on Monday, vowing that the Qaddafis’ forces were poised to retake the city. Several journalists said Wednesday that the guards holding them were so cut off from other sources of information that they did not know just how wrong Colonel Qaddafi’s son was.

But on Wednesday, several journalists said, two Arabic-speaking journalists sat down with the chief guard to lay out the situation. “Look, they all left you, all the big guys are gone,” an Iraqi cameraman told them, journalists present said.

The chief guard broke down in tears. Terrified of rebel reprisals, the guards surrendered their weapons to the journalists and insisted on having the Red Cross escort them out of the hotel.

In the same way, others said that the recent defection of top officials from the Qaddafi government had pushed the uprising to a tipping point. Mr. Sharif, an employee of Libya’s National Investment Company, said he had watched for years as others were promoted over him because he refused to join the Qaddafi political machine and its various “revolutionary committees.” The company’s chief may have earned mediocre returns but he was a paragon of political fidelity.

“He was high up in the revolutionary committee and everything was all right, and then the next day I saw on television that he had fled,” Mr. Sharif said.

When his boss defected, he said, he knew the end was near. Then, after evening prayer on Saturday night, he heard young men all over his neighborhood and the city pouring out of mosques, calling out: “God is great! God is great!”

He ran to his door to add his voice to the shouts. “I am 56,” Mr. Sharif said, “but this revolution makes me feel like it is the ’70s, like I am young again.”

On Wednesday, his mother carried with her a bottle of homemade Libyan perfume to Bab al-Aziziya to sprinkle as a tribute on the revolutionaries. She said her father had died at 90 in 1972, just three years after Colonel Qaddafi had come to power. She recalled that her father had told the family: “You will see a dark day under him. Thank God I am not going to be here to see it.”

    Libyans Face a New Challenge: Expelling the Fear That Qaddafi Instilled in Them, NYT, 24.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/25/world/africa/25voices.html

Qaddafi Leaves Behind Little to Guide Libya in His Absence

August 24, 2011
The New York Times
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s stranglehold on Libya appears to have ended after 42 years, even if his whereabouts remain elusive. But through countless erratic decrees and iron-handed purges, he carved deep scars into every facet of Libyan life. The mystery and speculation swirling about him marked a fitting close to a quixotic reign.

Colonel Qaddafi, who was a 27-year-old junior officer when his coup deposed King Idris in September 1969, viewed himself as a desert philosopher, and he declared that his political system of “permanent revolution” would replace both capitalism and socialism.

But over the years, that revolution also swept away nearly every institution that could challenge him — or guide the country when he was gone. By the time he was done, Libya had no parliament, no unified military command, no political parties, no unions, no civil society and no nongovernmental organizations. His ministries were hollow, with the notable exception of the state oil company.

“This is my country!” he roared in a televised speech when the revolt first erupted in late February, shaking his fist and pounding the dais. “Muammar is not a president to quit his post! Muammar is the leader of the revolution until the end of time!”

By Wednesday, rebels tried to tighten their control over the country, putting a nearly $2 million bounty on his head and sending fighters toward one of his last strongholds, Surt. The uprising condensed into six harrowing months an ever more destructive version of the erratic rule that Colonel Qaddafi imposed on Libya over the previous four decades. He clung to power and refused to accept the rejection of his own people, railing against a spectrum of outside conspiracies from Islamic fundamentalists to rejuvenated colonialism. The country of six million people and vast oil wealth, meanwhile, gradually disintegrated.

To ensure his singular role, Colonel Qaddafi had long wielded violence both at home and abroad. He financed and armed a cornucopia of violent organizations, including the Irish Republican Army, the Red Army Faction in Europe and African guerrilla groups. His government was linked to terrorist attacks, most notoriously the explosion of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. He became an international pariah.

Colonel Qaddafi terrorized and intimidated Libyans by spasms of violence at least once a decade.

In the late 1970s and early ’80s, he eliminated even mild critics through public trials and executions. Kangaroo courts were staged on football fields or basketball courts, where each of the accused was subjected to intense interrogation, often begging for mercy while a crowd howled for death. The trials were televised live to make sure no Libyans missed the point.

The bodies of one group of students hanged in downtown Tripoli’s main square were left there to rot for about a week, opposition figures said, as traffic was rerouted to maximize the number of cars forced to pass by.

“Qaddafi’s ability to have survived so long rests on his convenient position in not being committed to a single ideology and his use of violence in such a theatrical way,” said Hisham Matar, the author of “In the Country of Men,” a novel that depicts the devastation of normal life under Colonel Qaddafi. “He deliberately tried to create a campaign that would terrorize the population, that would traumatize them to such an extent that they would never think of expressing their thoughts politically or socially.”

In the beginning, though, he brought them relative prosperity.

Libya had been desperately poor, living off the meager proceeds from exporting scrap metal left over from major World War II battles until oil was discovered in 1959. But a decade later, Libyans had touched little of their wealth.

The 1969 coup changed that. The new Libyan government forged a profound global change in the relationship between the major oil companies and the producing countries, forcing the oil giants to cede majority stakes in exchange for continued access to Libya’s oilfields. Libya also demanded a higher share of the profits. The pattern was emulated across the oil-producing states.

With the increased revenue, Colonel Qaddafi set about building roads, hospitals, schools and housing. Life expectancy, which was 51 in 1969, is now over 74. Literacy leapt to 88 percent. Per capita annual income grew to above $12,000 in recent years, though that is markedly lower than the figure for many countries endowed with vast oil income.

But Colonel Qaddafi’s mercurial changes in policy and personality kept Libyans off balance for much of his rule.

To consolidate his power, he eliminated or isolated all the 11 other members of the original revolutionary command council. Strikes or unauthorized news reports resulted in prison sentences, and illegal political activity was punishable by death. Western books were burned, and private enterprise was banned. Libyan intelligence agents engaged in all manner of skulduggery, reaching overseas to kidnap and assassinate opponents.

Colonel Qaddafi’s bankrolling of terrorist organizations set him on a collision course with the West.

“He made his entire career, at least internationally and with the Arab world, by being the bad boy,” said Lisa Anderson, the president of the American University in Cairo. “He loved being provocative.”

In the early 1980s, after Colonel Qaddafi tried to extend Libya’s territorial waters across the Gulf of Sidra, President Ronald Reagan closed the Libyan Embassy in Washington, suspended oil imports and shot down two Libyan fighters.

In London in 1984, gunshots from the Libyan People’s Bureau, as the embassy was called, killed a policewoman and wounded 11 demonstrators. In April 1986, Libyan agents working in the embassy in West Berlin were linked to the bombing of La Belle disco there, killing two American servicemen and a Turkish woman and wounding 200 people.

Mr. Reagan retaliated 10 days later by bombing targets in Libya, including Colonel Qaddafi’s house in his compound at the Bab al-Aziziya barracks in Tripoli. Colonel Qaddafi said his adopted daughter Hanna was among at least 15 killed, although some Libyans suggested that he had adopted her posthumously.

In 1988, in the deadliest terrorist act linked to Libya, 259 people aboard the Pan Am flight died when the plane exploded in midair. The falling wreckage killed 11 people on the ground in Lockerbie. In an echo of that operation, Libyan agents were believed to have been behind the explosion of a French passenger jet over Niger in West Africa in 1989, killing 170 people.

Nearly a decade of international isolation started in 1992, after Libya refused to hand over two suspects who had been indicted by the United States and Britain in the Lockerbie bombing. The United Nations imposed international economic sanctions, and when his fellow Arabs enforced them, Colonel Qaddafi turned away from the Arab world. He began his quest to become leader of Africa, a goal he came closest to achieving in 2009 when he was named the chairman of the African Union for a year.

In 1999, Libya finally handed over two Lockerbie suspects for trial in The Hague under Scottish law and reached a financial settlement with the French. The international sanctions against Libya were lifted in 2003 after it accepted responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing and agreed to pay $2.7 billion to the families of the Lockerbie victims and two victims of other attacks.

Tripoli truly began to emerge from the cold after the Sept. 11 attacks against the United States by Al Qaeda. Colonel Qaddafi condemned them and shared Libya’s own intelligence gathering on the organization with Washington. After the American-led invasion of Iraq, Colonel Qaddafi announced that Libya was giving up its efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction, including a covert nascent nuclear program obtained from a clandestine Pakistani network, and said it would cooperate with the international community in destroying its stockpile.

A former military officer, Colonel Qaddafi, 69, adopted a string of titles over the years — the Brother Leader, the Guide to the Era of the Masses, the King of Kings of Africa and, most often, the Leader of the Revolution.

But he always presented himself as beloved guide and chief clairvoyant rather than the ruler. Indeed, he seethed when the popular uprising inspired by similar revolutions next door in Tunisia and Egypt sought to drive him from power.

He tried to crush the uprising with the same violence he had wielded to stay in power, deploying tanks and bombs against not only the rebels but also unarmed civilians.

The mounting death toll prompted NATO to intervene, and the West extended diplomatic recognition to the often chaotic and rivalrous rebel government. Early rebel victories settled into a standoff, but the freezing of Libyan assets, continued NATO assaults and mounting defections took an increasing toll.

As the opaque circle around Colonel Qaddafi shrank, his sons played ever more significant roles as his advisers, but it was never clear that he had anointed any one of them as his successor. He was believed to play one against the other, granting and then withholding favor, just as he did with anyone who might challenge his authority.

After months of inconclusive fighting, the assault on Tripoli that at last drove Colonel Qaddafi from power unfolded at a breakneck pace. Insurgents captured a military base of the vaunted Khamis Brigade, where they had expected to meet fierce resistance, then sped toward Tripoli.

While pockets of Qaddafi loyalists fought pitched battles in Tripoli neighborhoods, rebels captured the Bab al-Aziziya compound that was the symbol of his power, and Colonel Qaddafi said in a radio address that he had withdrawn from the compound as a tactical maneuver. He and his heir apparent, Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, were still at large.

But Libya’s post-Qaddafi future looked to be as volatile as its past. There was still no clear plan for political succession or for maintaining security in the country. Colonel Qaddafi’s long attempt to eliminate the government left Libya in shambles, its sagging infrastructure belying its oil wealth.

“It has been 30 years of decay at a time when the world itself was completely transformed,” Ms. Anderson said.

    Qaddafi Leaves Behind Little to Guide Libya in His Absence, NYT, 24.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/25/world/africa/25assess.html

Rebels Offer Bounty for Qaddafi as Journalists Are Freed

August 24, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and ALAN COWELL

TRIPOLI, Libya — Buoyed by their seizure of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s fortress-like compound, rebels sought to strengthen their control of Tripoli on Wednesday, placing a nearly $2 million bounty on the Libyan leader’s head and dispatching fighters toward one of his last bastions of support, his tribal hometown of Surt.

In another sign that Colonel Qaddafi’s regime had come unglued, loyalists holding more than 30 foreign journalists captive in a Tripoli hotel abruptly let them go.

“We are free,” Matthew Chance, a CNN correspondent, told his network as he and the others were allowed to depart the Rixos hotel with the aid of Red Cross workers who took them away. The journalists had been held captive there since the weekend, when rebel forces first invaded Tripoli in what has proved to be a decisive turn in the six-month-old conflict.

But as a reminder that he remained on the loose, Colonel Qaddafi said in an address broadcast early Wednesday on a local Tripoli radio station that his retreat from the Bab al-Aziziya compound, which rebel forces overran on Tuesday, was only a tactical maneuver.He blamed months of NATO airstrikes for bringing down his government and vowed “martyrdom” or victory in his battle against the alliance. Urging Libyan tribes across the land to march on the capital, he said: “I call on all Tripoli residents, with all its young, old and armed brigades, to defend the city, to cleanse it, to put an end to the traitors and kick them out of our city.”

“These gangs seek to destroy Tripoli,” he said, referring to the rebels, who began taking control of Tripoli late on Sunday. “They are evil incarnate. We should fight them.”

In the eastern city of Benghazi, base of the rebel uprising, the head of the rebel Transitional National Council told a news conference Wednesday that Libyan businessmen had contributed 2 million dinars, about $1.7 million, for the capture of Colonel Qaddafi dead or alive.

“We fear a catastrophe because of his behavior,” the rebel leader, Mustafa Abdel-Jalil, told reporters there.

The rebel leaders in Benghazi also called on loyalists in Surt, more than 200 miles east of Tripoli, to join them, and said they had directed rebel fighting units to close in on Surt from Misurata in the west and the port city of Ras Lanuf in the east.

Journalists in Tripoli said they heard the sound of renewed NATO airstrikes against unspecified targets early on Wednesday and many citizens stayed at home as rebels blasted the skies with volleys of celebratory gunfire. A relief ship sent to pluck foreigners to safety was unable to dock because “the situation is still too volatile” around the port, a relief official said.

As crowds cheered into Tuesday night in the city’s Green Square, now Martyrs’ Square, some Qaddafi militiamen were still fighting around the city, and the rebels acknowledged that even the Qaddafi compound was not yet under their full control. Still, the storming of the compound represented the fruition of an oft-repeated rebel vow: “We will celebrate in Bab al-Aziziya,” the ultimate seat of power in the Qaddafi government. The conquest was spearheaded by hundreds of experienced fighters from the port city of Misurata, who developed into some of the rebels’ best organized and most effective units after months of bitter fighting with elite loyalist forces.

Jubilant rebel fighters made off with advanced machine guns, a gold-plated rifle and Colonel Qaddafi’s golf cart. One took the distinctive fur that Colonel Qaddafi wore in his first public appearance after the uprising began six months ago.

As diplomacy accelerated in the new dynamics surrounding the conflict, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France met with Mahmoud Jibril, the Libyan rebel organization’s prime minister, in Paris. Mr. Sarkozy told French journalists afterward that he had offered medical assistance and said France would maintain a military presence in Libya via the NATO alliance “as long as our Libyan friends need it,” news reports from Paris said. France was the first country to recognize the Benghazi-based rebels and played a central role in the NATO air campaign along with the United States and Britain.

At the United Nations, the United States requested a meeting of the Security Council to discuss a resolution that would release up to $1.5 billion of frozen Libyan assets for use by the rebels, news services reported.

President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia, whose country has opposed the NATO effort, raised the possibility that Moscow might recognize the rebel administration, but called for negotiations to end the fighting. “Despite the successes of the rebels, Qaddafi and his supporters still have a certain influence and military potential,” he told journalists after meeting in Siberia with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il. “In essence, there are two powers in the country.”

The rebels must consolidate their control of the country in order for Russia to consider recognizing their government, he said.

“If the rebels have enough strength and opportunities to unite the country for a new democratic start, then naturally, we will consider establishing relations with them,” Mr. Medvedev said.

In a further maneuver, China on Wednesday urged a “stable transition of power” in Libya and said it is in contact with the rebels Benghazi-based National Transitional Council, Reuters reported, suggesting that Beijing’s allegiance has shifted. China “respects the choice of the Libyan people and hopes for a stable transition of power,” Ma Zhaoxu, the Chinese foreign ministry spokesman, said in a statement.

“We have always attached significance to the important role of the National Transitional Council in solving Libya’s problems, and maintain contact with it,” Mr. Ma said. China had maintained close economic ties with the Qaddafi regime and withdrew tens of thousands of its workers at the start of the conflict, news reports said. It remained unclear on Wednesday when the leaders of the rebel council would transfer their operations from Benghazi to Tripoli, as they have said they plan to. Rebel leaders plan to meet in Qatar on Wednesday with senior envoys from the United States, Britain, France, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, Reuters reported.

Rebel leaders acknowledged Tuesday that their forces in Tripoli are not under any unified command. Some are simply Tripoli residents who have taken up guns, and have little or no military experience. And rebels from the western mountains fight in independent brigades from each town or tribe, spraying its name — “Zintan” or “Nalut” — as they go.

Rebel military commanders said that aside from the area around Bab al-Aziziya, they believed that only two other neighborhoods of Tripoli remained under the control of Qaddafi loyalists. One is Al Hadba. The other is Abu Salim, which included the Rixos Hotel, where the foreign journalists, which included representatives of The Associated Press, BBC, Reuters and Chinese television, were released around midday.

The foreign captives also included the former District of Colombia representative in Congress, Walter E. Fauntroy, who had been visiting Tripoli during the rebel invasion. The precise reason for his visit there was unclear. The death toll in Libya has been impossible to assess. It is also unclear how many rebel fighters are in Tripoli, in part because so many young men from the city are now brandishing automatic rifles. The rebels from the western mountains number a few thousand in tribal bands of 600 or more, and the Misurata fighters were said in unconfirmed reports to number around 500.

Rebel leaders struggled to explain how their leaders in the eastern city of Benghazi misled the world two days ago when they falsely reported the capture of Colonel Qaddafi’s son Seif al-Islam, one of the most powerful figures in his father’s government. He embarrassed the rebels early Tuesday by walking freely into the Rixos Hotel and boasting that his father was still in control and inside the city.

At a news conference in the Qatari capital, Doha, Mr. Jibril, the rebel prime minister, said it was essentially a misunderstanding, suggesting that Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, had mistaken an early notification of an unconfirmed rumor for an official report of Seif al-Islam’s capture. There was no explanation why the misunderstanding went uncorrected for two days.

The rebels’ reversal about the Qaddafi son’s capture led to some finger-pointing among the rebels. “I learned not to trust the people from Benghazi who are telling me these stories,” said Anwar Fekini, a rebel leader from the western mountains who had repeated the news Monday.

