(Washington Post) - Growing up in Fairfax as the son of Libyan dissidents, Hesham Mansur was well aware of the horrors of Col. Muammar Al QathafiÂ’s government. But when the U.S.-born computer networking student registered for classes this semester at George Mason University, he had no idea that he would soon be in Libya, trying to overthrow that government himself.
“One of the Facebook comments was, ‘If you’re so brave, go do it yourself,’ ” Mansur, 27, said, recalling the flurry of Internet messages between Libyans abroad as the uprising gained steam. So on Feb. 28, less than two weeks after the protests began, he packed up medical supplies donated from Libyans in the United States, flew to Cairo and crossed into Libya by land.
He was not alone. For Libyans living in the United States, Germany, Sweden, Britain and elsewhere, the sight of their countrymen rising against Al QathafiÂ’s 41-year rule inspired them to put their own lives on hold and race out to help.
“I felt like I’d done all the Twittering I could do,” said Ahmed Hnesh, 29, a management consultant from Falls Church who is friends with Mansur and arrived here a few days before him.
The returnees number in the hundreds, if not more. Many were dissidents or are the children of dissidents. They came back to provide humanitarian aid, moral support, expertise and front-line muscle.
The rebelsÂ’ provisional government, includes a number of returnees from abroad, their cosmopolitanism and fluency in European languages helping them build diplomatic relationships. For those who choose to fight, overseas experience tends to be less helpful, though the self-proclaimed rebel army commander, Gen. Khalifa Haftr, spent years living in Fairfax.
Hnesh left the United States without telling his parents. Others living abroad have received tentative blessings from parents torn between fear for their safety and pride at their actions.
“For two weeks I pestered my mum,” said Zackariya Waheishi, 22, a U.K.-born Londoner who was in his last semester at his university when he withdrew to travel to his father’s home city. “Finally she said, ‘Well, it looks like you’re going to go, so go, but don’t be foolish.’ ”
Waheishi brought along an olive-green Urban Spirit jacket and his Timberland boots, and headed to the front line. “I was provided with a gun there,” he said, adding, “When they see that you’re from the U.K., it’s a morale booster for them.”
The Kalashnikov was the first weapon he had ever handled, and he stood with it on the front line, ready to shoot if Al Qathafi’s soldiers approached. “I guess I haven’t tried it yet,” he said. “I hope I won’t have to.”
Not all the new arrivals are young and of fighting age. Ali Tarhouni, 60, a professor of economics at the University of Washington, sent a long e-mail to his students in February, explaining why he could not finish out the semester. Then he got on a plane, leaving his wife and children in Seattle.
“Everyone in my family understood,” said Tarhouni, who was recently named the provisional council’s head of finance, economics and oil, and now spends his days meeting with diplomats and trying to reel in oil revenue for the rebel-held east. “My students are cheering for me.”
Tarhouni had been an activist as a student in Libya, and he said that after he came to the United States in the 1970s, he was sentenced to death in absentia. Returning now was exhilarating, he said. “I thought I’d never see my birth country again,” he said. “I thought I would die away. Many people died and never saw this country.”
Those who come acknowledge the risks. With Al QathafiÂ’s forces advancing toward Benghazi last week and the front line fluid, residents know they could awake any morning to find the city besieged. But once the newcomers arrive, apprehensions about safety tend to fall away as they share the elation of a populace that is willing to sacrifice much to hold on to its new freedoms.
Hnesh, Mansur and other friends from the United States have been staying here, helping to organize humanitarian aid. Four of them sat last week at MansurÂ’s cousinÂ’s house, drinking Turkish coffee and watching TV coverage of the uprising. Outside, shots rang out.
When Al Qathafi forces shelled Benghazi last month, sending residents fleeing, the friends stayed as the alleyways become factories for Molotov cocktails.
“I think being here, your sense of normal just gets skewed,” said Hnesh, who flew home briefly last month before returning. “Right now, normal is hearing guns and grenades flying. And seeing the characters that you do, walking around with major guns, and you go back to work and open your laptop and sit in your cube and you’re going: ‘Am I really here? When yesterday I was walking around taking part in a revolution?’ It doesn’t compare.”
Hnesh is not sure how long he will be able to stay, but Mansur and Waheishi vowed they will remain in Libya until Al Qathafi leaves.
“To be honest, me personally, I don’t think I’ll make a difference,” Waheishi said. “But I do believe that many stones make a mountain. There’s strength in numbers. And the more people we have, the higher morale is. And it makes me feel good to know that I am part of that.”
The passion drawing people to this revolution has led to the disappearance of at least one American who is not of Libyan descent. Matthew VanDyke, 31, a Georgetown graduate from Baltimore, arrived in Benghazi on March 6 hoping to make a documentary about the uprising.
On March 12, VanDyke said he wanted to go to the town of Brega to shoot some footage, said Nouri Fonas, the Libyan friend whom VanDyke was staying with in Benghazi.
But on March 14, Brega fell to Al Qathafi forces and VanDyke stopped answering his phone. His mother, Sharon VanDyke, said she has asked the State Department for help locating him.
Fonas, a tall man in khaki fatigues who is a writer in civilian life but is now fighting for the rebels, looked down, his lips trembling. “Never came back,” he said of his friend.
“Matthew not only has family in America, he has family in Libya,” he said. “I’d sell my soul to find my friend. He came to help with freedom.”
(N.Y. Times) - A NATO airstrike near the battlefront in eastern Libya killed 13 rebel fighters outside the pivotal port city of Brega, a rebel spokesman and wounded fighters said Saturday.
Badly burned survivors described scenes of carnage, with the fighters killed in a flash, as a cluster of rebel vehicles were lifted off the ground and then landed in fiery wrecks.
The deaths underscored the dangers faced by Western allies as they rely on airstrikes to push back the forces of Col. Muammar Al Qathafi, and revealed the anxieties of the rebel leadership, which fears what would happen if the airstrikes stopped.
The rebel leaders quickly called the strike an error and blamed the inexperience of their fighters. “It’s a mistake,” said Abdul Hafidh Ghoga, the rebel’s main spokesman, speaking at a meeting of the leaders, many of whom watched with grim faces as news of the airstrike was broadcast on Al Jazeera television. “Nothing has changed.”
A survivor said he believed that the airstrike had been intended for Al Qathafi forces, and that the allies had bombed the wrong target because a rebel fighter had fired a heavy machine gun into the air.
The potential for such deadly mistakes could be mounting: the Al Qathafi loyalists are increasingly using equipment similar to the rebelsÂ’, including pickup trucks fitted with machine guns or rocket launchers, making it difficult for even the combatants to recognize their enemies.
A NATO spokesman in Brussels said the alliance was aware of the report and was investigating. “NATO takes reports of civilian casualties very seriously,” the spokesman said. “But for us, exact details are hard to verify because we do not have reliable sources on the ground.”
