Libyan rebels beat a fresh retreat from Brega yesterday after a new bout of fierce fighting over the key oil town.
Volunteer fighters, who had entered the frontline town just hours earlier, said they were staging a tactical withdrawal after being ambushed by loyalists of Libyan strongman Muammar Qaddafi.
A correspondent saw 300 to 400 of them regrouping on the road back into rebel-held territory about 10km to the east.
Photo: Reuters
Loud explosions could still be heard from the outskirts of the city as the rebels’ best-trained fighters took on the Qaddafi loyalists.
Reinforcements were seen heading to the frontline on a minor road into the town.
Most of the rebel volunteers acknowledged they had neither the military training and discipline, nor the knowledge of the terrain to mount a frontal assault on Brega. They said they were dependent on the rebels’ few trained fighters, most of them defectors from the regular army.
“There is no commander. We are all together,” said Abdul Wahed Agouri, a 28-year-old volunteer.
“We are not army. We can’t move closer to Brega because we don’t know where the enemy is. We don’t know the area. We have to wait for the army [defectors],” he said, adding that that might take a few hours or a whole day.
Intermittent explosions rocked the desert landscape as the rebel advance guard exchanged rocket and artillery fire with Qaddafi forces inside the town.
The correspondent saw three wounded rebels being transported on the back of trucks to a staging point east of the town, where they were transferred to regular ambulances to be taken to hospital in the rebel-held city of Ajdabiya to the east.
“This guy sustained bullet wounds in fighting in the streets of Brega,” said Ezzedine Farsi, as one stretcher case was brought in with injuries to both his arm and leg.
Aircraft from the NATO-led coalition enforcing a no-fly zone were heard over the town.
Meanwhile, the chief rebel spokesman told reporters that coalition warplanes had killed 13 people, four of them civilians, in an air raid about 15km east of Brega on Friday.
“Thirteen dead, seven injured by friendly fire. It was a regrettable occurrence,” Abdulhafiz Ghoga said, calling them “unintentional deaths.”
“The leadership is working on preventing a recurrence,” Ghoga.
A civilian rebel official said the dead civilians were an ambulance driver and three medical students from Benghazi.
They had been part of a rebel convoy of five or six vehicles, said Issa Khamis, liaison officer for the rebels’ transitional government in Ajdabiya.
A NATO spokeswoman said the alliance was looking into the reports.
“We are always concerned by reports of civilian casualties. NATO’s mission is to protect civilians and civilian areas from the threat of attack,” Oana Lungescu said.
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