As for the reported capture of another Qaddafi son, Mohammed, Mr. Fekini confirmed reports that he had escaped and acknowledged some responsibility. Mohammed had played little role in the Qaddafi political machine, so Mr. Fekini said he and others agreed to place him under house arrest.

“Unfortunately it was naïve,” he said. “We are too humane to be warriors.”

 

David D. Kirkpatrick reported from Tripoli, Libya, and Alan Cowell from Paris.
Kareem Fahim contributed reporting from Tripoli, Seth Mydans from Moscow,
and Rick Gladstone from New York.

    Rebels Offer Bounty for Qaddafi as Journalists Are Freed, NYT, 24.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/25/world/africa/25libya.html

Price on Gaddafi's head as fighting goes on

TRIPOLI | Wed Aug 24, 2011
11:26am EDT
Reuters
By Missy Ryan and Ulf Laessing

TRIPOLI (Reuters) - Libya's new masters offered a million-dollar bounty for the fugitive Muammar Gaddafi on Wednesday, after he urged his men to carry on a battle that kept the capital in a state of fear.

A day after rebel forces overran his Tripoli headquarters and trashed the symbols of his 42-year dictatorship, rocket and machinegun fire from pockets of loyalists kept the irregular fighters at bay as they tried to hunt out Gaddafi and his sons.

Western leaders who backed the revolt with NATO air power remained wary of declaring outright victory while the 69-year-old Gaddafi is at large. He issued a rambling but defiant audio message overnight to remaining bastions of his supporters, some of whom may be tempted to mount an Iraq-style insurgency.

But the international powers and the rebel government-in-waiting in the eastern city of Benghazi lost no time in making arrangements for a handover of Libya's substantial foreign assets. Funds will be required to bring relief to war-battered towns and to develop oil reserves that can make Libya rich.

France was working with Britain and other allies to draft a new United Nations resolution intended to ease sanctions and asset freezes imposed on Libya when Gaddafi was in charge. Rebels also spoke of restarting oil export facilities soon.

In Benghazi, the chairman of the National Council gave a sense of urgency to finding Gaddafi, who the rebels believe may still be in or around Tripoli, having left his Bab al-Aziziya compound in the capital before it fell on Tuesday.

Mustafa Abdel Jalil, who was himself one of Gaddafi's ministers before defecting in February, said the incoming administration would amnesty any remaining member of Gaddafi's entourage who killed or captured him.

A local businessman, he added, was offering two million dinars -- or about $1.3 million -- to anyone who caught him.

"To any of his inner circle who kill Gaddafi or capture him, society will give amnesty or pardon for any crime he has committed," Abdel Jalil told a news conference in Benghazi.

Abdel Salam Jalloud, a close ally of Gaddafi who switched sides in the past week, told Al Jazeera that the veteran leader had had a plan to drop out of sight before launching a guerrilla campaign once NATO air forces had been called off.

"I believe he is in Tripoli," Jalloud said. "The rebels must open the roads, after they open the roads, he may dress in women's clothes and leave Tripoli to Algeria's borders or Chad.

"He is sick with power," he added. "He thinks he can disappear in Libya and when NATO leaves, he believes he can gather his supporters and carry out attacks ... He is delusional. He thinks he can return to power."

GADDAFI BASTIONS

The rebels, conscious of divisions among the disparate anti-Gaddafi movements which pose a threat to hopes of a stable democracy, have stressed the wish to work with former Gaddafi loyalists and to avoid the purges of the ousted ruling elite which marked Iraq's descent into sectarian anarchy after 2003.

To promote unity, however, removing Gaddafi and his immediate family from any remaining influence is a priority.

One rebel commander in Tripoli said Gaddafi might be in an area in the south of the city where clashes were going on. Rebels in the center of the capital said they had come under rocket and mortar fire from Gaddafi supporters to the south.

Gaddafi's home town of Sirte, on the Mediterranean coast between Tripoli and Benghazi, was still not in the hands of the new leadership. Nor was the southern desert city of Sabha, where the rebels reported fighting. A rebel military spokesman estimated that "95 percent of Libya is under rebel control."

Colonel Abdallah Abu Afra told Al Jazeera: "He who governs Libya is he who controls Bab al-Aziziya and that is the reality of the matter. For us, Gaddafi is over."

GADDAFI ADDRESS

In a poor-quality audio broadcast on a satellite channel, Gaddafi said the withdrawal from his headquarters in the heart of the capital was a tactical move after it had been hit by 64 NATO air strikes and he vowed "martyrdom" or victory .

Urging Libyans to cleanse the streets of traitorous "rats," he said he had secretly toured Tripoli: "I have been out a bit in Tripoli discreetly, without being seen by people, and ... I did not feel that Tripoli was in danger," he said.

Residents remained fearful, with empty streets, shuttered shops and piles of garbage testifying that life is still far from normal in the city of 2 million. Rebels manned checkpoints along the main thoroughfare into the city from the west. Food, water and medical supplies were running short in places.

On the streets of Tripoli, people were defacing or erasing Gaddafi portraits and other symbols in a city where they were once ubiquitous. They painted over street names and renamed them for rebel fighters who had become "martyrs."

One standoff was resolved when guards allowed some three dozen foreign journalists to leave a government-run hotel in Tripoli. They had been prevented from leaving for several days.

The continued shooting suggested the six-month popular insurgency against Gaddafi, a maverick Arab nationalist who defied the West and kept an iron hand on his oil-exporting, country for four decades, has not completely triumphed yet.

A spokesman for Gaddafi said the Libyan leader was ready to resist the rebels for months, or even years.

"We will turn Libya into a volcano of lava and fire under the feet of the invaders and their treacherous agents," Moussa Ibrahim said, speaking by telephone to pro-Gaddafi channels.

Rebel leaders would not enjoy peace if they carried out their plans to move to Tripoli from Benghazi, he said.

DIPLOMACY

But Gaddafi was already history in the eyes of the rebels and their political leaders planned high-level talks in Qatar on Wednesday with envoys of the United States, Britain, France, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates on the way ahead.

Another meeting was scheduled for Thursday in Istanbul.

China urged a "stable transition of power" in Libya and said on Wednesday it was in contact with the rebel council, the clearest sign yet that Beijing has effectively shifted recognition to forces poised to defeat Gaddafi.

China "respects the choice of the Libyan people," Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said in a statement.

A senior representative for reconstruction in the rebel movement said a new government would honor all the oil contracts granted during the Gaddafi era, including those of Chinese companies. "The contracts in the oil fields are absolutely sacrosanct," Ahmed Jehani told Reuters Insider TV.

"All lawful contracts will be honored whether they are in the oil and gas complex or in the contracting... We have contracts that were negotiated ... They were auctioned openly ... There's no question of revoking any contract."

A spokesman for rebel-run oil firm AGOCO had warned on Monday Chinese and Russian firms could lose out on oil contracts for failing to back the rebellion.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev urged Gaddafi and his foes to stop fighting and talk. "We want the Libyans to come to an agreement among themselves," he said, suggesting that Moscow could recognize the rebel government if it unites the country.

China and Russia, usually opposed to foreign intervention in sovereign states, did not veto a U.N. Security Council resolution in March that authorized NATO to use air power to protect Libyan civilians. But they criticized the scale of the air campaign and called for a negotiated solution.

The fall of Gaddafi, with the arresting images on Arab satellite TV of rebels stomping through his sanctum and laying waste to the props of his power, could invigorate other revolts in the Arab world, such as in Syria where President Bashar al-Assad has launched bloody military crackdowns on protesters.

(Reporting by Peter Graff, Ulf Laessing, Missy Ryan, Zohra Bensemra and Leon Malherbe in Tripoli, Robert Birsel in Benghazi, Hamid Ould Ahmed in Algiers, Souhail Karam in Rabat, Richard Valdmanis, Christian Lowe and Giles Elgood in Tunis, Sami Aboudi, Dina Zayed and Tom Pfeiffer in Cairo, Catherine Hornby in Rome, Denis Dyomkin in Sosnovy Bor and Chris Buckley in Beijing; Writing by Giles Elgood and Alastair Macdonald)

    Price on Gaddafi's head as fighting goes on, R, 24.8.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/24/us-libya-idUSTRE77A2Y920110824

Qaddafi Defiant After Rebel Takeover

August 24, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and ALAN COWELL

TRIPOLI, Libya — Rebel fighters scoured Tripoli on Wednesday in their continued search for an elusive and defiant Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, a day after they crashed through the gates of his fortresslike compound, running madly across its sprawling lawns, ransacking its barracks for weapons and carting off mementos of his 42-year dictatorship.

As a reminder that he remained on the loose, Colonel Qaddafi, in an address broadcast early Wednesday over a local Tripoli radio station, called his retreat from the compound “tactical,” several news reports said. He blamed months of NATO airstrikes for bringing down his compound and vowed “martyrdom” or victory in his battle against the alliance. It was the second such address by Colonel Qaddafi, 69, since his forces lost control of Tripoli.

The rebel victory on Tuesday, backed by NATO airstrikes and seasoned reinforcements, was by no means complete. Reporters in the city said they heard the sound of renewed NATO airstrikes against unspecified targets early on Wednesday. Dozens of reporters and other foreigners remained trapped in a luxury hotel, held there by pro-Qaddafi gunmen. A relief ship sent to pluck foreigners to safety was unable to dock because “the situation is still too volatile” around the port, a relief official said.

As crowds cheered into Tuesday night in the city’s Green Square, now Martyrs’ Square, some Qaddafi militiamen were still fighting around the city, and the rebels acknowledged that even the Qaddafi compound, called Bab al-Aziziya, was not yet under their full control.

Still, the storming of the compound represented the fruition of an oft-repeated rebel vow: “We will celebrate in Bab al-Aziziya,” the ultimate seat of power in the Qaddafi government. The conquest was spearheaded by hundreds of experienced fighters from the port city of Misurata, who developed into some of the rebels’ best organized and most effective units after months of bitter fighting with elite loyalist forces.

Jubilant rebel fighters made off with advanced machine guns, a gold-plated rifle and Colonel Qaddafi’s golf cart. One took the distinctive fur that Colonel Qaddafi wore in his first public appearance after the uprising began six months ago.

While the pillaging of Bab al-Aziziya was the most conclusive evidence yet that Colonel Qaddafi’s rule was at an end, it was not yet clear how much his fall would do to pacify Qaddafi partisans who may feel they have much to lose from the rebels’ ascendance, especially while their leader remains at large.

As diplomacy accelerated in the new dynamics surrounding the conflict, the French government announced that President Nicolas Sarkozy would meet Mahmoud Jibril, the rebel prime minister, later Wednesday in Paris. France was the first country to recognize the Benghazi-based rebels and played a central role in the NATO air campaign along with the United States and Britain.

President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia, whose country has opposed the NATO effort, was quoted as calling for negotiations, saying Colonel Qaddafi still retained influence and power.

In a further maneuver, China on Wednesday urged a “stable transition of power” in Libya and said it is in contact with the rebels Benghazi-based National Transitional Council, Reuters reported, suggesting that Beijing’s allegiance has shifted. China “respects the choice of the Libyan people and hopes for a stable transition of power,” Mao Zhaoxu, the Chinese foreign ministry spokesman, said in a statement.

“We have always attached significance to the important role of the National Transitional Council in solving Libya’s problems, and maintain contact with it,” Mr. Ma said. China had maintained close economic ties with the Qaddafi regime and withdrew tens of thousands of its workers at the start of the conflict, news reports said. It remained unclear on Wednesday when the leaders of the rebel council would transfer their operations from Benghazi to Tripoli, as they have said they plan to. Rebel leaders plan to meet in Qatar on Wednesday with senior envoys from the United States, Britain, France, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, Reuters reported.

Rebel leaders acknowledged Tuesday that their forces in Tripoli are not under any unified command. Some are simply Tripoli residents who have taken up guns, and have little or no military experience. And rebels from the western mountains fight in independent brigades from each town or tribe, spraying its name — “Zintan” or “Nalut” — as they go.

Rebel military commanders said that aside from the area around Bab al-Aziziya, they believed that only two other neighborhoods of Tripoli remained under the control of Qaddafi loyalists. One is Al Hadba. The other is Abu Salim, which includes the Rixos Hotel. A group of journalists have been trapped there for days, first by Colonel Qaddafi’s guards and now by gunfire outside. On Tuesday the BBC reported that the hotel had come under attack as well, forcing the journalists to take shelter.

“It’s desperately hard to see how we will get out,” Matthew Price, a BBC reporter in the hotel, said in a broadcast on Wednesday, recounting how an armed guard had raised his rifle to prevent a cameraman among the 35 trapped journalists and other foreigners from leaving. After five days of being held there, he said, food and water supplies were running out, electric power was sporadic and cable and satellite reception was “all off.”

Mr. Price said the foreigners included a United States congressman, but did not identify him by name. The journalist also said he believed there may be pro-Qaddafi marksmen on the roof.

Gunmen and snipers hostile to the rebels also continue to operate in many other neighborhoods, and doctors at clinics and hospitals around Tripoli reported hundreds of gunshot wounds over the last 72 hours, even in neighborhoods rebels consider well controlled.

The death toll was impossible to assess. Doctors at a small clinic in the relatively safe neighborhood of Jansur reported receiving 30 patients injured in the fighting, 6 of whom died overnight.

It is also unclear how many rebel fighters are in Tripoli, in part because so many young men from the city are now brandishing automatic rifles. The rebels from the western mountains number a few thousand in tribal bands of 600 or more, and the Misurata fighters were said in unconfirmed reports to number around 500.

Rebel leaders struggled to explain how their leaders in the eastern city of Benghazi misled the world two days ago when they falsely reported the capture of Colonel Qaddafi’s son Seif al-Islam, one of the most powerful figures in his father’s government. He embarrassed the rebels early Tuesday by walking freely into the Rixos Hotel and boasting that his father was still in control and inside the city.

In a news conference in the Qatari capital, Doha, Mahmoud Jabril, a top rebel leader, said it was essentially a misunderstanding, suggesting that Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, had mistaken an early notification of an unconfirmed rumor for an official report of Seif al-Islam’s capture. There was no explanation why the misunderstanding went uncorrected for two days.

The rebels’ reversal about the Qaddafi son’s capture led to some finger-pointing among the rebels. “I learned not to trust the people from Benghazi who are telling me these stories,” said Anwar Fekini, a rebel leader from the western mountains who had repeated the news Monday.

As for the reported capture of another Qaddafi son, Mohammed, Mr. Fekini confirmed reports that he had escaped and acknowledged some responsibility. Mohammed had played little role in the Qaddafi political machine, so Mr. Fekini said he and others agreed to place him under house arrest.

“Unfortunately it was naïve,” he said. “We are too humane to be warriors.”

Rebel officials and others close to Colonel Qaddafi both said Tuesday that they believed that he had not gone far.

“We believe that he is either in Tripoli or close to Tripoli,” Guma el-Gamaty, a spokesman for the rebels leadership, told BBC television. “Sooner or later he will be found alive and arrested — and hopefully that is the best outcome we want — or if he resists, he will be killed.”

In addition to Seif al-Islam’s boast about his father, Russian news agencies reported earlier that Colonel Qaddafi had a telephone conversation with the Russian head of the World Chess Federation, Kirsan N. Ilyumzhinov, who is in Colonel Qaddafi’s circle of foreign friends. Colonel Qaddafi had told his chess mate that he was alive and well in Tripoli, Mr. Ilyumzhinov reportedly said.

NATO officials in Brussels and London said the alliance’s warplanes, which have been helping the rebels, were flying reconnaissance and other missions over Libya.

“Our mission is not over yet,” said Col. Roland Lavoie, a NATO spokesman, at a news conference in Naples, Italy, urging pro-Qaddafi forces to return to their barracks. “Until this is the case we will carry on with our mission. The situation in Tripoli is still very serious and very dangerous.”

Tripoli’s two largest hospitals are in areas still under Qaddafi control, so the rebels have set up makeshift clinics in homes around downtown to treat the wounded before moving them to other neighborhoods or the rebel-held city of Zawiyah for care.

Elsewhere, rebels claimed they continued to edge along the coast from the east, though Colonel Qaddafi’s loyalists remain in control of his tribe’s strongholds, Surt on the Mediterranean and Sabha to the south. On Tuesday, rebels seized control of Ras Lanuf, an important oil port.

Even amid the jubilation in Bab al-Aziziya, though, such was the uncertainty about the control of Tripoli that the International Organization for Migration in Geneva said it had delayed a seaborne mission to rescue hundreds of foreigners because “security guarantees and assurances are no longer in place,” said Jemini Pandya, a spokeswoman for the organization.

A Tripoli-bound ship that left the eastern port of Benghazi on Monday would remain at sea until some level of safety for the mission could be assured, she said in a telephone interview. “It’s still lying just offshore and we are still trying to get security guarantees,” Ms. Pandya said on Wednesday. “The situation is still too volatile and security cannot be guaranteed in the port area.”

 

David D. Kirkpatrick reported from Tripoli, Libya, and Alan Cowell from Paris. Kareem Fahim contributed reporting from Tripoli, Libya, and Rick Gladstone from New York.