The spokesman, who, following NATO policy, asked not to be identified, added, “If someone fires at one of our aircraft, they have the right to defend themselves.”
In recent days, American officials have said that the United States, at least, has its own sources on the ground, saying that teams of C.I.A. operatives are in Libya, in part to gather intelligence for military airstrikes.
American officials have said that the United States was reducing its military role in Libya, and the Pentagon said Saturday that there would be no more American airstrikes after this weekend. But as of late Friday, the United States was still conducting most of the airstrikes and was still fully engaged early Saturday.
The strike near Brega occurred after dark on Friday as rebels were trying to retake the city. The Al Qathafi forces had positioned forward observers in the desert nearby with a view of the road, enabling their artillery crews in the city to hit the rebels as they tried to approach.
A small convoy of rebel trucks and an ambulance had entered an area of close fighting between the lines of the two sides. Two of the rebel fighters there said they had been told to search an area in Brega. One of them, Ali Abdullah Abubaker, said the rebel army leader Abdul Fattah Younes had warned them to leave heavy weapons behind.
Around nightfall, the rebels had stopped for prayers on a stretch of road between Ajdabiyah and Brega. Rebels driving a Mitsubishi truck with a heavy machine gun mounted on the back pulled up near the group, and one of them started firing into the air.
“I don’t know why,” Mr. Abubaker said. “Maybe he was scared.”
Other rebels speculated that there may have been celebratory firing or that Colonel Al QathafiÂ’s forces had infiltrated rebel lines and fired at NATO warplanes.
Seconds later, Mr. Abubaker heard the planes. “I saw something white,” he said. “There was no sound.” The white pickup truck he was in burst into flames, he said, and three of the four other men in it were killed.
“It’s a mistake,” said Mr. Abubaker, a college student, who had burns on his face and was struck by bullets in the truck that ignited in the blast.
Another fighter, Ibrahim Fahim al-Oraybey, 19, who had been riding in a pickup with a machine gun mounted on the back, said he saw a shepherd who lost both arms in the blast. Mr. Oraybey was also wounded, with burns on his face, back and shoulders. On Saturday, surgeons amputated his right leg below the knee.
An ambulance driver who arrived at the scene about an hour after the strike said he found only the blackened remains of four trucks and eight or nine bodies so badly burned and mangled by the explosion that he could not determine the exact number.
“I saw the fire, and the bodies, eight or nine bodies,” said the driver, Ahmed al-Ginashi. “They were totally burned.”
On the eastern front and in the besieged western city of Misurata, rebel fighters said Saturday that they were anxious about what they perceived as a slowdown in the airstrikes that enabled Colonel Al Qathafi to hold on as his forces regroup and advance. Officials said the airstrikes slowed down last week because of bad weather.
Mohamed, a Misurata resident whose surname was being withheld for the sake of his familyÂ’s safety, said that Al Qathafi forces had attacked the city again on Saturday morning with tanks and mortars, firing on the Al Jazeera neighbourhood near the Mediterranean.
He said that at least four people were killed, and that a tally prepared by the hospital on Friday put the death toll from a month of fighting in the city at 230.
On Saturday a Turkish relief boat arrived to evacuate some wounded patients, he said.
The battle lines in the east, just east of Brega, remained largely unchanged, with Al Qathafi forces in control of the city. Although airstrikes have taken out some of the governmentÂ’s tanks and heavy weapons, the militia appeared to have held back some of its military equipment in the relatively dense urban area.
Despite American plans to curtail its actions in Libya by Sunday, the American presence was robust on Friday and early Saturday. NATO reported Saturday morning that it had conducted 74 sorties on Friday. The Pentagon said that about 52 of them were flown by American aircraft.
On Saturday morning, American aircraft flew 24 sorties.
No Tomahawk missiles were fired from American ships on Friday or Saturday morning, and some of the Navy warships and submarines that had launched them in the past two weeks were expected to leave the area in the coming days. As of Friday, there were 9 American ships in the Mediterranean, down from 12 at the start of military action on March 19.
American planes will still be conducting surveillance flights, radar-jamming missions and in-air refuelling for France, Britain and other allied aircraft. American warplanes and ships will also remain on standby should NATO commanders need them, officials said.
In Washington, two lawmakers, Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican, and Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, a Connecticut independent, argued in an opinion column in The Wall Street Journal that Western forces should refocus their airstrikes on toppling Colonel Al Qathafi, moving beyond the United Nations mandate to protect Libyan civilians.
“A successful outcome in Libya requires the departure of Al Qathafi as quickly as possible,” the senators wrote. “It is not in our interest for Libya to become the scene of a protracted stalemate that will destabilize and inflame the region.”
They continued, “The battlefield reversals suffered by the opposition this week, when weather conditions hampered coalition airstrikes, underscore the need for a more robust and coherent package of aid to the rebel ground forces.”
As a stalemate held in the eastern front, the capital, Tripoli, remained under a tight lockdown. A panic set off by the defection of the Al Qathafi confidant Mussa Kussa eased slightly as only one other high-level official appeared to have fled in his wake. According to former government officials, guards were preventing others from leaving.
One senior official who had said he planned to travel to Egypt to pick up family members canceled his trip, telling reporters that he delayed it because of a paperwork problem.
(Washington Post) - On the evening of Feb. 8, Khalid Saih found himself in the back of a speeding car on the outskirts of Tripoli. It was not by choice. Saih, a lanky 36-year-old lawyer, was part of a small group of Libyan activists who were openly calling for a new constitution and more civil rights.
After months of harassment by the police, he and three fellow lawyers were ordered to report to the Interior Ministry in Tripoli. From there, with no warning, they were bundled into a car and told they would be meeting the Leader.
The men were terrified. None had met Col. Muammar Al Qathafi before. All of them had friends or relatives who had been tortured or murdered in his prisons. As they rode, they made contact with friends back in their hometown, Benghazi, to report their location, in case they were imprisoned or killed.
To calm their nerves, they recited a prayer that is invoked in situations of great danger:
There is no protection but he from the evil servant and his soldiers,
God be my protector from the bulk of their evil.
After a half-hour they arrived at a gated compound with a sign marked in Arabic “Equestrian Club of Abu Sitteh.” There were uniformed guards with guns and layers of barbed wire. The car stopped, and a man took the lawyers’ cellphones and escorted them to a large Bedouin-style tent, illuminated by an enormous bonfire in front.
They went in and sat down at a long, dimly lighted table. An attendant brought them glasses of fresh camelÂ’s milk. Then Al Qathafi entered, wearing brown Bedouin robes and a fur hat with flaps hanging down the sides.
With him were two of his top security aides, Abdullah al-Sanousi and Ahmed Qaddaf al-Dam, both well-known and feared men. The Leader shook the lawyersÂ’ hands and joined them at the head of the table.
