Ex-rebels allied to Libya’s army attacked a bastion of diehards linked to former Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi in clashes that left at least 11 dead, underlining the challenges facing the government.
Wednesday’s fighting came exactly a year after anti-regime forces declared the liberation of Bani Walid, 170km southeast of Tripoli, But many still see it as a shelter for regime loyalists and criminal gangs.
“Bani Walid was shelled from three fronts today,” town official Massud al-Waer said, adding that dozens of residents were wounded in the assault on the city, which has been under siege for weeks.
The commander of the ex-rebel group, Libya Shield, said four of his men had been killed and 19 wounded in the fighting for the hilltop town, which remained loyal to Qaddafi during the conflict last year that led to his ouster.
The deputy director of Bani Walid’s hospital, Abdullah al-Mansuri, told reporters that his facility had received another “seven dead people and 75 wounded, including a 14-year-old girl.”
The town came back into focus last month after the death of a former rebel from the city of Misrata who was credited with capturing Qaddafi and was later kidnapped, allegedly tortured and shot in Bani Walid.
The death of Omar ben Shaaban, 22, stoked tensions between the neighboring towns, which found themselves on opposite sides of the conflict last year.
The Libyan National Assembly, elected in July, ordered the Libyan ministries of defense and the interior to find those who had held Omar ben Shaaban hostage for weeks in Bani Walid and authorized the use of force if necessary.
The Libyan army chief of staff said on Wednesday in a statement carried by the official news agency LANA that the army was “ready to enter Bani Walid.”
The statement called on “all parties to exercise self-restraint” so that “units of the regular army can impose the authority of the state.”
Last week, tribal chiefs interviewed by reporters in Bani Walid said that they would refuse the entry of “lawless militias” into the town and said they did not recognize a military authority in Libya.
The weeks-long standoff underlines the challenges facing the authorities in Tripoli as they fight to suppress dozens of militia groups comprising disparate former rebels as they seek to rebuild the nation’s army and police force.
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
BACK TO BATTLE: North Korean soldiers have returned to the front lines in Russia’s Kursk region after earlier reports that Moscow had withdrawn them following heavy losses Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday pored over a once-classified map of vast deposits of rare earths and other critical minerals as part of a push to appeal to US President Donald Trump’s penchant for a deal. The US president, whose administration is pressing for a rapid end to Ukraine’s war with Russia, on Monday said he wanted Ukraine to supply the US with rare earths and other minerals in return for financially supporting its war effort. “If we are talking about a deal, then let’s do a deal, we are only for it,” Zelenskiy said, emphasizing Ukraine’s need for security guarantees
RSS