    Qaddafi Defiant After Rebel Takeover, NYT, 24.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/25/world/africa/25libya.html

Airstrikes More Difficult as War Moves to Tripoli

August 23, 2011
The New York Times
By ERIC SCHMITT and ELISABETH BUMIILLER

WASHINGTON — The NATO air campaign that was instrumental in helping the rebels advance into Tripoli is hamstrung in many ways now that the fighting has turned into complex house-to-house urban warfare, American military and allied officials said Tuesday.

For legal and practical reasons, as well as to avoid the perception of bombing indiscriminately inside Tripoli, the Libyan capital, allied warplanes will continue to prowl for targets, but mostly on the outskirts of the city where government troops might be trying to escape or reinforce Tripoli — and where the risk of civilian casualties is much lower, allied officials said.

A NATO spokesman, Col. Roland Lavoie, said at a news conference in Naples, Italy, on Tuesday that “there are still weapons out there and there are still targets that we could hit if we have any signs that they could represent a threat to the civilian population.”

But he and other NATO officials acknowledged that the urban environment in Tripoli, a city of about two million people, was “far more complex” for airstrikes than past targets have been.

Until now, the vast majority of targets attacked in Tripoli have been sites suspected of being military command headquarters or weapons-storage buildings that NATO monitored closely for days or weeks with surveillance aircraft, including Predator drones, to ensure that no civilians were living or working there.

Allied targeting experts and fighter pilots do not have that option with the rapidly shifting battle lines in block-by-block combat carried on by fighters on both sides dressed in civilian clothing.

“It could be difficult, because the use of air power, to a large degree, is negated when you get into this kind of urban warfare,” Senator John McCain said Tuesday on “The Early Show” on CBS. “It’s hard to identify targets and hard to be effective. But I don’t think there’s any doubt of the eventual outcome.”

This is hardly the first time that the United States or NATO has dealt with the challenge of rooting out foes in urban environments. American troops, in particular, learned many lessons combating the insurgency in Baghdad. While the United States and NATO do not have major armies on the ground in Libya, the allies have passed on these lessons to the rebel fighters. Applying them, they think, will allow rebels who had been dependent on strong NATO air support for many of their past gains to drive Qaddafi loyalists out of Tripoli completely.

A NATO military official said Tuesday, for instance, that British and French commandos were on the ground with the rebels in Tripoli offering “fairly extensive” help. “They’re doing a lot of coordination with some of the air assets that we have to bring specific targeting on the remnants of the pro-Qaddafi regime,” the official said, describing a traditional role of commandos in calling in airstrikes on precise targets, or instructing the rebels on how to do it themselves.

The military official said he did not know if Central Intelligence Agency operatives in Libya were also working with the rebels in Tripoli, but he said “they certainly should be.”

Outside Tripoli, fighting continued on Tuesday in government strongholds like Surt and Sabha, and Colonel Lavoie said allied warplanes would continue to use precision weapons to enforce the United Nations mandate to protect civilians. “It might not be on the front line,” he said. “It might be in the approaches of Tripoli if there are movements of vehicles.”

NATO dropped little ordnance in the last 24 hours — the French bombed some small mobile rocket launchers in Brega — and the United States dropped none.

“This is not a situation where there’s a whole lot of kinetic targeting taking place from the air,” an American defense official said. “There is an abundance of caution being exercised when you’re working in a confined urban environment. Operations are obviously moving in favor of the rebels every day, so you don’t want to do things that would be counterproductive to that progress.”

Pentagon officials said that by Tuesday the rebels controlled large portions of Tripoli, but they said there remained pockets where Qaddafi forces continued to fight back. “It’s still a pretty unclear picture, but for the most part the rebels appear to have control of most areas,” the senior defense official said.

A senior NATO diplomat said that by late Tuesday there were four or five main pockets of resistance from fighters loyal to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, and that the limitations on allied air power put more of an onus on rebel fighters to combat loyalist troops still fighting throughout the capital.

Moreover, NATO officials acknowledged they did not have reliable estimates on the number of soldiers fighting a last-ditch campaign to back Colonel Qaddafi, which makes it hard to judge when the rebels might establish firm control over the capital.

The official also said that Colonel Qaddafi appeared not to be in his compound, stormed by the rebels on Tuesday, but that he remained in Libya although “probably” not in Tripoli.

The official said that a compound wall that was broken down so the rebels could enter the area appeared to have been blasted through on the ground and was not caused by an airstrike.

Pentagon officials said that the United States continued to fly Predator drones over Tripoli and had sent more in recent weeks at the request of NATO. The United States also continued to provide refueling planes and additional surveillance aircraft.

One Libya expert cautioned against the notion that NATO and rebel forces may face a protracted urban conflict, saying that many remaining Libyan troops had hastily retreated into the capital in recent days; had not prepared elaborate defenses; are short on fuel, water and ammunition; and have little experience fighting an urban guerrilla war.

“They don’t have the practice of defending a city or carrying out an insurgency, and soldier for soldier they’re being outfought by the rebels,” said Frederic Wehrey, a senior policy analyst with the RAND Corporation who follows Libya closely.

    Airstrikes More Difficult as War Moves to Tripoli, NYT, 23.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/24/world/africa/24military.html

Waves of Disinformation and Confusion

Swamp the Truth in Libya

August 23, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and ROD NORDLAND

TRIPOLI, Libya — Truth was first a casualty in Libya well before this war began, and the war has not improved matters at all, on any side.

Libya has long been a republic of lies or, in the words of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, “the only democracy in the world.” Colonel Qaddafi was the absolute dictator who claimed years ago to have stepped down from all public posts. He said he was more of a sage, or guide, to Libya’s six million citizens.

In Libya, as with authoritarian governments generally, leaders are accustomed to dictating how people should think; no matter how outrageous the lie or how obviously bizarre (as was often the case in Libya), it is often received as reality by a public numbed by isolation and oppression. So it may not be surprising that the rebels now challenging Colonel Qaddafi sometimes sound like him, because he is the only leader they ever knew. Many of the rebels’ leaders were in Colonel Qaddafi’s top echelons, helping defend and promote his vision, and version, of reality.

A case in point was the rebels’ claim on Sunday that they had arrested Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, the leader’s son who is often talked of as the heir apparent. The claim was issued with such authority, even setting off a debate among rebels over what to do with the younger Mr. Qaddafi, that the International Criminal Court said he should be transported to The Hague.

By the wee hours of Tuesday morning, however, Mr. Qaddafi was squiring journalists around neighborhoods filled with Qaddafi sympathizers, saying the rebels who had rolled into the city had fallen into a trap.

Information, or rather truthful information, is often difficult to come by in any war zone. Disinformation is a powerful tool that can be used to mislead the enemy, hide tactics, instigate fear or win public support. There is also the fog of war, the confusion in communications and the chaos of the battlefield that can obscure any objective understanding.

But in Libya, with so many competing factions and overlapping agendas — Qaddafi loyalists, competing tribes, western guerrillas, eastern rebels, NATO allies — all of that is true, to an exceptional degree.

By sunrise, it seemed that the younger Qaddafi’s claim of having sprung an elaborate trap was just another lie, as rebels poured into Colonel Qaddafi’s Bab al-Aziziya compound.

“It’s a timely reminder that Twitter, 24-hour rolling news channels and satphones are still useless against the fog of war,” Rob Crilly of The Daily Telegraph of London wrote on Tuesday.

During the six months of fighting, both the rebels and Colonel Qaddafi’s forces repeatedly overstated or misrepresented their battlefield abilities and accomplishments. The rebels said they had seized cities, only to be pushed back hours or days later; on Tuesday, Colonel Qaddafi’s forces insisted that they controlled Tripoli. In the early days of the NATO intervention, optimistic claims about the rebels’ capacities and battlefield gains seemed intended to reassure queasy domestic audiences that a quick victory was possible.

One day before rebels invaded Colonel Qaddafi’s compound, a NATO spokesman, Col. Roland Lavoie, was asked where the Libyan leader might be hiding.

“I don’t have a clue,” he said at a news conference in Italy, offering an answer with the ring of truth.

Then he added, perhaps less convincingly, “I’m not sure it really does matter.”

The examples of spin from all sides provide one of many echoes in Libya of the war in Iraq and the fall of Saddam Hussein. For months after Mr. Hussein slipped into hiding, the American military had insisted that his capture was unimportant — until, of course, they captured him and promptly distributed images of him having lice picked from his hair. Officials were jubilant.

When the Americans rolled into Baghdad, they did so with what turned out to be a false justification — that Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction.” That claim was so deeply accepted by the troops that they packed gas masks and spent much of the critical first weeks looking for unconventional weapons, rather than controlling looters, which was one of the Iraqi grievances that later fed an insurgency.

Sometimes it is hard to tell if the people spreading the information believe it themselves. “There are no American infidels in Baghdad — never,” Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf, Mr. Hussein’s prevaricating minister of information, said long after American troops had entered the city.

Was this disinformation? Self-deception?

When it was no longer possible to deny their presence, after American troops had reached the center of the city, Mr. Sahhaf had a ready reply. “They’re coming to surrender or be burned in their tanks,” he said.

Those Iraqi troops who took him seriously — and there were some — died.

Unlike Iraq, the misinformation in Libya has sometimes taken on the feel of a comic opera.

When the uprising against Colonel Qaddafi began, he blamed Al Qaeda and youths “fueled by milk and Nescafé spiked with hallucinogenic drugs.” When that did not get enough traction, he said of the rebels: “They feel trigger happy, and they shoot especially when they are stoned on drugs.”

His maladroit spokesmen at one point showed journalists what they said were 36 million doses of confiscated hallucinogens — which proved to be Tramadol, a common painkiller.

Still, the rebels have offered their own far-fetched claims, like mass rapes by loyalist troops issued tablets of Viagra. Although the rebels have not offered credible proof, that claim is nonetheless the basis of an investigation by the International Criminal Court.

And there is the mantra, with racist overtones, that the Qaddafi government is using African mercenaries, which rebels repeat as fact over and over. There have been no confirmed cases of that; supposedly there are many African prisoners of war being held in Benghazi, but conveniently journalists are not allowed to see them. There are, however, African guest workers, poorly paid migrant labor, many of whom, unarmed, have been labeled mercenaries.

Both sides, of course, pronounce victory as a certainty.

In the case of Mahmoud Jibril, the rebel prime minister, it is just a little late. “The total collapse of the regime could materialize in the next few weeks,” he said during a visit to Washington in May.

 

David D. Kirkpatrick reported from Tripoli, and Rod Nordland from Kabul, Afghanistan.

    Waves of Disinformation and Confusion Swamp the Truth in Libya, NYT, 23.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/24/world/africa/24fog.html

Libya’s Bloody Road to Freedom

August 23, 2011
The New York Times
By AZZA KAMEL MAGHUR

Ottawa

IT’S called a street, but it’s really a neighborhood. Al Sarim Street in Tripoli, the Libyan capital, falls between low-lying Nasr Street and elevated Al Jumhuriyya Street. Its older buildings date from the Italian colonial era. Most were built as single-story homes on the upper side of the street. I used to drive down this street daily on my way home from my law firm nearby.

But on Saturday, the day before rebel forces poured into Tripoli, this calm neighborhood, which empties out at noon to allow traffic to pass through its wide streets with ease, became a fireball.

Last fall, a few months before the revolution erupted, I was summoned to the regime’s party headquarters in Tripoli, where I was interrogated by seven pillars of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s security establishment. They were angry about an article I’d published in the newspaper Oya criticizing undemocratic laws. They accused me of instigating anarchy and refusing to obey the law. My phone was tapped and a guard was posted at the door of my law office. In March, I left my law practice behind and fled to Canada with my 3-year-old daughter.

The neighborhood we left behind is clean, calm and uncrowded, despite the presence of several businesses and public buildings and its proximity to downtown Tripoli. As soon as you reach the western end of Al Sarim Street, the Mediterranean coastline stretches up ahead of you, and you can see a large park. The neighborhood contains the houses of the well-to-do, but it is also home to the first public housing complex built in Tripoli, a cluster of gray four-story buildings that blend into the rest of the neighborhood’s buildings, and are indistinguishable from them.

When life in Libya became harder, the majority of the people living on the upper side of the neighborhood converted the street-facing parts of their homes into shops and artisanal stores. They also added extra floors to their homes, in response to a growing housing crisis that had overtaken the nation.

The area is also known as Al Zuhur — the neighborhood of flowers — because of the trees and plants that flourish behind the walls of houses, and the fact that the street is shaded by the decorative trees with their intertwining branches. The higher part of the street is planted with evergreen shrubs that hang all along the slope until Nasr Street, where the fortress of the state television building sits.

Typically, the neighborhood youths stand on corners and intersections, or in front of the shops, talking, joking or just staring at passers-by.

But last Saturday was different. That evening, the call to prayer began from the minarets of the Ben Nabi and Buhmeira mosques after sundown and continued to ring out for longer than usual — a signal to take to the streets. The young men ran out of their houses to the rhythm of “God is great, God is great, thanks be to God.”

Some left their homes with dates in their mouths that they hadn’t yet had time to chew, while others rushed out still swallowing the day’s first drink of water after the Ramadan fast.

They left without having organized themselves beforehand, intent on achieving freedom or martyrdom. The youths of Al Zuhur were jasmine trees whose petals had scattered, night-blooming flowers that had blossomed with sunset, their beautiful nighttime scent wafting through like the Arabian jasmine that the young men of Tripoli sell to Libyan ladies in traditional attire on their way to weddings.

As chronicled in phone calls to Al Jazeera from Tripoli and in Facebook posts, Al Sarim Street and its young men rose up with the rest of Tripoli, the city whose head was yanked back by the hair and whose teeth were broken each time it raised its head to try and smell the scent of freedom.

The young men rushed out, during the iftar meal that breaks the daily Ramadan fast, their mothers ululating behind them and their fathers praying along with the mosques, knowing deep in their hearts that they would either return with their heads raised high, carrying the torches of freedom, or not at all.

Last weekend, all along Al Sarim Street, martyrs fell victim to the bullets of cowardly snipers hiding on the roofs of buildings, fighting for their freedom tooth and nail as they broke their city’s humiliating blockade. They fell on the street right in front of their mothers and fathers, who stood on balconies and doorsteps, bidding them farewell with cries and prayers.

The corpses mounted on the hot pavement, a testament to the birth of Tripoli’s freedom. The light in their still open eyes will not be extinguished, and their blood, which has spilled on the streets, will not cool until all of Tripoli is free, the scent of flowers and henna returns, and its people come out singing an old Libyan tune by Tripoli’s blind but visionary singer, Nuri Kamal: “Jasmine flower, you have reminded us of his smile and days from our past.”

 

Azza Kamel Maghur is a Libyan lawyer and human rights activist.
This essay was translated by Ghenwa Hayek from the Arabic.

    Libya’s Bloody Road to Freedom, NYT, 23.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/24/opinion/libyas-bloody-road-to-freedom.html

Factbox: Libya's rebel national council

Tue Aug 23, 2011
10:26am EDT
Reuters

(Reuters) - Here are some details about the rebels' National Transitional Council:

* HOW WAS IT FORMED?

-- Leaders of the February 17th Coalition, a Benghazi-based rebel movement formed as an uprising spread against Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, said local councils were formed in towns that threw off Gaddafi's control and they sent representatives to form the NTC.

-- The council has 40 members, each responsible for representing a geographical area or a social segment such as youth, women or political prisoners. Other members come from regions that have until recent days been under Gaddafi's control including Tripoli and the council has said naming them would put them in danger.

 

* WHAT HAS IT BEEN DOING?

-- The council says it aims to ensure territorial security, lead efforts to "liberate" all the country and support town councils in restoring normal life. It also oversees initial efforts to create a constituent assembly to draft a new constitution to be put to a referendum and to guide conduct of foreign policy. It has committees on areas such as economics, political affairs, legal affairs security and defense.

-- Separately, an executive committee, or cabinet, has been set up, although it was officially dismissed this month over "shortcomings" related to the unexplained killing of military commander Abdel Fattah Younes in July. The NTC was not affected by the dismissal of the executive. NTC chief Jalil said that as the council was not elected it would continue for only the first eight months of a 20-month transitional period leading to elections.

 

* WHAT IS ITS LEGITIMACY?

-- Rebel officials say they won tentative popular backing in the first days of the uprising when thousands massed in front of Benghazi's seafront courthouse -- the heart of the revolt -- and cheered support as members of the February 17th Coalition announced their first steps to defend the city, manage hospitals and guarantee basic services.

Senior figures from the rebellion toured eastern towns and villages in the following days to secure support for the national council, which came into being on March 5.

Rebel officials say the council reflects a balance between competence and consensus. But it faced a challenge from the start: reconciling the democratic ambitions of the mostly young citizens who threw off Gaddafi's rule with the views of town and village elders who fear for Libya's traditional social order.

 

* WHO IS IN CHARGE?

* Mustafa Abdel Jalil, head of the council. A mild-mannered consensus builder in his late 50s who used to be Gaddafi's justice minister but quit in February over what he saw as the excessive use of violence used against the Benghazi protesters.

-- Jalil had tendered his resignation several times after resisting high-level pressure to execute detainees he believed were innocent, say people who know him. The soft-spoken Jalil, who often wears a traditional east Libyan red Tagia hat, at times leaned toward negotiating with Tripoli, an idea quickly rejected by other officials.