For the next two hours, Al Qathafi lectured the men. He warned them not to encourage the kinds of protests that had overthrown one dictator in Tunisia and would soon topple another, Hosni Mubarak, in Egypt. “Take down your Facebook pages, your demands will be met,” Al Qathafi said. At times, he muttered to himself at length, leaving the lawyers baffled and embarrassed.
As he listened, Saih felt his fear giving way to a deep and unexpected reassurance. It was not Al QathafiÂ’s drugged, monotone voice that soothed him. Nor was it the LeaderÂ’s seeming desperation or his promises of reform, which Saih did not believe. Instead, it was the mere sight of him up close, an old man with a wrinkled, sagging face.
“I saw he’s a real human being,” Saih told me. “After so long, we had come to think maybe he is a robot, that he will never die. The youth had begun to lose hope. But when I saw him, I thought: He is just a man. This will come to an end, finally.”
When I met Saih in early March, he was at a bare desk in the Benghazi courthouse. The city, the largest in eastern Libya, freed itself from Al QathafiÂ’s control a week earlier. A damp sea breeze came in from the window. Saih, dressed in a rumpled brown suit, had become something of a celebrity: Al Arabiya, the satellite TV channel, was waiting outside for an interview.
He was a member of the Libyan National Council, the governing body set up by the rebels. The courthouse was its base, an array of featureless gray buildings along the cityÂ’s Mediterranean seafront.
Ad hoc municipal committees were meeting in rooms once used for trials and interrogations; paper signs hung on the doors, stating their new purpose. Young men in red military berets strode through the corridors, their faces glowing with zeal.
The walls were covered with fresh graffiti lampooning Al Qathafi. Outside, a loudspeaker blared the refrain of a revolutionary anthem - “we will remain” - as crowds of people milled around to hear the latest news.
It was not clear how long they would remain. Battles raged already in the desert towns of Ras Lanouf and Brega, less than 150 miles to the southwest. The rebelsÂ’ ragged volunteer militia was vastly outgunned by Al QathafiÂ’s forces, which would reach the gates of Benghazi before American and European war planes began pounding them with bombs on March 19.
The Libyan revolt started with Facebook calls for protests just like its counterparts in Tunisia and Egypt. Now it was devolving into a much bloodier and more prolonged civil war. LibyaÂ’s struggle would draw in the United Nations Security Council and a fragile coalition of Western and Arab military partners, muddying the heroic narrative of an indigenous Arab uprising.
But on that morning, Saih still had the dazed look of a survivor who cannot quite believe his own good luck. No one, he told me, not even the most committed dissidents or the most naïve optimists, had believed that Al Qathafi would be defeated in Benghazi.
The courthouse where he now sat in his own bare office, with a view of the wintry waves just across the city’s corniche, had been a place of fear and oppression. “Now it is the heart of Free Libya,” he said.
Saih was there when the Libyan revolt began, less than three weeks earlier. He and a group of fellow lawyers gathered after dark on February 15 outside police headquarters in downtown Benghazi to demand the release of a colleague, Fathi Terbil, who was arrested earlier that day.
Terbil was representing the relatives of about 1,200 men killed by Libyan security forces at Abu Salim prison in 1996. Some of the dead menÂ’s relatives were also there.
As the chanting crowd made its way through the city, more people joined them. The demonstration swelled, and soon hundreds of people were marching and chanting “the people want an end to corruption!” and other slogans borrowed from the protesters in Tunisia and Egypt.
After midnight, the police fired water cannons at them, and groups of thugs attacked with clubs and broken bottles. The protesters fought back with stones and later dispersed. The next day, the protests resumed and grew more violent as the first groups of mercenaries appeared, in yellow construction hats, to fight the protesters.
Some were Africans; some appeared to be foreign workers, including Bangladeshis and Chinese. Many were not mercenaries at all, but dark-skinned men from southern Libya or hapless African migrants in search of work. Some of the ones I talked to, in makeshift rebel prisons, said they had been tricked with promises of jobs and never paid at all.
On February 17, the scheduled “Day of Rage,” soldiers and the police opened fire with machine guns on unarmed crowds. Soon, photographs circulated of bodies torn in half by high-caliber weapons.
Unarmed young men climbed into bulldozers and drove them in suicidal attempts to breach the high green-and-white walls of the Katiba, the last stronghold of Al QathafiÂ’s authority left in the city, a vast compound that dominates BenghaziÂ’s downtown like a medieval fort.
The death toll shot up, and the initial core of politically active protesters like Saih and his fellow lawyers soon grew to encompass a broad swath of BenghaziÂ’s roughly 800,000 people.
One of them was Mahdi Ziu. His home was about 200 yards from the Katiba, and he saw a young man shot to death right outside his front door. Ziu was anything but an agitator: he worked as a middle manager at the Arabian Gulf Oil Company.
He was a paunchy man, sedentary and diabetic, with thinning hair and glasses and a resigned expression. He liked to read and surf the Internet, his daughter and brother told me. He had a soft heart and often cried when watching television dramas with his wife and daughter on the living-room couch.
He disliked politics and tended toward moderation in all things: he would walk away when he heard religious extremists fulminating about right and wrong at the local mosque.
But after three days of brutal killing in his hometown, something snapped. “He kept saying, ‘Jihad, jihad, this is the time for us all to go out and fight,’ ” his 21-year-old daughter, Zuhour, told me. Zuhour seemed to alternate between awe and horror as she quietly narrated her father’s death (his wife was sequestered, in accordance with Muslim mourning custom).
She sat on a couch in the living room, a slim, pretty girl in a head scarf with her hands folded uneasily in front of her. The neighbor’s baby whined in the next room, and a photograph of her father’s face sat on the table nearby. “If you heard this man,” Zuhour continued, “you would know he was ready for something.”
No one else in the family had taken part in the protests; MahdiÂ’s brother told me, a little regretfully, that he had been too frightened.
By Sunday, February 20, protesters in Benghazi had armed themselves and were focusing all their efforts on storming the Katiba.
Every day, soldiers inside the barracks were firing down on the funeral processions that used the long boulevard from the courthouse to the cityÂ’s main cemetery, killing more people and generating more funerals, more anger.
On Sunday morning, with the sound of gunfire in the background, Ziu slipped a last will and testament under the door of a friend. He then returned to his apartment and asked the neighbors to help him load a number of full gas canisters into his black Kia sedan, parked just outside the house.
They asked why, and he told them the canisters were leaking; he needed to get them fixed. His brother, Salem Ziu, told me that he thinks Mahdi used a small patch of TNT, the kind Libyans use to kill fish, as a detonator. No one really knows.
What is certain is that about 1:30 p.m., Ziu drove his car until it was facing the KatibaÂ’s main gate, near the police station where the first protests began five days earlier. The area in front of him was clear, a killing zone abandoned by all but the most reckless. Rebels fired from the shelter of rooftops and doorways, and snipers at the Katiba fired occasional shots down on the figures darting in the streets.
