Muammar Qaddafi’s fighters have beaten back an attempt by Libya’s new government to crush remnants of the old regime, forcing revolutionary troops into retreat in the mountains and turning Qaddafi’s seaside hometown into an urban battlefield of snipers firing from mosques and heavy weapons rattling main boulevards.
The tough defense on Friday of the holdout towns of Sirte and Bani Walid displayed the firepower and resolve of the Qaddafi followers and suggested Libya’s new rulers may not easily break the back of regime holdouts. It also raised fears the country could face a protracted insurgency of the sort that has played out in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“The Qaddafi loyalists have so many weapons,” cried Maab Fatel, a 28-year-old revolutionary fighter on the front lines in the mountain enclave of Bani Walid, 140km southeast of Tripoli.
Photo: Reuters
“This battle is really crazy,” Fatel said, his uniform splattered with blood from carrying a wounded comrade.
Revolutionary forces began the day by streaming into Bani Walid, but pulled back after intense fighting failed to dislodge pro-Qaddafi snipers and gunners from strategic positions. The two sides traded relentless mortar and rocket fire across a desert valley called Wadi Zeitoun that divides the town between north and south.
Mohaned Bendalla, a doctor at a field hospital in nearby Wishtata, said at least six rebels were killed and more than 50 were wounded.
Inside the town, a radio station believed linked to one of Qaddafi’s main propagandist kept up a steady stream of appeals to fight and rants that demonized the revolutionaries as traitors who did not honor Islamic values.
“These revolutionaries are fighting to drink and do drugs all the time and be like the West, dance all night,” the announcer claimed. “We are a traditional tribal society that refuses such things and must fight it.”
Ahmed Omar Bani, a military spokesman for Libya’s transitional government, dismissed such allegations, saying the revolutionary forces’ only goal was “to liberate our people.”
In Sirte, Qaddafi’s birthplace on the Mediterranean coast, his backers rained gunfire down from mosque minarets and high-rise buildings on fighters pushing into the city from the west. In the streets the two sides battered each other with high-caliber machine guns, rockets and rocket-propelled grenades.
At one point, a pickup truck filled with revolutionary forces rushed back to the rear lines, its bed bloodied and strewn with the body parts and mangled face of a fighter who had been manning a machine gun. Other fighters shouting “God is great” pulled out his lifeless remains and comforted his partner, the pickup driver.
NATO warplanes swept overhead, but it was unclear whether there were fresh airstrikes.
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