* Mahmoud Jibril, head of the council's executive committee, is referred to as the NTC's prime minister. A strategy consultant who spent most of his career abroad, Jibril was head of Libya's state economic think-tank but resigned after Gaddafi overruled his suggestions for liberalizing the economy.

-- He has extensive foreign contacts and came from relative obscurity to become the rebels' roving envoy. But his travels have frustrated some colleagues and foreign backers.

* Confusion over who heads the rebels' military wing has at times echoed their chaotic strategy on the ground. Omar Hariri, who was one of the officers along with Gaddafi who overthrew King Idris in 1969 but was then jailed, heads military affairs on the NTC.

* The joint chief of staff was Abdel Fattah Younes, who was Gaddafi's interior minister and an experienced military man before defecting to the rebels, until he was killed. His deputy, Suleiman Mahmoud has been asked to take over and is considering taking up the post. The executive committee's acting defense minister is Galal Degheli.

* Ali Tarhouni is a U.S.-based academic and opposition figure in exile who returned to Libya to take charge of economic, financial and oil matters on the executive committee. Abdel Hafiz Ghoga, the council's official spokesman and vice chairman, is a human rights lawyer who represented families of victims of a 1996 prison massacre.

* The head of the NTC's political committee is Fatih Baja. "Of course we're ready to take over," Baja told Reuters last week. "We've been preparing for this since the first month of the revolution." Baja previously worked on the staff at Gar Yunis University and has a degree in political science.

* Salwa Fawzi El-Deghali previously taught at the Academy of Graduate Studies in Benghazi and has a degree in constitutional law. El-Deghali is responsible for Legal Affairs.

Sources: Reuters/NTC

(Reporting by Tom Pfeiffer; Additional reporting by Angus MacSwan, Robert Birsel
and David Cutler)

    Factbox: Libya's rebel national council, R, 23.8.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/23/us-libya-rebel-council-idUSTRE77M45E20110823

Factbox: Gaddafi's compound in Tripoli

Tue Aug 23, 2011
7:43am EDT
Reuters

(Reuters) - Forces loyal to Muammar Gaddafi are making a stand at his fortified Bab al-Aziziya compound in the center of Tripoli.

Here are some details about the area:

* Bab al-Aziziya means Splendid Gate and the compound houses Gaddafi's private quarters as well as a military barracks and other installations.

* According to rebel military official Major General Umar al-Hariri, the barracks are linked to underground tunnels up to 30 km (20 miles) long, some of which lead to the sea.

* The six sq km base is located south of Tripoli at the northern end of Airport Highway.

* The compound has facilities for banquets and other public events but it is not lavish.

* The compound was the target of a 1986 U.S. bombing of Libya. U.S. President Ronald Reagan said it was in retaliation for what he called Libyan complicity in the bombing of a Berlin night club.

* After the 1986 bombing, a sculpture was created depicting a hand crushing a fighter aircraft. Gaddafi used the backdrop in March in a television broadcast to rally supporters.

* At the beginning of the revolt in March, thousands of Libyans packed into the heavily fortified compound to form a "human shield" against possible air strikes by allied forces.

* It was also bombed by NATO aircraft and in June guard towers along the walls were brought down. Gaddafi was unhurt in a NATO airstrike on his compound in April when three people were killed, in what a government spokesman said was an assassination attempt on the Libyan leader.

(Reporting by David Cutler, London Editorial Reference Unit)

    Factbox: Gaddafi's compound in Tripoli, R, 23.8.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/23/us-libya-gaddafi-compound-idUSTRE77M2RZ20110823

New Clashes Erupt Around Qaddafi Site

August 23, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK, KAREEM FAHIM AND ALAN COWELL

TRIPOLI, Libya — The crackle of gunfire and the rumble of explosions spread across Tripoli in renewed fighting on Tuesday, and Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi remained at large hours after his son Seif al-Islam made a surprise appearance at a hotel with foreign journalists, taunting the rebels who have invaded the city, claiming his father is safe and urging loyalist forces to resist.

Video showed billows of smoke rising above several districts and news reports said some of the heaviest clashes took place around Colonel Qaddafi’s compound. The waves of gunfire drowned out the rebels’ earlier euphoria after their lightning strike into Tripoli on Sunday.

It was not clear whether the recent rebel gains were the beginnings of a decisive victory or, rather, the start of potentially prolonged street-fighting for control of the capital. NATO officials in Brussels and London said the alliance’s warplanes were flying reconnaissance and other missions over Libya but declined to say whether the planes had bombed the fortified Qaddafi compound in Tripoli.

“Our mission is not over yet,” said Col. Roland Lavoie, a NATO spokesman, at a news conference in Naples, Italy, urging pro-Qaddafi forces to return to their barracks. “Until this is the case we will carry on with our mission.” Asked if the alliance knew where Colonel Qaddafi was, he said: “We don’t know. I don’t have a clue.”

He acknowledged that the urban environment in Tripoli, a city of some two million, was “far more complex” for air strikes, but said the alliance had precision weapons at its disposal to enforce its United Nations Security Council mandate, which is to protect civilians from attack.

While rebel leaders professed on Monday to be making progress in securing Tripoli and planning for a post-Qaddafi government, and international leaders hailed the beginnings of a new era in Libya, the immediate aftermath of the invasion was a vacuum of power, with no cohesive rebel government in place and remnants of the Qaddafi government still in evidence.

Such was the uncertainty that the International Organization for Migration in Geneva said it had delayed a seaborne mission to rescue hundreds of foreigners from Tripoli because “security guarantees and assurances are no longer in place,” said Jemini Pandya, a spokeswoman for the organization. A ship that left the eastern port of Benghazi on Monday would remain at sea until some level of safety for the mission could be assured but would not dock in Tripoli as planned on Tuesday, she said in a telephone interview.

Additionally, Al Arabiya satellite television reported, rebels killed dozens of pro-Qaddafi troops on Tuesday in a convoy from Colonel Qaddafi’s hometown of Surt. There was no independent corroboration of the report. The Pentagon reported late on Monday that its warplanes had shot down a Scud missile fired from Surt.

The BBC reported meanwhile that the Qaddafi-controlled Rixos luxury hotel in central Tripoli where most foreign reporters are based had also come under attack on Tuesday, sending some reporters to take cover in a basement. But no further details were available.

“There are still some pockets of resistance,” the French foreign minister, Alain Juppé, said in a radio interview in Paris, but he said he believed “the fall of Qaddafi is close.” Along with the United States and Britain, France has played a central role in the diplomatic and military campaigns to oust Colonel Qaddafi and Mr. Juppé said those efforts still needed time “to get to the end of this operation.”

On the diplomatic front, Oman and Bahrain said on Tuesday that they formally recognized the rebel authorities, following Egypt, which took the same step on Monday, calling the Transitional National Council the “new regime.” Mohammed Amr, Egypt’s foreign minister, said that the council would take over the Libyan Embassy in Cairo, and would assume Libya’s seat on the Arab League, which is based in Cairo.

It was not clear if the renewed fighting was linked to the surprise reappearance of Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, whose capture the rebels had trumpeted since Sunday but who walked as a free man to the Rixos Hotel early Tuesday. He boasted to foreign journalists there that his father was safe in Tripoli, his government was still “in control” and that the rebels had been lured into a trap, the BBC and news services reported. The episode raised significant questions about the credibility of rebel leaders who had claimed to be holding him prisoner.

It was not clear whether he had been in rebel custody and escaped, or was never held at all. Another Qaddafi son, Muhammed, escaped from house arrest on Monday.

With a full beard and wearing an olive-green T-shirt and camouflage trousers, Seif al-Islam took reporters on a drive through parts of the city still under the regime’s control, The Associated Press reported. The tour went through streets full of armed Qaddafi backers, controlled by roadblocks, and into the Qaddafi stronghold neighborhood Bu Slim, The A. P. said.

At Colonel Qaddafi’s Bab al-Aziziya compound, at least a hundred men were waiting in lines for guns being distributed to volunteers to defend the regime. Seif al-Islam shook hands with supporters, beaming and flashing the “V,” for victory, sign.

“We are here. This is our country. This is our people, and we live here, and we die here,” he told A.P. Television News. “And we are going to win, because the people are with us. That’s why were are going to win. Look at them — look at them, in the streets, everywhere!”

“We are going to break the backbone of the rebels,” he said, according to The A.P.

On Monday, fighters hostile to the rebels still battled on the streets and rooftops of Tripoli, wounding or killing at least a dozen people. And Colonel Qaddafi’s green flag still flew in parts of Tripoli and over at least two major cities considered strongholds of his tribe, Sabha to the south and Surt on the coast roughly midway between Tripoli and Benghazi.

In a brief address while on vacation on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., President Obama recognized both the historic nature of the rebels’ accomplishment and the troubles they face. Saying that the future of Libya “is in the hands of its people,” he cautioned that “there will be huge challenges ahead.” He pledged that the United States would seek to help Libya in its attempt to establish democracy.

Mahmud Nacua, a Libyan rebel representative in London, told reporters that the insurgents would “look under every stone” for Colonel Qaddafi so that he could be brought to trial. This was presumably a reference to charges by the International Criminal Court in The Hague, which in June issued arrest warrants for Colonel Qaddafi, Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi and Libya’s intelligence chief, Abdullah Senussi, accusing them of crimes against humanity.

The struggle to a impose a new order on the capital presents a crucial test of the rebel leadership’s many pledges to replace Colonel Qaddafi’s bizarre autocracy with the democratic rule of law, and it could have consequences across the country and throughout the Arab world.

Unlike the swift and largely peaceful revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, the Libyan insurrection was the first revolt of the Arab Spring to devolve into a protracted armed struggle, and at times threatened to descend into a civil war of factions and tribes.

A rebel failure to deliver on their promises of justice and reconciliation here in the capital could spur Qaddafi loyalists around Libya to fight on. And an ugly outcome here might discourage strong foreign support for democracy movements elsewhere.

For now, governments throughout the West and the Middle East welcomed the rebels’ victory and pledged to assist them in the transition. The European Union said Monday that it had begun planning for a post-Qaddafi era, and Turkey’s foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, flew to Benghazi on Tuesday and met with the rebel leader, Mustafa Abdel-Jalil.

At the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, the secretary general, said he was trying to organize a meeting by Thursday or Friday with regional actors, including the African Union and the Arab League, to help smooth the transition to a new government. He said the United Nations was prepared to help with any request from the Libyans, from writing a new constitution to coordinating humanitarian assistance, he said.

Some rebels speculated that certain tribes who had benefited from Qaddafi patronage, like the Warfalla and the Warshafana, remained hostile to the rebels.

David D. Kirkpatrick and Kareem Fahim reported from Tripoli, Libya, and Alan Cowell from Paris. Reporting was contributed by Stephen Farrell from Cairo, Sebnem Arsu from Istanbul, Helene Cooper from Washington, and Neil MacFarquhar from the United Nations.

    New Clashes Erupt Around Qaddafi Site, NYT, 23.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/24/world/africa/24libya.html

After Uprising, Rebels Face a Struggle for Unity

August 22, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and STEVEN LEE MYERS

TRIPOLI, Libya — With rebels on the verge of ending Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s long reign, the character of their movement is facing its first real test: Can they build a new government of unity and reconciliation, or will their own internal rivalries mean divisions in the new Libya?

Six months after their revolt broke out, the day-to-day leadership of the anti-Qaddafi movement remains an unanswered question, with no figure emerging as the rebellion’s undisputed leader. Even the common struggle against Colonel Qaddafi never masked latent divisions between east and west, between political leaders and fractious militias, and, some say, between liberal public faces and Islamists in the rebel ranks.

The rebels from the western mountains who stormed into Tripoli on Sunday night often roll their eyes at their ostensible political leadership, the Transitional National Council, which is based in the eastern city of Benghazi. Many complained that their national leaders did not give them enough support, even after Western governments began allowing them access to the frozen assets of the Qaddafi government.

“The N.T.C. did not work so hard to bridge the gap” between what western rebels forces had and what they needed to subdue Tripoli, said Youssef Mohamed, a management consultant working as an adviser to one of the rebel units charged with securing the capital.

American and European officials said on Monday that they have been working for weeks to foster cohesion in the rebel ranks and to avoid a repeat of the sectarian strife that gripped Iraq in 2003 after the American invasion. Officials said they thought that one reason Tripoli fell as quickly as it did was that important rebel groups closed ranks and came up with a coherent strategy to invade Colonel Qaddafi’s last stronghold.

Even so, rivalries began emerging on Monday well before Tripoli was fully subdued, along with questions about the rebels’ credibility. Officials of the Transitional National Council in Benghazi said Sunday that their forces had captured Colonel Qaddafi’s son and would-be successor, Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi. But then on Tuesday he appeared at a Tripoli hotel housing foreign journalists — moving freely around the city — and even before then some in Tripoli appeared not to trust their Benghazi leadership to handle him.

Emhemmed Ghula, a leader of the Tripoli rebel underground stationed at a newly established military headquarters on Monday, said he worried that the Benghazi leadership had wrongly agreed to turn Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi over to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, where he is wanted on war crimes charges.

“It was not us,” Mr. Ghula said, referring to the Tripoli rebels. “If we caught him, we are not going to give him to anyone. We would just take him to trial — a fair trial — under Libyan laws.”

Pressed on his relationship with the movement’s national leadership, he acknowledged: “We belong to them, politically. They did help us with the plan for this revolution.” But he added: “The general plan, I should say. Not with the local plan.”

Tensions were also on display Monday after the rebels captured a prominent broadcaster from Libyan state television, Hala Misrati. She was spotted driving in the city and was arrested, several rebels said, in connection with her role as Qaddafi propagandist. She was taken to a local office building for questioning, and through a cracked door a heavyset man could be seen leaning over her seat as she screamed, “I am innocent!”

A mob of rebels, many armed, tried to storm the office. They were pushed back when a rebel officer emerged from the interrogation room and fired his gun through the ceiling. He fired another shot to scare off the press.

Ultimately, however, order appeared to win out: an older officer made his way through the mob counseling patience, and the crowd dissipated. Ms. Misrati was quietly whisked away.

Rebel leaders say they have worked for months to try to pave the road to a national unity, including within their own ranks. At the start of Ramadan, for example, the chairman of the Transitional National Council, Mustafa Abdel-Jalil, flew to the western mountains — after getting NATO’s permission to breach its no-fly zone — so he could pass out financial aid to needy families for the holiday season.

By design, the council includes representatives from across the country. They pledged from the start to keep Libya’s capital in Tripoli, in western Libya, not in Benghazi in the east, a rival center of power in during Colonel Qaddafi’s rule. On Monday, the council announced that it was beginning to relocate its operations.

And despite the grumblings of some on the ground, local and national rebel leaders have sometimes coordinated closely. When rebels in Tripoli began to rise up Sunday, two senior officials from Benghazi were huddled in Tunis with a leader from the western mountains to monitor the movements together. On Monday, Jeffrey D. Feltman, under secretary of state for Near East affairs, said in an interview with CNN’s Web site that he was surprised by the closeness of the communication among rebels across the country.

“Saturday night we were seeing high-level officials in Benghazi who basically said: ‘O.K., in an hour Tripoli’s going to rise up and this is what’s going to happen. It’s going to start in this neighborhood, they’re going to go out to the mosques and start doing the call to prayer,’ ” he said. “So it was clear from that description that there’s a lot more communication than what was apparent publicly between the N.T.C. in Benghazi and Tripoli.”

Officials in Washington said that for the last several weeks, representatives of the rebel council had met quietly with American, European and other diplomats in Qatar and laid the groundwork for building a democratic government in a country that has never known one.

With the lessons of postwar Iraq very much in mind, the Obama administration and its allies oversaw the drafting of “a transition road map” that creates an interim governing authority to fill the vacuum created by the monolithic Qaddafi regime until elections are held.

The road map did not specify dates or a timetable for the election. But the officials said the rebel leaders had consistently pledged to have an open, inclusive government. They have also pledged not to pursue vendettas or a “de-Baathification-style” purge of the political and security bureaucracy, something that fueled the insurgency in Iraq.

“We try to learn lessons,” a senior administration official said. “That’s why there was such as emphasis on post-Qaddafi planning. It wasn’t strictly because of April 2003, but that definitely was on people’s minds.”

In Washington, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton spoke by phone with Mr. Abdel-Jalil, the chairman of the Transitional National Council, to discuss the arrangements.

“He’s not perfect, but we’ve been very impressed,” a senior administration official said. “They’re focused, and we’re focused now, on not having a bloodbath.”

France, Britain, the United States and other powers involved in the Libyan struggle will meet with rebel leaders in Istanbul on Thursday to discuss the transition. Mrs. Clinton and other foreign ministers are considering meeting next week. The United Nations Security Council is also expected to meet to continue negotiations over a resolution that would allow countries to give the rebels the assets frozen under the council’s resolutions.

Still, American officials have also acknowledged that they do not yet know how well that leadership speaks for the military leaders or, for that matter, the many novice fighters in their loosely organized brigades.

Those questions were brought to the fore by the killing three weeks ago of a rebel military chief, Gen. Abdul Fattah Younes, by other rebels, apparently in revenge for his role in the Qaddafi government, which tortured and imprisoned many Islamists. The council has not yet identified the killer, but his assassination follows the murder of at least four lower-level security officials by an armed band who roamed Benghazi hunting them down. None of their killers have been found.