Ziu put his foot down on the accelerator. The guards opened fire, but too late. The speeding car struck the gate and exploded, sending up a fireball that was captured on a cellphone video by a protester a few hundred yards away.
The blast blew a hole in the wall, killing a number of guards and sending the rest retreating into the Katiba. Within hours, it would fall to the protesters.
The remains of Ziu’s charred and crumpled car now lie by the open gate of the Katiba. Above and around it are tributes to him in looping spray-painted letters: “Mahdi the Hero.” “Mahdi, who liberated the Katiba.”
Earlier that same day, Emad al-Imam was walking in a funeral procession in downtown Benghazi. He, too, was unused to protests. A 42-year-old father of two who worked as an administrator at an agricultural company, he joined the procession only out of sympathy.
As he passed near the Katiba, machine-gun fire raked the mourners. Imam dropped to the ground. His head was protected by a concrete block on the pavement; he could feel the bullets whining past his upturned ear. He lay there - it felt like 10 hours, he told me, but it was probably only 10 minutes - until the shooting stopped. He opened his eyes and saw four soldiers pointing AK-47s at his head.
“They made me get up and searched me,” he told me. “One of them hit me on the head with his gun stock, and I fell on my face. He put his foot on my neck. They were arguing about whether to kill me now or bring me inside first.”
The men took him by the arms and dragged him into the Katiba, through a gate not far from where Mahdi Ziu would soon launch his kamikaze drive. He did not resist. Inside, they blindfolded him and threw him onto the floor.
After a few minutes, he worked the blindfold off far enough to see that he was in a room with 60 or 70 prisoners. A soldier walked up and beat him savagely, he said. Someone fired a gun next to his head. He turned and watched the soldier fire two more bullets into the body of the man sitting next to him. Then they dragged Imam into another room, where they used electric wires to burn his legs.
By this time, he could hear fierce exchanges of gunfire outside the Katiba walls. The protesters had now acquired heavier weapons from looted military barracks in Bayda and other eastern towns, and some of Al QathafiÂ’s soldiers had defected to join them. The siege of the Katiba was in its last hour.
“Both sides were firing so hard that paint flakes were falling from the ceiling,” Imam told me. “One of the soldiers with me said, ‘Before we die, you will.’ ”
Another soldier asked, “Who here comes from Bayda?” One protester said he was from there, and the soldier told a comrade, “Give me that bayonet.” He took it and began slashing the prisoner brutally. Imam was born in Bayda, and it is written on his national ID card. He lay there, waiting for them to find the card and kill him too.
But the sound of gunfire got closer and closer, and before long the soldiers ran out of the room, leaving the prisoners alone. Some time later, a group of armed protesters ran in. “Who are you?” one of them shouted. One captive cried out, “Don’t hurt us, we are with you.”
The protesters untied them. But Imam and his comrades were too frightened to leave. He listened to the gunfire, tried unsuccessfully to get up and then passed out.
He woke up in a hospital. He had burns and bruises all over his body. The doctors told him to rest, but he wanted to find his parents, to let them know he was alive. He staggered off the bed. The doctors had given him Valium. He fell down twice, and then, emerging into the darkened street, began limping home.
Emad’s father, a tall, stoic-looking man of 65 named Miftah al-Imam, told me he started to worry after his son was missing for several hours. He called Emad’s cellphone, and an unfamiliar voice answered. “May I speak to the owner of this phone?” Miftah said.
The voice said, “The owner of this phone is being burned,” laughed and hung up. The words sounded so strange to Miftah that he thought his son’s phone had been taken by a child or practical joker. He called several family friends, and then, reluctantly, he went to a nearby hospital. He found a terrifying scene, Miftah told me.
The hospital was full of the wounded, people shouting, blood on the floors, pandemonium. He found a doctor who showed him a list: his sonÂ’s name was not on it. He walked to another hospital. This one was overwhelmed, too.
No one recognised EmadÂ’s name. Miftah pleaded for help finding his son, and a kindly nurse told him there was one unidentified body. She led him into a makeshift morgue where a covered corpse lay on a gurney and pulled back the cloth from a young manÂ’s face. Miftah approached. There was a bullet hole in the side of the head.
Miftah looked, and felt his stomach wrench. The face was a little fuller than EmadÂ’s, but that could be from torture. He was certain this was his son.
“I kissed his forehead,” Miftah told me when we met in Benghazi, a week later. “ ‘May God have mercy on you,’ ” I said. “ ‘May God take revenge on injustice.’ ” He gave his name to the hospital staff and told them the body was his son. One doctor, seeing that Miftah looked pale and unsteady on his feet, drove him home.
Back at the house, Miftah gave the news to his wife and to EmadÂ’s wife and two children, who live on a different floor. The sound of shrieking and sobbing filled the house. The neighbors heard and came to pay their condolences. For two hours, more friends and relatives arrived to comfort the bereaved family.
It was then that Emad staggered through the front door, into his own funeral.
When I arrived in Benghazi a few days later, the city was still drunk on victory. Crowds were gathered outside the courthouse, chanting anti-Al Qathafi slogans, and passing cars were honking their horns in celebration.
It had been raining for days - the rebels called it a sign of divine approval - and now vast puddles in the muddy streets reflected an operatic evening sky, with storm clouds rolling away to reveal bright stars over the Mediterranean.
Signs of battle were everywhere, as in some of the smaller cities I passed through on the nine-hour drive from the open Egyptian border: bullet holes dotting the facades, rubble piled on the medians, police stations burned black.
The city sprawled south and west from its seafront corniche, a dusty, gray-and-tan landscape of mostly low-slung, ugly block houses, with only a few fading remnants of Italian colonial architecture.
There was little colour or advertising aside from shredded posters of the Leader and the ubiquitous anti-Al Qathafi graffiti. At the Katiba, young men and boys were milling around, staring at the ruins in wonder. Some told me they were there to search for relatives who disappeared years before in the maze of Al Qathafi’s prisons. One old man grabbed my arm and shouted: “Before, to see this place was to die. Now it is ours.”
All across eastern Libya, the collapse of Al QathafiÂ’s regime exposed an unknown world of walled military compounds and torture rooms belonging to the Leader and his gang. Protesters burned and destroyed almost all of them, police stations, jails, security branches - and there were so many: external security, internal security, national security, intelligence.
On my second day in the city, I visited one of those prisons with a gap-toothed 28-year-old man named Osama Makhzoum. He was an unemployed accountant, well educated and disgusted by the corruption around him, who was among the first protesters on February 15.
He had a clownish, affectionate smile, and he spoke in a rapid-fire stream of anecdotes and jokes that was impossible to keep up with; it was as if a decade of dammed-up words had just been unleashed. “By God, Libyans were afraid to say Al Qathafi’s name before, and now they are fighting him,” he told me as we drove across town that day in his beat-up silver Renault sedan. “This is a good thing.”
The prison where he was held five years earlier was a maze of buildings in western Benghazi, a mile or so from the Katiba. We walked across a courtyard full of deep rain puddles to his old cellblock, blackened from smoke.
“This is where they took away my belt and shoes when I arrived,” he said. “And this is my cell.” It was a tiny, dark room, about 5 feet by 7 feet, with a single open window near the ceiling. When it rained, he and his thin cotton mattress would get soaked, he told me.
The men were allowed one bathroom visit a day. The room now had only a filthy metal bowl and some scraps of food. The cell doors were all open, and some of the walls had fresh graffiti on them: “Down with Muammar the bastard” and “Where are you now, Ziyad al-Zawi?”
Zawi was a notorious intelligence officer who had worked here. Osama was interrogated by him repeatedly, always blindfolded. Eventually they decided Osama was not guilty of anything - they had arrested him in a sweep - and let him go, with no apology. “This experience affected me,” Osama said. “I became antisocial. I threw my cellphone chip away so they could not arrest my friends.”
But he had got off easy, he said. His great-uncle had been jailed at Abu Salim, also in a routine sweep, and was among the roughly 1,200 men massacred there in 1996.
Later that day, Osama took me to Benghazi’s main cemetery, a vast, dusty expanse on the western edge of town. Scores of freshly dug graves marked the “martyrs” area, where those killed in the previous week’s fighting were buried. Many were lacking headstones; Osama told me materials were in short supply in Benghazi.
He showed me the grave of a close friend, Zuhair al-Tuwaybi. He described how he and Tuwaybi set off together to protest on Feb. 18 and became separated. Plainclothes police officers opened fire on the group, and Tuwaybi was shot through the heart. Osama stared at the grave. Then he choked up and walked off toward the cemetery gate to hide his tears.
Benghazi has long been a bulwark of resistance to Al Qathafi and his rule. The city is the capital of LibyaÂ’s eastern region, known as Cyrenaica, and it has paid dearly for its independence. Its streets and houses are tatty and decayed.
There is little left of BenghaziÂ’s ancient history as a Greek and Roman port or even of the Italian occupation, from 1911 to 1943. The regionÂ’s proudest legacy is the struggle against Italian colonialism led by Omar al-Mukhtar, the Libyan national hero who was hanged by Mussolini in 1931. His mausoleum used to be in Benghazi, not far from the village where he was born.
But Al Qathafi moved it south of the city, in a deliberate slap. By that time, Al Qathafi had turned against Benghazi, where several plots against him originated, starting in the 1970s. He hanged the conspirators in public and let the cityÂ’s once-thriving port and its roads and public buildings fall into decay.
Residents say he redirected raw sewage into the lagoon by its downtown, so that a foul stench drifts over the plaza nearby. Eastern Libya has more lush farmland than the West and most of the countryÂ’s oil reserves.
But Benghazi received little of that windfall. Unemployment is high, even by Libyan standards. Many streets in the poorer neighborhoods are unpaved. On the cityÂ’s desert edges, half-built housing complexes lurk in the distance. Osama came from a family that - like many in Benghazi - hated Al Qathafi passionately for generations. His grandfather was a wealthy businessman whose fortune was destroyed by the LeaderÂ’s quasi-Marxist economic policies.
“One day in 1984, my grandfather had a big shipment coming into the port in Benghazi,” Osama told me. “The revolutionary committee confiscated all of it and started selling it in government markets. My grandfather heard about it, and he died later that day.”
The family once owned several shops and apartment buildings. But starting in the 1970s, Al Qathafi implemented a principle from his revolutionary Green Book known as al bayt li sakinihi, or “the house to its resident.”
The government seized many properties and gave them to whoever was renting or using them. Squatters took over the Makhzoum family properties, and the revolutionary committees took their shops. One Benghazi businessman I met described, weeping, how he was jailed for months, and tortured, while Al Qathafi’s auditors checked his books for signs of theft. They found none. “After that we kept a very low profile,” the businessman told me.
Al Qathafi did not start out as a radical. When he and a group of fellow officers replaced Libya’s frail monarchy in 1969, they considered themselves youthful protégés of the Arab nationalist leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt.
Al Qathafi spoke of social justice, of Arab pride, of developing the country with LibyaÂ’s gift of oil wealth. Many of the people who spoke most bitterly about his rule told me they supported him heartily at first and even took to the streets after the 1969 coup to support this handsome, youthful officer.
It was only years later, after Al Qathafi grew frustrated with the pace of change, that his messianic and violent persona emerged. Al Qathafi reprised his redistribution policies earlier this year, as the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt were gathering steam.
With no warning, he appeared on Libyan state television and urged poor people to squat in a vast middle-class housing complex in Benghazi that was almost complete.
The units had all been sold in advance, and their owners were furious; fights broke out as poor families flooded into the complex after the LeaderÂ’s speech. It seems very likely that Al Qathafi was hoping the conflict would distract people from their protest plans.
The ostensible goal of Al QathafiÂ’s Green Book was to create an egalitarian society in which the ills of capitalism and socialism would vanish and the people would govern themselves.
In practice, all the privileges were transferred to members at the highest levels of the revolutionary committees, who became an unacknowledged ruling class in Al Qathafi’s delusional Jamahiriya, or “republic of the masses.”
Everyone in Libya knew who these revolutionary committee leaders were and where they lived. Driving through downtown Benghazi, I noticed a burned building in a residential district. I asked if it was another police station. “No,” Osama said, “that is Huda’s house.”
Huda bin Amer, he explained, had been the leader of the revolutionary committee in Benghazi and one of Al QathafiÂ’s most feared lieutenants. She came to prominence in 1984, at a public hanging of several men accused of plotting to kill Al Qathafi.
As one of the dying men jiggled on the end of his rope, Huda - everyone knows her by her first name - rushed up and pulled on his legs, to dispatch him more quickly. No one could document that this story took place, but it is told universally and has become part of her public persona.
She is famous for having coined the phrase “We don’t want talk, we want hangings in the public square.” Huda fled Benghazi at the start of the protests in February and is now said to be with Al Qathafi in Tripoli.
The poor, meanwhile, do not seem to have gained much from Al QathafiÂ’s Marxist sloganeering. Osama drove me through a poor neighborhood called Sirti, where the unpaved streets were lakes of raw sewage and the buildings were crumbling ruins.
It reminded me of the worst parts of Basra in southern Iraq after the American invasion in 2003. Even in BenghaziÂ’s wealthier neighborhoods, there was no working sewage system, and most families had to build their own sewage-disposal pits.