In the aftermath of General Younes’s killing, many in Benghazi blamed the Islamists in their ranks. And, although no evidence has linked Islamists with the killing, at least two liberals close to the rebel leadership said they appreciated the rumors, because they called attention to the Islamists’ threat.

Also after the killing, the Transitional National Council tried to organize its many quasi-independent militias into a national army. But that effort has faltered as the militias have insisted on forming their own independent coalition.

 

David D. Kirkpatrick reported from Tripoli, and Steven Lee Myers from Washington. Steven Erlanger contributed reporting from Paris.

    After Uprising, Rebels Face a Struggle for Unity, NYT, 22.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/23/world/africa/23rebels.html

Rebels’ Assault on Tripoli Began With Careful Work Inside

August 22, 2011
The New York Times
By KAREEM FAHIM and MARK MAZZETTI

TRIPOLI, Libya — Among the rebel leaders it was referred to as zero hour, the moment when residents of Tripoli would rise up against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s forces after a six-month war in the desert that had failed to break his 42-year grip on power.

But an uprising never materialized, in part because a bloody crackdown on protesters in February by Colonel Qaddafi’s forces had served as a grim deterrent to those inside Tripoli who might try to challenge the government’s authority.

So, the rebel leaders began plotting their own revolt inside the capital. Over the past several weeks, they smuggled weapons into Tripoli and stashed them in safe houses. They spread the word among local revolutionaries that widespread protests would begin after the Ramadan evening prayers on the appointed day.

They chose Aug. 20, which also just happened to be the anniversary of the prophet Mohammed’s liberation of Mecca.

In the end, it was Saturday’s uprising inside Tripoli — combined with a rebel military advance toward the capital across three fronts — that overwhelmed Colonel Qaddafi’s beleaguered soldiers, though fighting continues in the capital.

Even with Libya’s ragged rebellion still troubled by internal divisions, several days traveling with rebel troops — along with interviews with rebel leaders, NATO diplomats and officials in Washington — reveal that rebel forces were able to devise a careful plan for the final assault on Tripoli that unfolded with a swiftness few had predicted.

They were aided by steady supplies of weapons, fuel, medicine and food from British, French and Qatari troops and an escalated bombing campaign by NATO jets and American Predator drones. Hundreds of rebels took part in secret military training inside Qatar.

Rebel forces even advanced on Tripoli by boat, arranging a flotilla from the town of Misurata in an operation the rebels called Mermaid Dawn.

With the regime collapsing, American officials said that aides close to Colonel Qaddafi called several Obama administration officials, including the American ambassador, Gene Cretz, and Jeffrey Feltman, assistant secretary of state, to try to hastily broker a truce. Yet the Libyans never promised that Colonel Qaddafi would cede power, the American officials said, and the calls were not taken seriously.

American officials said that even as fighting in eastern Libya bogged down in a stalemate, guerrillas operating in the rugged Nafusah Mountains in the west were steadily gaining ground against Qaddafi forces and cutting off supplies to the capital.

The rebels operating in the west made steady progress over the past month, driving north toward the Mediterranean Coast and seizing a sprawling oil refinery in Zawiyah, just 30 miles west of Tripoli. Along the way, according to a senior NATO official, the rebels battled mercenary fighters from Chad and other African countries whom Colonel Qaddafi had enlisted to bolster his overstretched military.

Several American officials said the fall of Zawiyah may have been the campaign’s real turning point, as it choked nearly all of the remaining fuel supplies to the government in Tripoli.

“That signaled the end might be near,” a senior defense official said on Monday.

The rebels had been resupplied with weapons from Qatari special forces and given satellite photographs by their British and French military advisers. To boost morale, the United States passed along snippets of intercepted telephone conversations in which Libyan commanders were complaining about desperate shortages of food, water and ammunition.

The western offensive by the rebels galvanized opposition fighters in other parts of the country. American and NATO officials described a carefully coordinated three-pronged push on Tripoli, to drive fighters loyal to Colonel Qaddafi on the roads back toward the capital where NATO planes could bomb them.

That push, concentrated to the west of Tripoli, was coordinated with the uprising on Saturday within Tripoli itself.

“It all came together more quickly than many anticipated, but it was not exactly a coincidence,” the diplomat said.

Rebel groups broke through long-stagnant front lines and approached Tripoli from the south and east. The surge forced Libyan government troops into the open, allowing allied warplanes to strike them repeatedly, a senior NATO official said on Monday.

The rebel push on Tripoli inspired some residents of the capital to go ahead with the planned uprising, according to interviews with some rebel leaders on Monday.

Over the weekend, residents “came to the point where they wanted to go for it,” said Yusuf Muhammed, who advises an elite rebel brigade made up of fighters from Tripoli.

There was another reason for the protests, according to several rebel leaders. The rebels hoped that Libyan government troops would try to put down the uprising using large weapons like antiaircraft guns — making it easier for NATO warplanes to spot the muzzle flashes of Colonel Qaddafi’s troops.

Sure enough, when the protests began Saturday evening, Colonel Qaddafi’s troops were waiting outside the mosques and began firing on protesters, according to several residents who said they saw the violence.

By Sunday morning, some 600 rebel fighters from Tripoli were sent to bolster the group advancing on the capital from the west, according to rebel leaders. About 100 members of the unit had received specialized training in Qatar, according to Mr. Mohammed, the rebel adviser.

But the rebel advance on Tripoli was nearly thwarted on Sunday morning, when a column of Libyan government forces tried to outflank the rebels and re-enter Zawiyah. As Colonel Qaddafi’s troops approached Zawiyah, however, NATO warplanes bombed the convoy before it could reach the strategic city.

It was part of an intense NATO aerial bombardment that continued throughout the day on Sunday. NATO warplanes carried out about 50 attack missions that day. Among the most sensitive were on command-and-control bunkers in Tripoli that the government had set up in civilian buildings in an effort to ward off allied attacks.

With American Predator drones providing round-the-clock surveillance to monitor the “pattern of life” in the buildings for days or weeks, allied warplanes attacked the structures only after it was determined that the military was using them, the senior NATO officials said.

One of the NATO targets was a base used by the feared 32nd Brigade, an urban assault unit commanded by Khamis al-Qaddafi, one of the colonel’s sons.

Rebel leaders had expected the Khamis brigade to form a “ring of steel” around Tripoli — the last defense of Colonel Qaddafi’s embattled regime.

But rebel fighters said that when the weekend came, there were only about 50 soldiers defending the base. It left rebel leaders to wonder whether the feared group of Qaddafi loyalists had been defeated, or whether they had merely dispersed so they could fight another day.

 

Elisabeth Bumiller, Steven Lee Myers
and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington.

    Rebels’ Assault on Tripoli Began With Careful Work Inside, NYT, 22.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/23/world/africa/23reconstruct.html

For Obama, a Moment to Savor, if Briefly

August 22, 2011
The New York Times
By MARK LANDLER

VINEYARD HAVEN, Mass. — President Obama was a reluctant warrior in Libya, drawn into the rebel uprising over the warnings of his Pentagon chief and his own qualms about getting the United States entangled in yet another war in the Muslim world.

Now that the rebels have seized most of Tripoli and driven Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi into hiding, Mr. Obama claimed a victory for his much-doubted strategy. But that victory is tinged by the same uncertainties that made the president so wary of getting involved in the first place.

With Colonel Qaddafi’s loyalists still fighting in pockets, the United States and its allies are confronting a chaotic, potentially treacherous transition. They must help Libya’s new rulers — people they did not know six months ago — set up a functioning, credible government in a country divided by tribal conflicts and a dearth of state institutions.

Mr. Obama acknowledged those hurdles, interrupting his vacation here to praise the rebel advances, even as the fighting continued and the whereabouts of Colonel Qaddafi remained a mystery.

“Your courage and character have been unbreakable in the face of a tyrant,” the president said in a somber seven-minute address. He urged the Libyan Transitional National Council, which the United States recently recognized as the country’s legitimate government, to pursue a peaceful, inclusive transition to democracy.

“True justice will not come from reprisals and violence,” Mr. Obama said. “It will come from reconciliation and a Libya that allows its citizens to determine their own destiny.”

“In that effort,” he added, “the United States will be a friend and a partner.”

That could be difficult long-term partnership, analysts said. Unlike Egypt or Tunisia, which had established institutions to smooth the transition from long-time dictators, Colonel Qaddafi’s “revolution” — essentially a four-decade-long cult of personality — has left little for a new government to build on.

“They are basically starting from scratch,” said Steven A. Cook, a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Now will really be the test for the United States, because there are a lot of centrifugal forces that could pull this apart.”

Republicans who had criticized Mr. Obama’s handling of Libya, including the presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Jon M. Huntsman Jr., were more muted on Monday, with Mr. Romney shifting attention from the military campaign to the need to extradite those behind the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103.

While the president’s tone was determinedly not triumphal, his aides insisted that the weekend’s events had vindicated his strategy — heading off mass killings in the eastern city of Benghazi, marshaling a broad coalition to press Colonel Qaddafi, giving the Libyan opposition time to take root and plan a transition, and, above all, limiting American involvement.

“All of this was done without putting a single U.S. troop on the ground,” Mr. Obama noted.

Even now, though, he appeared less personally invested in Libya than he has in other big issues. Though he spoke to his National Security Council and to Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain before his remarks, he went right back to his vacation, playing basketball with aides. (Mr. Cameron canceled his holiday to hold meetings in London.)

At first, the president’s wary approach seemed to satisfy no one — hawks in Congress who called for boots on the ground, doves who demanded a pullout and foreign policy experts who warned of a quagmire. Those doubts only deepened as the NATO military campaign that Mr. Obama had suggested would last weeks dragged into months.

On Monday, administration officials argued that six months was not long in the context of Colonel Qaddafi’s 42-year reign, and that the coalition was critically important in sustaining pressure on him.

“This was a unique operation in that the U.S. wasn’t left to bear the bulk of the burden itself,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser. “The burden was spread effectively wide that we were more than able to sustain the pressure for six months, and frankly, would have been able to for many more months to come.”

For all that, Mr. Obama seems unlikely to get much political payoff from the events in Libya. Part of the reason stems from his multilateral approach — very different, for example, from the commando raid he ordered on Osama bin Laden. That gave him a measurable bounce in the polls, though it, too, proved fleeting as anxieties about the economy crept back.

Nor is it likely to improve his relations with Republicans in Congress. Many still recall the rancorous dispute over Mr. Obama’s decision not to seek Congressional authorization for the air campaign — a decision that some administration advisers regret, and one that led the House to reject a measure authorizing the mission.

Two Republican hawks — Senators John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina — said Mr. Obama did not deserve credit because the operation had taken too long. They attributed that “to the failure of the United States to employ the full weight of our airpower.”

On Monday, those who supported the campaign — largely Democrats — offered tempered encouragement, urging the United States to step up its involvement in Libya. But several Democrats also called for the focus to turn to Pam Am Flight 103.

“The release of al-Megrahi was a total miscarriage of justice,” said Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, referring to Abdel Baset Ali al-Megrahi, one of the convicted masterminds of the bombing, who was released by Britain and returned to Libya.

“Seeing him participate in good health at a pro-Qaddafi rally recently was another slap in the face not just for the families of the Lockerbie victims, but for all Americans,” she said.

Mr. Obama paid homage to those victims, as well as other Americans who had been killed by Libyan-sponsored terrorism. That subtly reinforced another point: on this president’s watch, another violent strongman who vexed Washington for many years was gone.

While officials said they did not expect that to help the president in the polls especially, it could help him counter a narrative that often dogs Democratic presidents in elections.

“It helps lock in and solidify the idea that he’s the guy who keeps us safe,” one senior official said. “Reagan targeted Qaddafi; George W. Bush targeted Bin Laden; Obama has done both.”

 

Jennifer Steinhauer contributed reporting from Washington.

    For Obama, a Moment to Savor, if Briefly, NYT, 22.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/23/us/politics/23prexy.html

Qaddafi’s Final Hours

August 22, 2011
The New York Times


For more than 40 years, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi has dominated and terrorized Libya — his image plastered on what seemed like every wall and his goons posted on every corner. Late Monday, with rebel fighters in substantial control of Tripoli, he was nowhere to be found, and his regime seemed to be collapsing.

There may be more dark moments to come. We are in awe of the courageous Libyans who pressed their fight. The rebels — a ragtag band that overcame incredible odds, battlefield defeats and bitter internal divisions — have showed extraordinary commitment and resilience.

We urge them to now show restraint in these final hours and respect for all Libyans in the days and months to come. They have promised to build a democratic Libya. They must keep that promise.

There is little doubt that the rebels would not have gotten this far without NATO’s air campaign and political support from President Obama, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain. When critics in Washington and elsewhere declared Libya a quagmire, these leaders refused to back away.

The rebel army improved with advice from British, French and Italian special forces and arms from France and Qatar. NATO strikes on Libyan forces and military command centers did real damage. A naval blockade and international sanctions also squeezed the government.

There were times when the United States and Europe should have committed more assets. But Mr. Obama made the right decision to let Europe take the lead.

Libya will need even more support — as well as vigilant monitoring and likely frequent goading — in the months ahead. The challenges of building a stable and representative new country cannot be overstated.

The main rebel leadership group has struggled to secure areas under its control. It must make clear that reprisals against surrendering Qaddafi loyalists will not be tolerated.

When Colonel Qaddafi is found, he should be sent to the International Criminal Court to face justice.

A few of the rebel leaders are known, but it is unclear if any of them has the standing or the skill to unite the country. The rebels’ Transitional National Council and the military are both hampered by ethnic and tribal divisions. The council must reach out quickly to all groups and ensure that it represents all Libyans.

It will also need to move quickly to put together a plan to restore public order as well as electricity and other basic services. It must outline a reasonable timetable for democratic elections.

As we learned at a very high cost in Iraq, all parties must have a role in building a new political order or those excluded will turn to violence. Decision-making — including how to restart damaged oil wells and share oil revenues — must be transparent.

World leaders can reinforce these messages by speaking out. President Obama on Monday rightly warned the rebels that “true justice will not come from reprisals and violence.” The release of frozen Libyan assets and the lifting of sanctions must be carefully managed.

It will be up to the Libyans to build their own future. The rebels’ victory — if followed by the democracy they promise — should inspire others to believe that the battle is worth fighting. And no autocrat, no matter how brutal, is invincible.

    Qaddafi’s Final Hours, NYT, 22.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/23/opinion/qaddafis-final-hours.html

Qaddafi’s Son Taunts Rebels in Tripoli

August 22, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and KAREEM FAHIM

TRIPOLI, Libya — The euphoria that followed the rebels’ triumphant march in Tripoli gave way to confusion and wariness on Monday, as Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi remained at large, his son Seif al-Islam made a surprise appearance at a hotel with foreign journalists, and pockets of loyalist forces stubbornly resisted rebel efforts to take control of the capital.

While rebel leaders professed to be making progress in securing Tripoli and planning for a post-Qaddafi government, and international leaders hailed the beginnings of a new era in Libya, the immediate aftermath of the lightning invasion was a vacuum of power, with no cohesive rebel government in place and remnants of the Qaddafi government still in evidence.

Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, whose capture the rebels had trumpeted since Sunday, walked as a free man to the Qaddafi-controlled luxury Rixos Hotel in the center of Tripoli early Tuesday, boasting to foreign journalists there that his father’s government was still “in control” and had lured the rebels into a trap, the BBC and news services reported. His appearance raised significant questions about the credibility of rebel leaders.

It was not clear whether he had been in rebel custody and escaped, or was never held at all. Another Qaddafi son, Muhammed, escaped from house arrest on Monday.

Fighters hostile to the rebels still battled on the streets and rooftops of Tripoli, wounding or killing at least a dozen people. And Colonel Qaddafi’s green flag still flew in parts of Tripoli and over at least two major cities considered strongholds of his tribe, Sabha to the south and Surt on the coast roughly midway between Tripoli and Benghazi. The Pentagon reported late Monday that its warplanes had shot down a Scud missile fired from Surt.

In a brief address from his vacation home on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., President Obama recognized both the historic nature of the rebels’ accomplishment and the troubles they face. Saying that the future of Libya “is in the hands of its people,” he cautioned that “there will be huge challenges ahead.” He pledged that the United States would seek to help Libya in its attempt to establish democracy.

There was speculation that Colonel Qaddafi may have retreated to his fortified compound, Bab al-Aziziya, in Tripoli, which rebels said was heavily defended by snipers and tanks.

Mahmud Nacua, a Libyan rebel representative in London, told reporters that the insurgents would “look under every stone” for Colonel Qaddafi so that he could be brought to trial. This was presumably a reference to charges by the International Criminal Court in The Hague, which in June issued arrest warrants for Colonel Qaddafi, Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi and Libya’s intelligence chief, Abdullah Senussi, accusing them of crimes against humanity.

The struggle to a impose a new order on the capital presents a crucial test of the rebel leadership’s many pledges to replace Colonel Qaddafi’s bizarre autocracy with the democratic rule of law, and it could have consequences across the country and throughout the Arab world.

Unlike the swift and largely peaceful revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, the Libyan insurrection was the first revolt of the Arab Spring to devolve into a protracted armed struggle, and at times threatened to descend into a civil war of factions and tribes.

A rebel failure to deliver on their promises of justice and reconciliation here in the capital could spur Qaddafi loyalists around Libya to fight on. And an ugly outcome here might discourage strong foreign support for democracy movements elsewhere.