On the road again, we passed Benghazi’s main theater; someone had written on it in big letters “Al Qathafi: The theatrics are over.” Osama chuckled as he reeled off the new revolutionary calendar Al Qathafi invented to go with his brave new world. January became Ayannar (where’s the fire?), April became al-Tayr (birds), August became Hannibal (as in the Carthaginian general).
Osama recited all 12 months. Even ordinary words like shop and embassy were replaced by the LeaderÂ’s populist neologisms, though these do not seem to have caught on with ordinary Libyans. Osama grew more and more animated as he cataloged Al QathafiÂ’s eccentricities, as if he were only now discovering the outrageousness of it all.
The self-image as an African “king of kings”; the wild costumes and theatrical tirades; the bizarre lectures on the need to change wordings in the Quran.
“We are all asking ourselves, how could this happen?” he said. “Who is this man? You listen to him talk, and you can’t believe he’s sane. Sometimes he talks like a heretic. Me, I think he’s crazy or took too much drugs. You watch TV, and he talks for 75 minutes nonstop, shouting at the top of his lungs. He covers every subject - magic, health, religion, politics, and not a single sentence makes sense!”
Later, when I pressed him with more questions about Al Qathafi, Osama looked over at me with a weary smile and said: “Stop trying to make sense of us. We don’t even understand ourselves.” Other Libyans I met expressed the same sense of dawning outrage, as if the collapse of Al Qathafi’s authority tilted their perspective on everything.
The fear of surveillance and spies - a constant of Libyan life - had lifted, and now people seemed to be allowing themselves to feel things they had long kept sheltered inside.
One businessman described a video shown on state television a few years ago, in which Al Qathafi is shown waiting in a long line at a bank to apply for a housing loan.
When the Leader reaches the teller, he is turned down. “How does he have the audacity to show this?” the businessman said, his eyes suddenly wild with anger. “Does he really expect people to believe this dictator waits in lines at banks?”
Symbols of Al Qathafi and his family provoked the greatest fury. Near the airport on the edge of town, rebel soldiers took Osama and me to see one of the LeaderÂ’s villas. It looked as if a tornado had blown through it. Shattered glass lay everywhere, upturned plants and broken chairs and bloodstains littered the pale marble floor.
Al QathafiÂ’s men abandoned the place just before Benghazi fell to the rebels, escaping on a plane. Now it lay empty and silent, with the warm afternoon light falling in through cathedral-high ceilings: a cryptic remnant of the LeaderÂ’s excesses.
He led us through to a bedroom where knotted piles of brightly colored womenÂ’s clothes lay on the carpet, with prescription-drug bottles and playing cards and perfume bottles and cigarettes. Farther on was a bedroom with a vast bed frame, its headboard decorated in gold tracery and plump silk cushions. The soldiers gazed at the rooms with the same awe I did.
None of them had ever been there before Benghazi fell on Feb. 21. It reminded me of what I saw in Iraq in 2003: the gaudy villas where Uday Hussein had held drug-fueled parties with Russian prostitutes, the pet lions still prowling in the cage outside.
But here, in Benghazi, there was more mystery. Al Qathafi was still in power in Tripoli; the men who fled this villa were, presumably, still fighting on with him. No witnesses remained to say who really lived here or what they did.
One thing was clear: Some kind of struggle had taken place before the henchmen fled and the place was ransacked by rebels. “They executed two people in here,” a soldier said. “Come.”
He led us through a hallway to an office with a desk. Across from it was a couch with big patches of dried blood staining its pale cushions. The desk chair was also covered with blood. Had some of Al QathafiÂ’s men been shot for treachery here? Was there a struggle over whether to flee or join the rebels? Had two men shot each other simultaneously? No one could say.
Everyone agreed that Al Saadi Al Qathafi had been here. Saadi, the LeaderÂ’s dissolute third son, was in Benghazi when violence broke out there on February 17 and spoke on a radio station to warn BenghaziÂ’s residents to obey him or face the consequences. He fled soon afterward and later appeared at a pro-government rally in Tripoli.
“He’s the one who thinks he’s a soccer player,” a soldier said contemptuously. Saadi played briefly in a professional Italian league, though he rarely got on the field and was considered something of a joke. He had a reputation for orgiastic parties at European hotels, where his entourage spent hundreds of thousands of dollars. Later he was presented to the Libyan public as a sober businessman, floating a scheme for a free-trade zone along Libya’s coast.
The soldiers showed me two armor-plated cars parked near the airfield, not far from the villa, where Saadi apparently made his last-minute escape. One was a black BMW sedan, the driverÂ’s side window riddled by bullets that shattered the outer layer of glass to a white powdery mass, though none passed all the way through. A black S.U.V. was parked next to it, also pockmarked by bullets. The doors were open, and soldiers and young men were staring at the soft black leather seats in wonder.
On the following morning, the soldiers who showed me the villa piled into a flatbed truck and headed for the front, in Brega, to the southwest. Al Qathafi’s loyalists had begun their counteroffensive. Osama and I drove west to follow the rebel fighters, passing through a trash-strewn desert landscape that looked like a scene from “Road Warrior.”
Men of all ages were riding toward the front, howling and firing their pistols and rifles at the sky. Some were dressed in military fatigues and had heavy anti-aircraft guns; they, too, fired joyously as they passed cheering crowds, with a heavy thud-thud that shook the ground.
At a staging point near the town of Ajdabiyah, I found teenagers making Molotov cocktails and civilian mechanics repairing machine guns. Others kneeled on the ground with belts of ammunition draped over their chests and prostrated themselves in prayer.
It was the start of a long, chaotic struggle in which the rebels - brave but lacking any discipline or command structure - eventually lost ground to Al QathafiÂ’s better-equipped military. Only French and American warplanes would halt Al QathafiÂ’s advance.
Back in Benghazi, not everyone was banking on a rebel victory. One night, Osama brought me to the house of his father, Attiya, a professor of political science at Garyounis, the cityÂ’s main university.
It was a large, comfortable home on a quiet street, with a little courtyard hidden behind a dun-colored wall. In the living room just past the door, I took off my shoes and found two of AttiyaÂ’s fellow faculty members sitting in a spare, green-themed living room, reclining on floor cushions and bolsters in the traditional Arab manner and sipping steaming glasses of tea.
With them was a young man with a black baseball cap pulled low over his forehead. He had a handsome face, with a cold, calculating expression. His name was Allam Fallah, and he was a graduate student and assistant to the dean at the university. He was also a member of Al QathafiÂ’s revolutionary committees.
Fallah was reluctant to talk to me at first or even to give his name. But at the urging of his professors, who were helping to protect him, he spoke up.
“Some people like me fled or left the country,” Fallah told me after an hour of talk. “But I didn’t kill anyone, I didn’t steal. I didn’t spy on people. I believed in the revolutionary idea.”
He told me the revolutionary committees had four tiers: at the top were the revolutionary guard, a well-armed cadre that was close to Al Qathafi. Fallah said he was on the bottom tier. Others who knew him disputed that, saying he was very well connected to powerful insiders in Tripoli.
Fallah appeared to be playing a careful double game, watching to see which way the wind would blow in Al QathafiÂ’s battle with the rebels. In my talks with him, he deplored Al QathafiÂ’s excesses but also criticized the rebels, saying they lacked the ability to unify or govern the country.
He portrayed himself as a rebel sympathiser and told me he was at the first demonstration on Feb. 15. But two of his acquaintances told me independently that they saw Fallah that night on the police side, not with the protesters.
They also told me he arranged two university buses on February 16 to transport Al QathafiÂ’s mercenaries, who attacked and killed protesters starting on that day.
Fallah moved like a hunted man. He had taken the license plate off his car and rarely traveled during the day. Already, a few members of Al QathafiÂ’s committees had been murdered in Benghazi since the revolt began. His committee boss, the dean of the university and a prominent Al Qathafi ally, fled to Tripoli at the start of the uprising.
FallahÂ’s professors told me they knew of people who wanted to kill him. They were protecting him because he helped them in the past, they told me, intervening on their behalf when they ran afoul of Al QathafiÂ’s henchmen. Fallah was clearly a survivor, who hedged his bets from early on. In a sense, everyone in Libya was.
Even some of the most vocal rebels, I was told, made little deals for their survival, agreeing to spy on colleagues or provide other favors in exchange for job security. Few of them had come as close to the regime as Fallah.
Fallah told me he was invited to join the local revolutionary committee after Al Qathafi heard him speak at a meeting at Garyounis University in 2001, when he was an undergraduate. He said he had been inspired by Al QathafiÂ’s left-wing rhetoric but gradually became disillusioned after seeing the LeaderÂ’s hypocrisies.
“Al Qathafi speaks of the will of the people, the benefit of the people, those suffering injustice and so on,” he said. “But when you come close to Al Qathafi, you don’t see any of this. He just used these progressive words to build a reputation for himself.
He didn’t commit to anything, and the Libyan people started to hate progressive thinking because of him.” Fallah described another meeting with Al Qathafi in February, in which he and other young committee members urged the Leader to carry out economic and social reforms, to fire the most corrupt ministers.
It was impossible to tell whether Fallah’s revolutionary principles had ever been genuine. His committee membership had earned him lavish perks: a nice apartment, a car. “He’s a double-face, a liar,” I was told by his immediate supervisor at the university, Abdulsalam Faytouri. “He wants power.”
The last time I saw Fallah, he seemed more confident. He spoke disparagingly of the rebels, saying they had no plan for the country. The “technocrats and professors” of Benghazi, he said, had no influence. Even the tribes were divided.
There was no charismatic leader to rally around; even the leader of the rebelsÂ’ provisional government, Mustafa Abduljalil, had no vision for the future. Libya, he said, was still governed by Bedouin values: tribe, family, religion, the importance of a strong leader. Al Qathafi understood that.
“Look what is happening,” Fallah told me. We were sitting in white plastic chairs in the courtyard of Osama’s father’s house, this time late at night. “It’s impossible to remove Al Qathafi, he controls the West. In Tripoli the schools are open. Here, they are closed, the economy is in shambles. How long can we stay like this?”
Osama burst out in disagreement, saying Libyans had suffered too much under Al Qathafi and would find a way to govern themselves. Fallah smiled contemptuously and got up to go. “Come back in six months,” he told me as he disappeared into the night. “You will see that I was right.”
(UPI) - Libyan leader Muammar Al Qathafi is growing increasingly isolated, though he isn't showing signs of imminent surrender, official sources said.
Al Qathafi in a written statement issued through state media Thursday warned that coalition airstrikes on his country were stoking violence between Christians and Muslims.
"If these (airstrikes) continue then the world will be entering a genuine crusader war," London's pan-Arab daily newspaper Asharq al-Awsat quoted the message as stating. "They have started something dangerous that cannot be controlled."
Sources to the newspaper claim Al Qathafi imposed a travel ban on senior government officials after a series of high-profile defections. He's feeling isolated and changing his behavior but shows no sign of surrender, Asharq al-Awsat added.
The same source said the Libyan intelligence chief, parliamentary speaker and prime minister were in the process of defecting.
Mussa Kusa, the Libyan foreign minister turned defector, is said to have offered key information on Al Qathafi's role in global terror after fleeing the country to Britain earlier this week.
The U.N. Security Council approved a no-fly zone over Libya, though Western members of the coalition enforcing the mandate are debating whether the language in the resolution calls explicitly for regime change.
Jay Carney, a spokesman for the White House, said Friday that the "overall goal" in Libya was to see the end to Al Qathafi's reign but stressed that wasn't a military objective.
NATO took command over the Libyan operation Thursday.
(L.A. Times)- LibyaÂ’s rebel military struggled Saturday to explain an apparent rift within its highest ranks while acknowledging its soldiersÂ’ role in a mistaken NATO bombing of rebel columns the night before.
The strike, which killed 13 rebels and injured seven, illustrated the hazards of conducting an aerial bombing campaign against a fluid and fast moving front line. Several cars and an ambulance were also incinerated, and opposition leaders said rebels may have been responsible for the bombing because they had fired their guns into the air in celebration.
“It was a terrible mistake, and we apologize, and we will not let it happen again,” said Abdul Hafidh Ghoga, vice president and spokesman of the opposition’s Transitional National Council.
The opposition and forces loyal to Muammar Al Qathafi increasingly appear locked in stalemate, with the rebels controlling most of the eastern part of the country but unable to oust the Libyan leader from power.
Early Sunday, government forces shelled the city of Misurata, the only major rebel holdout in the western half of the country, Reuters reported. The city has been the scene of fierce battles in recent weeks.
Many of the rebels had never picked up a weapon before the uprising against Al Qathafi began in February, and the largely volunteer force narrowly missed being routed in March when coalition planes halted Al QathafiÂ’s forces as they reached Benghazi, the rebel capital.
The opposition has said its soldiers have started to receive better training and clearer leadership. But a day after the strike, the interim government sought to distance itself from a popular army commander it had earlier embraced.
Khalifa Haftar, a former army colonel who recently returned to Libya after living for many years in Falls Church, was initially hailed by the Transitional National Council as a leader who could help discipline the new army and train its largely volunteer ranks.
But Saturday, Ghoga said Haftar had no leadership role in the army.
“We defined the military leadership before the arrival of Haftar from the United States,” he said, referring to the appointment of Abdul Fattah Younis as commander of the armed forces and Omar al-Hariri as the council’s senior defence official. “We told Mr. Haftar that if he wants, he can work within the structure that we have laid out.”
However, a source within the military who is close to Haftar said Haftar is still commanding the army, and that GhogaÂ’s announcement had upset the public.