For now, governments throughout the West and the Middle East welcomed the rebels’ victory and pledged to assist them in the transition. The European Union said Monday that it had begun planning for a post-Qaddafi era, and Turkey’s foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, said he would fly to Benghazi on Tuesday to meet with the rebel leader, Mustafa Abdel-Jalil, the semiofficial Anatolian Agency reported.

Egypt formally recognized the rebel Libyan government on Monday, calling the Transitional National Council the “new regime.” Mohammed Amr, Egypt’s foreign minister, said that the council would take over the Libyan Embassy in Cairo, and would assume Libya’s seat on the Arab League, which is based in Cairo.

France said Monday that it wanted to call a top-level meeting in Paris next week of the so-called Contact Group of nations supporting the Libyan rebels: the United States, Britain, several Arab states, the United Nations and the Arab League. But the French foreign minister, Alain Juppé, said, “It’s up to the Libyans and the Libyans alone to choose their future and to build a new Libya, which will be a democratic Libya.”

At the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, the secretary general, said he was trying to organize a meeting by Thursday or Friday with regional actors, including the African Union and the Arab League, to help smooth the transition to a new government. He said the United Nations was prepared to help with any request from the Libyans, from writing a new constitution to coordinating humanitarian assistance, he said.

Some rebels speculated that certain tribes who had benefited from Qaddafi patronage, like the Warfalla and the Warshafana, remained hostile to the rebels.

The tenuous nature of the rebels’ grip on the capital was clear at the makeshift headquarters of the “Tripoli Brigade,” described as a hand-picked team assigned to secure the city.

Emhemmed Ghula, who identified himself as a deputy chief of the Tripoli underground, was telling journalists the city was “90 percent under control,” aside from some number of snipers. “They have some roofs, but they can’t move in the streets.”

Moments later, one such sniper atop a tall building nearby began firing down on the courtyard and windows of the headquarters, housed in a former women’s school. Then as the fighters huddled against the walls, two groups of armed men in trucks — one mounted with artillery — attacked the front gate. Artillery shells burst through the compound.

The attackers’ aim and organization suggested the gunmen were experienced Qaddafi militiamen. But the fighters inside showed little discipline. Instead of firing back at the start of the fight, a dozen armed men near the gate raced to the floor of a small anteroom. There was no one either giving or following orders.

“It is nothing, just a few guys,” one rebel officer said to a group of journalists, playing down the significance of what became a three-hour firefight. “But for you guys, it is safer inside.”

After a conference behind closed doors, the Tripoli Brigade assigned to police the city ultimately decided to relocate its headquarters to safer ground. “Call NATO, please! 911!” one rebel joked when he saw a visitor’s satellite phone.

At roughly the same time, as many as 10 injured people were brought to a makeshift rebel clinic in a house in the city, according to several foreign journalists visiting at the time. (Tripoli Central Hospital is in an area that remains controlled by Qaddafi loyalists.) It is unclear whether any of them were injured at the Tripoli Brigade headquarters or in other fighting in the city. But moments later, the journalists said, a gunfight broke out in front of the clinic as well.

 

Reporting was contributed by Stephen Farrell from Cairo, Sebnem Arsu from Istanbul, Helene Cooper from Washington, and Neil MacFarquhar from the United Nations.

    Qaddafi’s Son Taunts Rebels in Tripoli, NYT, 22.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/23/world/africa/23libya.html

Gaddafi hunted as loyalists fight on in Tripoli

TRIPOLI | Mon Aug 22, 2011
2:25pm EDT
Reuters
By Ulf Laessing and Missy Ryan

TRIPOLI (Reuters) - Muammar Gaddafi was a hunted man on Monday as loyal remnants of his forces made last-ditch stands in the capital and world leaders rushed to embrace the fractious Libyan rebels as new masters of the oil-rich state.

Two days after their irregular armies launched pincer thrusts into Tripoli in tandem with an uprising in the city, Gaddafi's tanks and sharpshooters appeared to hold only small areas, including his Bab al-Aziziya headquarters compound.

Civilians, who mobbed the streets late on Sunday to cheer the end of dictatorship, stayed indoors as gunfire crackled.

Reuters correspondents witnessed firefights and a clash with heavy weapons, including anti-aircraft guns, as rebels tried to flush out snipers and pockets of resistance. Hundreds appear to have been killed or wounded since Saturday.

Gaddafi's whereabouts were not known after rebels said they held three of his sons. In a last, defiant, audio broadcast on Sunday before state television went off the air, he said he was still in Tripoli, and would stay "until the end." There has been speculation he might be in his home region around Sirte.

A U.S. official said there was no evidence he had fled the country. He has few friends left. His prime minister turned up in Tunisia. More Libyan embassies hoisted the rebel flag. And foreign governments which had hesitated to take sides, among them Gaddafi's Arab neighbors, Russia and China made clear they now felt his 42 years of absolute power were over.

Western powers who have deployed air power in support of a variety of rebel groups, urged the 69-year-old "Brother Leader" to halt the bloodshed after six months of civil war that ebbed and flowed over hundreds of miles of North African desert.

U.S. President Barack Obama said: "Muammar Gaddafi and his regime need to recognize that their rule has come to an end."

French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who took an early gamble on the Libyan rebels, called on Gaddafi loyalists "to turn their back on the criminal and cynical blindness of their leader by immediately ceasing fire, giving up their arms and turning themselves in to the legitimate Libyan authorities."

Egypt, whose Arab Spring revolt inspired its neighbors, abandoned its caution and recognized the rebel government. Other beleaguered Arab revolutionaries, notably in Syria, may take heart from a hard-fought triumph in the sands of Libya.

After Gaddafi, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad must be "the most miserable person on earth," said Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, a political scientist in the United Arab Emirates: "Gaddafi's fall," he said, "Will also inspire the Syrian people."

 

SONS DETAINED

Among those detained was Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the face of his father's rapprochement with the West over the past decade but now indicted with his father for crimes against humanity. The International Criminal Court said it hoped to question him at The Hague, though a rebel official said Libya might try him.

A rebel official in the eastern city of Benghazi, seat of the opposition National Transitional Council, said some of its representatives had slipped in to Tripoli in recent days to make contact with authorities hitherto loyal to Gaddafi with the aim of averting a breakdown of order in the capital.

Shamsiddin Abdulmolah said would-be defectors had been persuaded in recent weeks to stay in their jobs in Tripoli to help run the city: "Each neighborhood has its own little council and today they've taken over administration including military affairs and security," he said.

There have been concerns that tribal, ethnic and other divisions among the diverse armed groups opposed to Gaddafi could lead to the kind of blood-letting seen in Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. However, the presence of former Gaddafi aides in the rebel camp is cited by some as cause to hope the opposition can prove more inclusive than that in Iraq.

NTC head Mustafa Abdel Jalil, who was Gaddafi's justice minister until joining the revolt in February, told a news conference in Benghazi: "I call on all Libyans to exercise self-restraint and to respect the property and lives of others and not to resort to taking the law into their own hands."

 

COMPETITION FOR OIL

Jalil said the National Council would favor foreign countries that had supported the rebellion -- a potential blow to the likes of Chinese and Russian oil companies, though they are not the only ones to have cut deals with Gaddafi.

Western governments had competed for the veteran ruler's favor in recent years after negotiating a grudging resolution to decades of conflict, during which Gaddafi's "anti-colonial" campaigns saw him support a range of armed groups from the Palestinians to the IRA and take responsibility for the downing of an American airliner over Lockerbie in Scotland in 1988.

First signs emerged of moves to begin restoring oil production that has been the foundation of the economy and a source of hope for Libya's six million, mostly poor, people. Staff from Italy's Eni arrived to look into restarting facilities, said Foreign Minister Franco Frattini.

Italy, Libya's nearest European neighbor and the colonial power until World War Two, is a big customer for Libyan energy.

A rebel official in the east said government forces had withdrawn on Monday from the key Mediterranean oil port of Brega, between Benghazi and Tripoli.

Civilians had flocked late on Sunday to Tripoli's Green Square, long the showpiece of Gaddafi's personality cult, waving rebel flags. Some said they renamed it Martyrs' Square.

Young men burned the green flags of the government and raised the rebel tricolor used by the post-colonial monarchy which Gaddafi overthrew in a military coup in 1969.

But on Monday, a Reuters correspondent with rebels moving in from the west watched commanders of the irregular force try to hold their men back from rushing ahead in the city, insisting they check buildings methodically for snipers.

It was slow work and there will little sign of coordination between rebel units. The all-green flags of the Gaddafi government were still hanging in many streets -- an indication that rebels did not feel safe enough to rip them down.

"Revolutionaries are positioned everywhere in Tripoli," said a rebel commander who used the name Abdulrahman. "But Gaddafi's forces have been trying to resist ... Snipers are the main problem ... There is a big number of martyrs."

A government official told Reuters 376 people on both sides were killed, and about 1,000 wounded, though it was unclear how the figures were arrived at.

At the Rixos Nasr hotel, where the government had obliged foreign reporters to stay throughout the war, pro-Gaddafi guards prevented journalists from leaving.

Only five months ago, Gaddafi's forces were set to crush the rebel stronghold of Benghazi. He warned then that there would be "no mercy, no pity" for his opponents.

His forces, he said, would hunt them down "district to district, alley to alley, house to house, room to room." It is a refrain some rebels have thrown back at him in recent days.

 

(Reporting by Missy Ryan and Ulf Laessing in Tripoli, Michael Georgy and Peter Graff in western Libya, Robert Birsel in Benghazi, Libya, William Maclean in London, Hamid Ould Ahmed and Christian Lowe in Algiers, Souhail Karam in Rabat, Richard Valdmanis and Giles Elgood in Tunis, Laura MacInnis and Alister Bull in Oak Bluffs, Mass., and Michael Roddy and Keith Weir in London,; Writing by Alastair Macdonald, editing by Peter Millership)

    Gaddafi hunted as loyalists fight on in Tripoli, R, 22.8.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/22/us-libya-idUSTRE77A2Y920110822

    Related > Gaddafi timeline > http://www.reuters.com/article/interactive/idUSTRE77A2Y920110822

More Clashes After Rebels Sweep Tripoli

August 22, 2011
The New York Times
By KAREEM FAHIM, DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and ALAN COWELL

TRIPOLI, Libya — Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi remained at large Monday morning, and loyalist forces still held pockets of the city, stubbornly resisting the rebels’ efforts to establish full control after their astonishingly speedy advance into the capital appeared to signal the end of the Libyan leader’s four-decade grip on power.

“We do not know if he is inside or outside Libya,” Mustafa Abdel-Jalil, the chairman of the rebel government, the National Transitional Council, said of Colonel Qaddafi at a news conference in Benghazi, up until now the de facto rebel capital. He acknowledged, too, that the area of Tripoli around Colonel Qaddafi’s compound, Bab al-Aziziya, was not under rebel control.

Explosions and the sound of mortars could still be heard Monday morning, and a rebel fighter told Al Jazeera television that pro-Qaddafi forces still controlled 15 to 20 percent of the capital. An elite rebel brigade that was supposed to establish a police presence throughout the city instead found itself involved in a firefight with pro-Qaddafi forces.

News reports quoting rebel officials said tanks had emerged from Colonel Qaddafi’s compound and opened fire. “There haven’t been many silent minutes,” Karen Graham, a British nurse in Tripoli told the BBC.

But as rebel leaders said they had arrested two sons of Colonel Qaddafi, the European Union said on Monday that it had begun planning for a post-Qaddafi era. Financial markets rose smartly in Europe and the United States, and oil prices declined early on the expectation of increased Libyan production, but firmed later in the day.

Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain, which along with the United States and France played a central role in the air campaign over Libya, said some of the fighting in Tripoli was “extremely fierce.” He said Colonel Qaddafi “must stop fighting without conditions” and relinquish all claims to power.

Mahmud Nacua, a Libyan rebel representative in London, told reporters that the insurgents would “look under every stone” for Colonel Qaddafi so that he could be brought to trial, presumably a reference to charges by the International Criminal Court in The Hague, which issued arrest warrants for Colonel Qaddafi, one of his sons, Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, and his intelligence chief in June, accusing them of crimes against humanity.

On the diplomatic front, Egypt formally recognized the rebel Libyan government on Monday, calling the National Transitional Council the “new regime.” Mohamed Amr, Egypt’s foreign minister, said that the council would take over the Libyan Embassy in Cairo, and would assume Libya’s seat on the Arab League, which is based in Cairo.

France said Monday that it wanted to call a top-level meeting in Paris next week of the so-called Contact Group of nations supporting the Libyan rebels: the United States, Britain, several Arab states, the United Nations and the Arab League. But the French foreign minister, Alain Juppé, said “It’s up to the Libyans and the Libyans alone to choose their future and to build a new Libya, which will be a democratic Libya.”

His words seemed to reflect an emerging European desire to avoid being drawn into turmoil in a post-Qaddafi era. Earlier, Mr. Cameron said: “Our task now is to do all we can to support the will of the Libyan people, which is for an effective transition to a free, democratic and inclusive Libya. This will be and must be and should be Libyan-led and a Libyan-owned process with broad international support coordinated by the United Nations.”

At the United Nations, Ban Ki-Moon, the secretary-general, said he was trying to organize a meeting by Thursday or Friday with regional actors, including the African Union and the Arab League, to help smooth the transition to a new government. He said the United Nations was prepared to help with any request from the Libyans, ranging from writing a new constitution to coordinating humanitarian assistance, he said.

“Now is the time for all Libyans to focus on national unity and reconciliation,” Mr. Ban told reporters, echoing other world leaders in calling for Colonel Qadhafi and his forces to step aside. “This is a hopeful moment but also there are risks ahead.”

On Sunday, NATO troops continued close air support of the rebels all day, with multiple strikes by alliance aircraft helping to clear the road from Zawiyah to Tripoli. Rebel leaders in the west credited NATO with thwarting an attempt by Qaddafi loyalists to reclaim Zawiyah on Sunday with a flank assault on the city.

In a report on Monday from Brussels, The Associated Press quoted a NATO official as saying the alliance would continue air patrols over Libya until all pro-Qaddafi forces surrender or return to barracks. But Mr. Nacua, the rebel envoy in London, seemed to suggest that the rebels felt NATO’s role was now over.

“NATO has done a very good job. They neutralized Qaddafi’s war machine,” Mr. Nacua said. “But I think their role will be over, and the Libyan people will independently rebuild their country.”

A reporter asked if that meant the alliance would be requested to suspend its air campaign. “I think so, yes,” Mr. Nacua said. “There’s no danger from Qaddafi and his heavy machines against our fighters.”

Analysts said the crucial role played by NATO in aiding the rebel advance in the relatively unpopulated areas outside the capital could prove far less effective in an urban setting, where concerns about civilian casualties could hamper the alliance’s ability to focus on government troops.

President Obama said Sunday night that Colonel Qaddafi and his inner circle had “to recognize that their rule has come to an end.” He called on Colonel Qaddafi “to relinquish power once and for all.” He also called on the National Transitional Council to avoid civilian casualties and protect state institutions as it took control of the country.

“Tonight, the momentum against the Qaddafi regime has reached a tipping point,” Mr. Obama said in a statement. “Tripoli is slipping from the grasp of a tyrant. The Qaddafi regime is showing signs of collapsing. The people of Libya are showing that the universal pursuit of dignity and freedom is far stronger than the iron fist of a dictator.”

The shocking collapse of the Qaddafi forces appeared to signal the end for one of the world’s most flamboyant and mercurial political figures, the leader of an idiosyncratic government that was frequently as bizarre as it was brutal.

Long a thorn in the side of the West after he took power in a bloodless coup in 1969, Colonel Qaddafi had managed an awkward reconciliation in recent years, abandoning his fledgling nuclear program and agreeing to pay billions of dollars to the victims of the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing, which was attributed to Libyan agents.

While denying that he actually headed the government, Colonel Qaddafi created a cult of personality that centered on his Green Book, a volume often as trivial as it was impenetrable. His decades of iron-fisted rule have produced a country, analysts say, that is devoid of credible institutions and any semblance of a civil society — a potential source of trouble in the months and years ahead.

After six months of inconclusive fighting, the assault on the capital unfolded at a breakneck pace, with insurgents capturing a base of the vaunted Khamis Brigade, where they had expected to meet resistance, then speeding toward Tripoli and through several neighborhoods of the capital effectively unopposed.

A separate group of rebels waged a fierce battle near the Rixos Hotel, a bastion of Qaddafi support near the city center. A team of rebels there captured Colonel Qaddafi’s son and one-time heir apparent, Seif al-Islam. Rebels also claimed to have accepted the surrender of a second Qaddafi son, Mohammed.

Mr. Abdel-Jalil, the rebel council chairman, said both sons were “in a safe place” under rebel control. He said gunfire heard when Mohammed el-Qaddafi was being interviewed on television after his surrender had come from a firefight between his bodyguards and the rebels taking him into custody. One rebel was killed and a bodyguard was injured.

Seif al-Islam has been a central character in the drama of the revolt. Before the uprising began, he was known as Libya’s leading advocate of reform in both economic and political life. He cultivated an Anglophile persona, and often appeared to be waging a tug of war against his father’s older and more conservative allies. He was increasingly seen as the most powerful figure behind the scenes of the government as well as his father’s likely successor.

When the revolt broke out it was Seif al-Islam who delivered the government’s first public response, vowing to wipe out what he called “the rats” and warning of a civil war.

In his last public interview, he appeared a changed man. Sitting in a spare hotel conference room, he wore a newly grown beard and fingered prayer beads. After months of denouncing the rebels as dangerous Islamic radicals, he said that he was brokering a new alliance with the Islamist faction among the rebels to drive out the liberals.

Colonel Qaddafi issued a series of defiant audio statements during the night, calling on people to “save Tripoli” from a rebel offensive. He said Libyans were becoming “slaves of the imperialists” and that “all the tribes are now marching on Tripoli.”

Mahmoud Hamza, a senior official of the Qaddafi Foreign Ministry, acknowledged in a phone call at 1 a.m. local time on Monday that “it is getting near the end now.” But he said that the Qaddafi forces had not given up.

“Tripoli now is very dangerous. There is a lot of fighting, but there is not yet an assault on Bab al-Aziziya,” he said. “For me this is the most fearful thing. I hope it does not come to that.”

 

Kareem Fahim reported from Tripoli, David D. Kirkpatrick from Zintan, Libya and Alan Cowell from Paris. Reporting contributed by Eric Schmitt from Washington, Mark Landler from Vineyard Haven, Mass., Clifford Krauss from Houston, Stephen Farrell in Cairo and Neil MacFarquhar at the United Nations.

    More Clashes After Rebels Sweep Tripoli, R, 22.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/23/world/africa/23libya.html

New Fighting Tempers Rebel Euphoria

From Headlong Rush Into Capital

August 22, 2011
The New York Times
By KAREEM FAHIM

TRIPOLI, Libya — Fresh fighting erupted in the Libyan capital on Monday, as members of a rebel brigade trying to establish a security base near the waterfront came under fire from loyalists to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. Reporters accompanying the rebel brigade were forced to duck for cover.

The waterfront fight and the reverberating sounds of shooting elsewhere made it clear that the rebel assault on Tripoli the day before was more like a Sunday drive than a punishing final offensive, even as the rebels were celebrating and world leaders were calling on Colonel Qaddafi to surrender.

From the first cautious ventures out of the hard-fought vantage point of Zawiyah, the rebels’ advance on Sunday became a headlong rush into the heart of Tripoli and Green Square, the symbol of Colonel Qaddafi’s power. By nightfall Sunday, the rebels were in command of the square, the scene of so many manic, forced declarations of fealty to Colonel Qaddafi. The portraits were ripped down, along with the green flags that represented his rule. Instead, young men waved rebel flags in the renamed Martyrs’ Square.

By 2:30 a.m. Monday, a wary quiet had taken hold. Rebel fighters secured the entrances to the square and staffed checkpoints in parts of the capital. There were small, ecstatic gatherings, but there were also long, silent streets in a city of frayed nerves, and rumors of roving government soldiers and snipers everywhere. After their speedy advance, the rebels’ hold on parts of central Tripoli seemed evident but also tenuous.

Bullets ricocheted here and there, and the sounds of gunfights erupted sporadically, intensifying through Monday morning, particularly around Colonel Qaddafi’s compound. Overnight, the road from Zawiyah to Tripoli was jammed with hundreds of cars, many with fighters aboard, in what looked like a move to further secure the city.

Sunday had begun with the sound of rockets. The roar subsided as the rebels moved beyond Zawiyah, a city that was won back from the Qaddafi forces only after days of heavy fighting. But each time, the fighters found it a temporary jolt rather than a protracted battle.

The first major test was the military base for the feared Khamis Brigade, a heavy armored unit commanded by one of Colonel Qaddafi’s sons, in the town of Mayah. The brigade is the keystone of the so-called ring of steel defense line about 17 miles west of Tripoli, and for months NATO forces had identified it as the main obstacle to an advance to the capital.

Locals fear it: the Khamis Brigade’s troops do what they want, residents say, and get all the guns they want. Since the February uprising, the base has also served as a prison for government opponents.

On Sunday, the bodies of six Qaddafi soldiers lay near the entrance. A group of prisoners released from the base spoke of their torture and cried. Fighters cheered and grabbed what they could, including the most popular item, a Belgian gun, stacking pickup trucks high with weapons. Emad Ali took two bottles of battery fluid and some grease.

“I wanted something useful for the soldiers,” he said.

The soldiers did not need much help from Mr. Ali. NATO warplanes had flown overhead for days, bombing targets in the capital and its surroundings to clear the path to Tripoli.

An uprising in Tripoli on Saturday night also laid the groundwork. At the “zero hour,” as the rebels called it, residents took to the streets and held demonstrations that were met with deadly force by Qaddafi soldiers — who also further exposed their heavy artillery to NATO surveillance, one rebel leader said.

All day, news of fresh advances made its way back from the front lines, and then became obsolete. The rebels flew through town after town until they reached Janzur, a Tripoli suburb.

A convoy met them, but it was of jubilant Tripoli residents who had heard they were coming, honking car horns and screaming and waving out their windows as the fighters went past.

In Gargaresh, an affluent neighborhood in western Tripoli, residents spilled into the streets — at first in disbelief, compulsively sharing the news, then in joy, hugging and cheering — as they received text messages saying that the rebels had entered the city.

“My country is free! God is great! My country is free!” screamed one Gargaresh resident, reached by telephone. He had to shout — the rhythmic roar of the crowd with him drowned out any quieter conversation.

He and his neighbors had spent weeks inside their houses, he said, trying to keep trips outside as infrequent as possible because they feared Colonel Qaddafi’s security forces. But on Sunday night, they all reunited in a triumphant block party that lasted all night.

“They went in such a big hurry,” said Majid el-Haif, 32, a resident of the Siyahiya neighborhood who was in the street with his neighbors to celebrate the quick retreat of pro-Qaddafi forces. “It was so smooth.”

 

Jehad Nga contributed reporting from Doha, Qatar.

    New Fighting Tempers Rebel Euphoria From Headlong Rush Into Capital, NYT, 22.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/23/world/africa/23scene.html

Analysis: Gaddafi collapse will embolden Arab rebels

BEIRUT | Mon Aug 22, 2011
6:39am EDT
Reuters
By Samia Nakhoul

BEIRUT (Reuters) - The implosion of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's 41-year-old rule will put a new spring in the step of the Arab revolutions and demonstrate once again that these entrenched autocratic governments are not invincible.

From the Atlantic coast to Gulf shores, live images on Arab satellite channels of rebels pouring into Tripoli, trampling on pictures of Gaddafi and chanting "From alley to alley, door to door," taunting the leader with his own threats to hunt down his enemies, will rattle Arab leaders facing similar revolts.

Arab capitals have been enthralled as street protests forced Tunisia's Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali to flee the country he had ruled for 23 years and Egypt's Hosni Mubarak to step down after 30 years in power and now Gaddafi's government to decompose.

Arabs who this month have seen Mubarak and his sons appear behind bars and who now see the rule of the longest-serving Arab ruler collapsing must wonder what else is possible.

From Syria to Yemen, Arab autocrats who sought to use force and repression to contain pent-up popular aspirations and fend off uprisings must have pause for thought after events in Libya.

"It is an important development because it shows there are different ways in which Arab regimes will collapse. It just shows once you get a momentum developing and the right combination -- a popular will for change and regional and international support -- no regime can withstand that," said Beirut-based Middle East analyst Rami Khouri.

"Syria has this combination of a popular uprising with regional and international backing. These authoritarian regimes, even if they are strong, collapse in the end. We have three transitions now, Tunis, Egypt and Libya and more are to follow."

Khouri said a revolt in Bahrain by a Shi'ite majority seeking more rights from the Sunni Al Khalifa ruling family had failed because it lacked regional and international backing.

It is true, experts say, that Gaddafi's downfall depended crucially on Western military intervention, which evidently is not going to be repeated in Syria or elsewhere -- debt-laden Western powers, still deeply involved in Iraq and Afghanistan, have no appetite for new fronts in the Muslim world.

The five-month NATO bombing campaign in Libya prevented Gaddafi's forces from recapturing the rebel city of Benghazi and quelling the revolt that erupted on February 17, which would have been a discouraging reversal for restive Arabs elsewhere.

PERSISTENCE PAYS

"It shows that if the protesters, opposition, freedom fighters or rebels in Yemen or in Syria persist they may be able to topple the regime," said Middle East analyst Geoff D. Porter.

"People's views of the Arab spring were formed by Tunisia and Egypt where protests lasted up to a month. They thought Libya will be impossible because it didn't fit the Tunisia and Egypt model," he said. "Libya's protests will encourage and embolden protesters in Syria and Yemen although they miss a big component which is the support of NATO."

Scenes of popular rejoicing in Tripoli after Gaddafi's forces apparently melted away suggest many in the capital had loathed their leader, but had not previously dared defy him for fear of retribution.

"This is another day, a new page in Libya's history. We are witnessing a new dawn and a new history of freedom," said Mohammed Derah, a Libyan activist in Tripoli.

Anti-Gaddafi demonstrations in Tripoli early on in the revolt were forcibly suppressed.

"Libya showed that Gaddafi didn't have the support he claimed he had. One may be able to make the comparison to Syria and Yemen where joining a revolution is a big risk. (People) may not support the regime but they wouldn't risk their lives until rebels show up," Porter said in reference to the paucity of demonstrations in Syrian cities such as Damascus and Aleppo.

Experts said economic and oil sanctions imposed on Gaddafi had played a big role in bringing his forces to their knees and similar actions against Syria could have a similar impact.

Assad, who faces growing international calls to step down over his crackdown on more than five months of protests which U.N. officials say have cost around 2,000 civilian lives, warned the West on Sunday that Syria would not tolerate any outside interference, saying unrest had become more militant.

"As for the threat of a military action ... any action against Syria will have greater consequences (on those who carry it out), greater than they can tolerate," he said.

No country has proposed any military intervention in Syria, which borders Israel, Lebanon, Iraq, Turkey and Jordan -- and has powerful allies in Shi'ite Iran and Lebanon's Hezbollah.

"Assad is probably afraid he will be in the same camp but he thinks he has different international relations than Gaddafi, who had no friends. Assad has the support of Tehran and Hezbollah and that changes the international community's calculus," Porter said.

For Khouri, the Libyan rebel success will shake the confidence of rulers such as Assad, who apparently believe their military-backed governments are immune to popular discontent.

"Assad lives in a world of his own. He doesn't live in a real world. He is oblivious to the new reality. These dictatorships feel invincible," Khouri said

"What we are seeing is that they are not invincible. They are very vulnerable. Most of these regimes have been in power for decades and decades and have reached the end of the line."

 

(Editing by Jon Boyle)

    Analysis: Gaddafi collapse will embolden Arab rebels, R, 22.8.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/22/us-libya-gaddafi-arab-idUSTRE77L1TX20110822

Factbox: Libyan oil output - how quickly can it restart?

Mon Aug 22, 2011
4:56am EDT
Reuters

(Reuters) - Six months of civil war have left Libya's oil industry in chaos, with fields that once pumped around 1.6 million barrels per day (bpd) deserted and export terminals, pumping stations and pipelines damaged by fighting and sabotage.

But with rebel fighters now in the capital, Tripoli, and the battle for control of the country probably in its final phase, industry executives and analysts say much of the country's oil output could be resurrected within months if peace can be established quickly.

Although it will struggle to return to pre-war output for the foreseeable future, output of as much as 1 million bpd could be feasible within months, they say.

Much will depend on the damage done to infrastructure and equipment in the last stages of the fighting between forces loyal to Muammar Gaddafi and rebels, backed by NATO, trying to end his 41 years of rule.

An official working for Libya's Arabian Gulf Oil Company (AGOCO), which has been operating the Sarir and Mesla oilfields under rebel control, said on Friday that output from its area could resume within three weeks.

"Our fields are under maintenance and we're still waiting for security," Abdeljalil Mayouf, information manager at AGOCO told Reuters. "When the security is OK we will start. Perhaps two or three weeks after the improvement in security. In three weeks maybe."

But even if Gaddafi avoids a bloody finish, his departure could usher in a new period of instability and uncertainty. Analysts, oil companies and Western governments worry that the opposition is riven by internal division, which could prompt new fighting after Gaddafi has been removed from power, jeopardizing both post-war recovery and the resumption of oil exports.

War and other traumas in oil producing nations have typically had a lasting impact on output. The speed of recovery in oil output depends crucially on how quickly international companies with highly evolved skills can be brought in.

Following are details of Libya's oil industry, production and assessments of how long it may take to restore output.

 

PRODUCTION AND EXPORTS

* Until the beginning of this year, OPEC member Libya was the world's 17th-largest oil producer and Africa's third-largest. It holds the continent's largest crude oil reserves. It sold about 85 percent of its exports to Europe.

* Oil production was equivalent to about 2 percent of global consumption, but fighting and social disruption have cut this to less than 100,000 bpd, and exports have stopped altogether. Many oilfields are dependent on foreign workers, who have almost all left the country.

* Most of Libya's oilfields are around the Sirte Basin, which contains around 80 percent of its proven reserves and spans the front line between rebel and government forces. Many other key parts of the country's oil industry are still held by forces loyal to Gaddafi.

* Libya has six major oil export terminals, listed with loading volumes for January from the IEA. The condition of these facilities now is not clear:

- Es Sider (447,000 bpd)

- Marsa El Brega (51,000 bpd)

- Ras Lanuf (195,000 bpd)

- Tobruk (51,000 bpd)

- Zueitina (214,000 bpd)

- Zawiyah (199,000 bpd)

- other unspecified terminals (333,000 bpd)

 

DAMAGE

* Damage to infrastructure was reported to be light during the first few months of fighting as both sides hoped to take full control of the country's oil industry. In March, officials said the terminals of Ras Lanuf, Zueitina and Es Sider had suffered only minor damage during fighting and some other oil towns had been left untouched.

* But damage has increased as fighting has continued and rebels have reported significant damage to oil infrastructure this month. It has not been possible to independently confirm reports of damage being done to oil installations, an accusation rebels have previously leveled at government forces.

 

LIBYAN OIL COMPANIES

* Libya's oil industry was formerly run by the state National Oil Co, which accounted for around 50 percent of the country's output.

* Since fighting began, the Libyan National Council, with the help of Qatar has been able to export a minimal amount of crude oil in the form of two partially laden tankers. The oil for these cargoes was reported previously to have been in storage. One of these cargoes went to a U.S. refinery and the other to Italy. No exports have been reported for several weeks.

* It is not clear how the oil industry will be structured after the war, but it may be placed in the hands of AGOCO.

 

RESTORATION

* A Reuters poll of 20 analysts and industry officials last month forecast it would take up to one year to restore Libyan output to at least 1 million bpd but up to two years to get back to pre-civil war levels of 1.6 million bpd.

* The longest forecast for a full recovery of oil output came from David Wech, head of research at Vienna-based consultants JBC Energy. He said a return to full output capacity could take three to four years because significant investment in infrastructure would be necessary.

* Oil industry consultancy Wood Mackenzie said it would take around 36 months for the country to recover its full production capacity, from whenever the crisis is resolved. It estimates that substantial oil volumes could be back in the market by late 2012 if a resolution is achieved by the end of 2011. But the recovery period will extend if production remains shut-in for longer, as infrastructure continues to deteriorate.

* Samuel Ciszuk, senior Middle East & North Africa energy analyst with IHS Energy, said oil output could theoretically be restored in 18 months but that this would be the most optimistic scenario.

* "Once there is a degree of security for their personnel, it should not take too long for the oil firms to get their workers back in. If the money's right they will go back," said Mike Wittner, Societe Generale head of oil market research in New York. But it was difficult to assess how much damage had been done to oil facilities during the war, he said. "No one really has a clear idea of how much damage to the oil infrastructure there has been ... Anytime you shut a field down quickly and run off in a panic there will be problems."

 

FOREIGN OIL COMPANIES

* Foreign oil firms, essential for the quick resumption of production, have spoken to rebels at length, but the future of existing contracts with Gaddafi's government is uncertain.

* Italian producer ENI, present in Libya since the 1950s, is the biggest foreign oil company there, producing 270,000 boed (barrels of oil equivalent per day) in 2010. Its contracts are in force to 2042 for oil production, but it is not yet clear if they would be honored by any future government.

* The total equity share of the following foreign companies -- many of which operated fields on behalf of Libya's National Oil Co -- amounted to almost 500,000 bpd before the conflict began. The legal status of contracts after the civil war will need to be clarified.

 

(Reporting by Christopher Johnson; Editing by Alison Birrane)

    Factbox: Libyan oil output - how quickly can it restart?, R, 22.8.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/22/us-libya-oil-factbox-idUSTRE77L19Q20110822

Jubilant Rebels Control Much of Tripoli

August 22, 2011
The New York Times
By KAREEM FAHIM and DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

TRIPOLI, Libya — Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s four-decade-old grip on power dissolved with astonishing speed on Monday as rebels marched into the capital and arrested two of his sons, while residents raucously celebrated the prospective end of his four-decade-old rule. Colonel Qaddafi’s precise whereabouts remained unknown.

In the city’s central Green Square, the site of many manufactured rallies in support of Colonel Qaddafi, jubilant Libyans tore down posters of him and stomped on them. The rebel leadership announced that the elite presidential guard protecting the Libyan leader had surrendered and that their forces controlled many parts of the city, but not Colonel Qaddafi’s leadership compound.

The National Transitional Council, the rebel governing body, issued a mass text message saying: “We congratulate the Libyan people for the fall of Muammar Qaddafi and call on the Libyan people to go into the street to protect the public property. Long live free Libya.”

Officials loyal to Colonel Qaddafi insisted that the fight was not over, and there were clashes between rebels and government troops early on Monday morning. Explosions and the sound of mortars could still be heard Monday morning and a rebel fighter told Al Jazeera television that pro-Qaddafi forces still controlled 15 to 20 percent of the capital. News reports quoting rebel officials said tanks had emerged from Colonel Qaddafi’s compound and had opened fire. “There haven’t been many silent minutes,” Karen Graham, a British nurse in Tripoli told the BBC, referring to the sound of battle.

NATO and American officials said that the Qaddafi government’s control of Tripoli, which had been its final stronghold, was now in doubt, and the European Union said on Monday it had begun planning for a post-Qaddafi era.

“It’s clear the regime is crumbling around him,” Alistair Burt, a British minister, said, referring to the Libyan leader.

President Obama said Sunday night that Colonel Qaddafi and his inner circle had “to recognize that their rule has come to an end” and called on Colonel Qaddafi “to relinquish power once and for all.” He also called on the National Transitional Council to avoid civilian casualties and protect state institutions as it took control of the country.

“Tonight, the momentum against the Qaddafi regime has reached a tipping point,” Mr. Obama said in a statement. “Tripoli is slipping from the grasp of a tyrant. The Qaddafi regime is showing signs of collapsing. The people of Libya are showing that the universal pursuit of dignity and freedom is far stronger than the iron fist of a dictator.”

The shocking collapse of the Qaddafi forces appeared to signal the end for one of the world’s most flamboyant and mercurial political figures, the leader of an idiosyncratic government that was frequently as bizarre as it was brutal.

Long a thorn in the side of the West after he took power in a bloodless coup in 1969, Colonel Qaddafi had managed an awkward reconciliation in recent years, abandoning his fledgling nuclear program and paying billions of dollars to the victims of the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing, which was attributed to Libyan agents.

While denying that he actually headed the government, Colonel Qaddafi created a cult of personality that centered on his Green Book, a volume both trivial and impenetrable. His decades of iron-fisted rule have produced a country, analysts say, that is devoid of credible institutions and any semblance of a civil society — a potential source of trouble in the months and years ahead.

After six months of inconclusive fighting, the assault on the capital unfolded at a breakneck pace, with insurgents capturing a base of the vaunted Khamis Brigade, where they had expected to meet resistance, then speeding toward Tripoli and through several neighborhoods of the capital effectively unopposed.

A separate group of rebels waged a fierce battle near the Rixos Hotel, a bastion of Qaddafi support near the city center. A team of rebels there captured Colonel Qaddafi’s son and one-time heir apparent, Seif al-Islam. Rebels also claimed to have accepted the surrender of a second Qaddafi son, Mohammed.

Rebel spokesmen said that their fighters had surrounded the Bab al-Aziziya compound where they believed Colonel Qaddafi might still be holding out, but that they were reluctant to begin an all-out assault. Colonel Qaddafi issued a series of defiant audio statements during the night, calling on people to “save Tripoli” from a rebel offensive. He said Libyans were becoming “slaves of the imperialists” and that “all the tribes are now marching on Tripoli.”

Mahmoud Hamza, a senior official of the Qaddafi Foreign Ministry, acknowledged in a phone call at 1 a.m. local time on Monday that “it is getting near the end now.” But he said that the Qaddafi forces had not given up.

“Tripoli now is very dangerous. There is a lot of fighting, but there is not yet an assault on Bab al-Aziziya,” he said. “For me this is the most fearful thing. I hope it does not come to that.”

Al Arabiya television broadcast images of Libyans celebrating in central Tripoli and ripping down Qaddafi posters. Huge crowds gathered in Benghazi, the capital of the rebel-controlled eastern part of the country, as expectations grew that Colonel Qaddafi’s hold on power was crumbling.

Earlier on Sunday, protesters took to the streets, and cells of rebels inside Tripoli clashed with Qaddafi loyalists, opposition leaders and refugees from the city said. Fighting had been heavy in the morning, but by midnight Colonel Qaddafi’s forces had withdrawn from many districts without a major battle.

A rebel spokesman said insurgents had opened another line of attack on Tripoli by sending boats from the port city of Misurata to link up with fighters in the capital. It was not clear how many fighters were involved in that operation.

Moussa Ibrahim, the government’s spokesman, issued press statements through the night, saying that more than 1,300 people had died in fighting in the city, but that government troops remained in control. Those claims could not be confirmed.

But the turmoil inside Tripoli and the crumbling of defenses on its outskirts suggested a decisive shift in the revolt, the most violent of the Arab Spring uprisings.

NATO troops continued close air support of the rebels all day, with multiple strikes by alliance aircraft helping clear the road to Tripoli from Zawiyah. Rebel leaders in the west credited NATO with thwarting an attempt on Sunday by Qaddafi loyalists to reclaim Zawiyah with a flank assault on the city.

Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi has been a central character in the drama of the revolt. Before the uprising began he was known as Libya’s leading advocate of reform in both economic and political life. He cultivated an Anglophile persona, and often appeared to be waging a tug of war against his father’s older and more conservative allies. He was increasingly seen as the most powerful figure behind the scenes of the government as well as his father’s likely successor.

When the revolt broke out it was Seif al-Islam who delivered the government’s first public response, vowing to wipe out what he called “the rats” and warning of a civil war.

In his last public interview, he appeared a changed man. Sitting in a spare hotel conference room, he wore a newly grown beard and fingered prayer beads. After months of denouncing the rebels as dangerous Islamic radicals, he said that he was brokering a new alliance with the Islamist faction among the rebels to drive out the liberals.

While rebels expressed hope that Colonel Qaddafi’s forces had lost their will to fight, support for the government could remain strong inside areas of Tripoli. Analysts said the crucial role played by NATO in aiding the rebel advance in the relatively unpopulated areas outside the capital could prove far less effective in an urban setting, where concerns about civilian casualties could hamper the alliance’s ability to focus on government troops.

A senior American military officer who has been following the developments closely, and who has been in contact with African and Arab military leaders in recent days, expressed caution on Sunday about the prospects for Libya even if the Qaddafi government should fall. Even if Colonel Qaddafi is deposed in some way, the senior officer said, there was still no clear plan for a political succession or for maintaining security in the country.

“The leaders I’ve talked to do not have a clear understanding how this will all play out,” said the officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the issue publicly.

Few would have predicted that the rebels would meet so little resistance from the 32nd Brigade, a unit that NATO had considered one of the most elite in Libya and commanded by Khamis Qaddafi, one of the leader’s sons. The so-called Khamis Brigade was one of the crucial units enforcing the defense lines around the capital, extending about 17 miles outside Tripoli to the west and about 20 miles to the south.

Rebels said those points had been breached by Sunday afternoon despite the expectation that Colonel Qaddafi would use armored units and artillery to defend them. It was unclear whether the government troops had staged a tactical retreat or had been dislodged by NATO strikes.

After a brief gun battle, rebels took over one of the brigade’s bases along the road to Tripoli. Inside the base, rebels raised their flag and cheered wildly. They began carting away stores of weapons, including rocket-propelled grenades and mortars.

While the bodies of several dead loyalist soldiers were left on the ground in the base, it appeared the troops there had retreated rather than being forced out in battle. At least one structure suffered significant damage from NATO bombs.

American officials say they are preparing contingency plans if and when Colonel Qaddafi’s government falls to help prevent the vast Libyan government stockpiles of weapons, particularly portable antiaircraft missiles, from being stolen and dispersed.

Untold numbers of the missiles, including SA-7s, have already been looted from government arsenals, and American officials fear they could circulate widely, including heat-seeking antiaircraft missiles that could be used against civilian airliners. The senior military officer said the United States had already been quietly meeting with leaders of Libya’s neighbors to stem the flow of the missiles and could send small teams of American military and other government weapons experts into Libya after the fall of the Qaddafi government to help Libyan rebel and other international forces secure the weapons.

Early Monday, the Human Rights Watch advocacy group urged the combatants to “do everything feasible to protect civilians caught in the fighting” and said rebels “should not carry out reprisals against those who fought for or supported” Colonel Qaddafi’s regime.

 

Kareem Fahim reported from Tripoli, and David D. Kirkpatrick from Zintan, Libya. Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington, Mark Landler from Vineyard Haven, Mass., and Alan Cowell from Paris.

    Jubilant Rebels Control Much of Tripoli, NYT, 22.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/23/world/africa/23libya.html

Instead of a Bloody Struggle,

a Headlong Rush Into a Cheering Capital

August 21, 2011
The New York Times
By KAREEM FAHIM

TRIPOLI, Libya — In the end, it was more of a Sunday drive than a punishing final offensive.

From the first cautious ventures out of the hard-fought prize of Zawiyah, the rebels’ advance became a headlong rush into the heart of Tripoli and Green Square, the symbol of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s power. By nightfall, the rebels were in command of the square, the scene of so many manic, forced declarations of fealty to Colonel Qaddafi. Now, the portraits were ripped down, along with the green flags that marked his rule. Instead, young men waved rebel flags in the renamed Martyrs’ Square.

By 2:30 a.m. Monday, a wary quiet had taken hold. Rebel fighters secured the entrances to the square and staffed checkpoints in parts of the capital. There were small, ecstatic gatherings, but there were also long, silent streets in a city of frayed nerves, and rumors of roving government soldiers and snipers everywhere. After their speedy advance, the rebels’ hold on parts of central Tripoli seemed evident but also tenuous.

Bullets ricocheted here and there, and sounds of gunfights erupted sporadically but faded by the early morning. The road from Zawiyah to Tripoli was jammed with hundreds of cars, many with fighters aboard, in what looked like a move to further secure the city.

Sunday began with the sound of rockets. The roar subsided as the rebels moved beyond Zawiyah, a city that had taken days of heavy fighting to win back from the Qaddafi forces. But each time, the fighters found it a temporary jolt rather than a protracted battle.

The first major test was the military base for the feared Khamis Brigade, a heavy armored unit commanded by one of Colonel Qaddafi’s sons, in the town of Mayah. The brigade is the keystone of the so-called ring of steel defense line about 17 miles west of Tripoli, and for months NATO forces had identified it as the main obstacle to an advance to the capital.

Locals fear it: the Khamis Brigade’s troops do what they want, residents say, and get all the guns they want. Since the February uprising, the base has also served as a prison for government opponents.

On Sunday, the bodies of six Qaddafi soldiers lay near the entrance. A group of prisoners released from the base spoke of their torture and cried. Fighters cheered and grabbed what they could, including the most popular item, a Belgian gun, stacking pickup trucks high with weapons. Emad Ali took two bottles of battery fluid and some grease.

“I wanted something useful for the soldiers,” he said.

The soldiers did not need much help from Mr. Ali. NATO warplanes had flown overhead for days, bombing targets in the capital and its surroundings to clear the path to Tripoli.

An uprising in Tripoli on Saturday night also laid the groundwork. At the “zero hour,” as the rebels called it, residents took to the streets and held demonstrations that were met with deadly force by Qaddafi soldiers — who also further exposed their heavy artillery to NATO surveillance, one rebel leader said.

All day, news of fresh advances made its way back from the front lines, and then became obsolete. The rebels flew through town after town until they reached Janzur, a Tripoli suburb.

A convoy met them, but it was of jubilant Tripoli residents who had heard they were coming, honking car horns and screaming and waving out their windows as the fighters went past.

In Gargaresh, an affluent neighborhood in western Tripoli, residents spilled into the streets — at first in disbelief, compulsively sharing the news; then in joy, hugging and cheering — as they received text messages saying that the rebels had entered the city.

“My country is free! God is great! My country is free!” screamed one Gargaresh resident, reached by telephone. He had to shout — the rhythmic roar of the crowd with him drowned out any quieter conversation.

He and his neighbors had spent weeks inside their houses, he said, trying to keep trips outside as infrequent as possible because they feared Colonel Qaddafi’s security forces. But on Sunday night, they all reunited in a triumphant block party that lasted all night.

“They went in such a big hurry,” said Majid el-Haif, 32, a resident of the Siyahiya neighborhood who was in the street with his neighbors to celebrate the quick retreat of pro-Qaddafi forces. “It was so smooth.”

 

Jehad Nga contributed reporting from Doha, Qatar.

    Instead of a Bloody Struggle, a Headlong Rush Into a Cheering Capital, NYT, 21.8.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/22/world/africa/22scene.html

Surveillance and Coordination With NATO Aided Rebels

August 21, 2011
The New York Times
By ERIC SCHMITT and STEVEN LEE MYERS

WASHINGTON — As rebel forces in Libya converged on Tripoli on Sunday, American and NATO officials cited an intensification of American aerial surveillance in and around the capital city as a major factor in helping to tilt the balance after months of steady erosion of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s military.

The officials also said that coordination between NATO and the rebels, and among the loosely organized rebel groups themselves, had become more sophisticated and lethal in recent weeks, even though NATO’s mandate has been merely to protect civilians, not to take sides in the conflict.

NATO’s targeting grew increasingly precise, one senior NATO diplomat said, as the United States established around-the-clock surveillance over the dwindling areas that Libyan military forces still controlled, using armed Predator drones to detect, track and occasionally fire at those forces.

At the same time, Britain, France and other nations deployed special forces on the ground inside Libya to help train and arm the rebels, the diplomat and another official said.

“We always knew there would be a point where the effectiveness of the government forces would decline to the point where they could not effectively command and control their forces,” said the diplomat, who was granted anonymity to discuss confidential details of the battle inside Tripoli.

“At the same time,” the diplomat said, “the learning curve for the rebels, with training and equipping, was increasing. What we’ve seen in the past two or three weeks is these two curves have crossed.”

Through Saturday, NATO and its allies had flown 7,459 strike missions, or sorties, attacking thousands of targets, from individual rocket launchers to major military headquarters. The cumulative effect not only destroyed Libya’s military infrastructure but also greatly diminished the ability of Colonel Qaddafi’s commanders to control forces, leaving even committed fighting units unable to move, resupply or coordinate operations.

On Saturday, the last day NATO reported its strikes, the alliance flew only 39 sorties against 29 targets, 22 of them in Tripoli. In the weeks after the initial bombardments in March, by contrast, the allies routinely flew 60 or more sorties a day.

“NATO got smarter,” said Frederic Wehrey, a senior policy analyst with the RAND Corporation who follows Libya closely. “The strikes were better controlled. There was better coordination in avoiding collateral damage.” The rebels, while ill-trained and poorly organized even now, made the most of NATO’s direct and indirect support, becoming more effective in selecting targets and transmitting their location, using technology provided by individual NATO allies, to NATO’s targeting team in Italy.

“The rebels certainly have our phone number,” the diplomat said. “We have a much better picture of what’s happening on the ground.”

Rebel leaders in the west credited NATO with thwarting an attempt on Sunday by Qaddafi loyalists to reclaim Zawiyah with a flank assault on the city.

Administration officials greeted the developments with guarded elation that the overthrow of a reviled dictator would vindicate the demands for democracy that have swept the Arab world.

A State Department’s spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland, said that President Obama, who was vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard, and other senior American officials were following events closely.

Privately, many officials cautioned that it could still be several days or weeks before Libya’s military collapses or Colonel Qaddafi and his inner circle abandon the fight. As Saddam Hussein and his sons did in Iraq after the American invasion in 2003, the Libyan leader could hold on and lead an insurgency from hiding even after the capital fell, the officials said.

“Trying to predict what this guy is going to do is very, very difficult,” a senior American military officer said.

A senior administration official said the United States had evidence that other members of Colonel Qaddafi’s inner circle were negotiating their own exits, but there was no reliable information on the whereabouts or state of mind of Colonel Qaddafi. Audio recordings released by Colonel Qaddafi on Sunday night, which expressed defiance, were of limited use in discerning his circumstances.

Even if Colonel Qaddafi were to be deposed, there is no clear plan for political succession or maintaining security in the country. “The leaders I’ve talked to do not have a clear understanding how this will all play out,” said the senior officer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to maintain diplomatic relationships.

The United States is already laying plans for a post-Qaddafi Libya. Jeffrey D. Feltman, an assistant secretary of state, was in Benghazi over the weekend for meetings with the rebels’ political leadership about overseeing a stable, democratic transition. A senior administration official said that the United States wanted to reinforce the message of rebel leaders that they seek an inclusive transition that would bring together all the segments of Libyan society.

“Even as we welcome the fact that Qaddafi’s days are numbered and we want to see him go as quickly as possible, we also want to send a message that the goal should be the protection of civilians,” the official said.

The administration was making arrangements to bring increased medical supplies and other humanitarian aid into Libya.

With widespread gunfire in the streets of Tripoli, Human Rights Watch cautioned NATO to take measures to guard against the kind of bloody acts of vengeance, looting and other violence that followed the fall of Saddam Hussein’s government.

“Everyone should be ready for the prospect of a very quick, chaotic transition,” said Tom Malinowski, the director of the Washington office of Human Rights Watch.

    Surveillance and Coordination With NATO Aided Rebels, NYT, 21.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/22/world/africa/22nato.html