“Because of that, today Benghazi is upside down,” the source said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. “They are saying Ghoga has to go. The people, they want Haftar. No one can take him away from the army, or from our hearts.”
Haftar and Younis are known to have had tensions since Haftar joined Younis in early March in Benghazi and was announced as the commanding officer under Younis.
The two men had come to their positions via very different paths. Younis, who was Al QathafiÂ’s interior minister and the commander of the Libyan special forces, broke ranks in February to join the rebels.
Haftar, who took part in the 1969 coup that brought Al Qathafi to power, was a hero in LibyaÂ’s war with neighboring Chad but changed sides in 1988 and went into exile as an activist against the regime.
Mustafa Gheriani, an opposition spokesman, said Haftar had swaggered into town “like Clint Eastwood,” with aspirations of leadership. But he played down Haftar’s importance to the army.
“There’s been quite a lot of people talking about ‘Haftar’s back, Haftar’s back,’ but most of them don’t know who Haftar is,’’ Gheriani said. “Haftar’s been out of the country for 25 years.”
Asked to explain Saturday’s announcement in light of the council’s earlier embrace of Haftar, he said, “This is the position of the council today. The situation is fluid. . . . The political viewpoints change frequently.”
Rebel army troops seemed unaware of any rift, or of the militaryÂ’s command structure.
When asked who was commanding the army, one career soldier, Ramzi Ali Mohammad, 31, said, “Khalifa Haftar.”
“No, no,” said another, Abdel Salam Mohammad Ali, 52, a corporal who has been in the army 32 years and remembers Haftar from the war with Chad. “It’s Abdul Fattah Younis.”
“It’s both, together,” said Mohammad, adding that he had seen Younis visit the front line on Friday. “They’re both commanding officers of the war. It’s one operation room and two minds.”
The front line has in past days reportedly been more organized than in the past, with more experienced soldiers positioned farther forward and newer volunteers held back. Still, the line has seesawed for several days, centering on the town of Brega. Ghoga said that by Saturday evening, Brega was in rebel hands.
Earlier in the day, rebel soldiers buried the dead from the previous nightÂ’s airstrikes. Gheriani said that such incidents need to be accepted as part of war.
“In such a brutal campaign that Mr. Al Qathafi is waging against his own people, mistakes may happen, collateral damage may happen,” he said. “We regret what happened, but we understand that when you consider the big picture, sometimes you have to give up some lives to save the nation.”
But Iman Bugaighis, an opposition spokeswoman, said a publicity campaign was underway in mosques and on the radio to try to stop rebels from firing their weapons arbitrarily into the sky, a common practice.
Safety concerns aside, she said, “these ammunitions are very valuable because we have to use them on the front lines. We are trying to get the message out.”
Libyan conflict descending into stalemate as US winds down air strikes
(The Guardian) - Rebels and pro-Al Qathafi forces appear to be losing their way amid growing concern in the west over the revolution's end game.
For weeks, LibyaÂ’s revolutionary leadership has spoken almost in awe of the soldiers who defected from Muammar Al Qathafi's army and who would lead the rebel assault to bring him down.
And for weeks, the disorganised civilian volunteers who have rapidly advanced and almost as swiftly retreated along a few hundred miles of desert road have awaited the arrival of these professional soldiers to turn around the revolution's fortunes.
Finally, some made an appearance for the first time at the frontline near Brega. They appeared disciplined, well armed and under command - a stark contrast to the free-for-all of the civilian rebel militia.
But there were no more than a few dozen of them and the question still remained: where were the thousands of experienced soldiers that the revolutionary leadership had so often invoked to bolster morale? Did they exist?
While the revolutionary governing council has appealed to foreign governments for larger weapons to confront Al Qathafi's tanks and artillery, it has become increasingly apparent that the real issue for the rebels is a lack of discipline, experience and tactics.
Even where they have had the advantage, they have been outmanoeuvred in large part because there has been no plan for attack or defence.
Instead, the young rebels, full of bravado, charge forward only to turn and flee when they come under fire, often conceding ground.
Some of the rebels have been crying out for leadership. The revolutionary government's de facto finance minister, Ali Tarhouni, was confronted by civilian members of the rebel militia demanding to know who was going to take charge of military strategy on the ground after claiming that there are 1,000 trained fighters among the rebels.
On Friday, two of the senior rebel defectors from the Al Qathafi regime, Abdel Fattah Younes, the ex-interior minister, and Khalifa Haftar, the former head of Libya's armed forces, made an appearance at the front to be greeted like heroes.
Wearing sunglasses and a red and green scarf around his neck, Younes toured the frontline near the port of Brega, shaking hands with the crowd of volunteers who formed around him firing their weapons in the air.
While their visit boosted morale at a time when the rebels have been in retreat once again, a more important question remains - whether these men, who have avoided the frontlines for their own reasons, can turn the war around.
And from this weekend it is not who is fighting that is the question but who will no longer be fighting, with the US announcement that its warplanes will no longer carry out bombing raids.
Even before the American decision, the number of air strikes, mandated by the UN security council resolution 1973, had been sharply diminishing.
On Friday, NATO announced that coalition aircraft had flown 74 strike missions the previous day, down almost a quarter from earlier in the week. Of those missions, US aircraft flew only 10. And that number of strikes looks likely to decline as responsibility passes largely to the UK, France and Canada.
Among the aircraft being withdrawn are the A-10 Thunderbolts and AC-130 gunships which have been used with such devastating impact against Libyan armour.
The slowing of the coalition mission has only helped to contribute to a growing sense that the conflict in Libya is stumbling into a new and uncertain phase, marked not by the strengths of the opposing sides but by a realisation of their weaknesses.
On the rebel side, a familiar scenario has been played out repeatedly as their poorly armed and ill-disciplined fighters have advanced chaotically to occupy towns briefly vacated by Al Qathafi's troops, only to be driven back through scores of miles of desert at the first salvo of rocket or tank fire despite the bravado of their rhetoric.
On Al Qathafi's side, his armour and aircraft harried by coalition jets, the momentum similarly has faded since his forces were driven back from the edges of Benghazi by the entry of international forces into the conflict.
And the coalition, too - so optimistic at first behind the scenes about being able to lever Al Qathafi out of power with a limited air campaign has also run out of steam as the US has quickly moved to limit its involvement in the war, ruling out ground troops, and its participants have come to realise the limitations of the UN resolution that authorised force in the first place.
Instead, what has begun to emerge is what many feared in the first place – a stalemate, defined by two sides playing a kind of lethal tag in the desert over deserted oil towns.
By last week it had led one of America's most senior officers, General Carter Ham, head of US Africa command, to warn publicly for the first time of what Washington, London and Paris regard as the nightmare scenario.
"I do see a situation where that could be the case," he said. "I could see accomplishing the military mission which has been assigned to me, and the current leader would remain the current leader."
Ham's prognosis has been underscored by US intelligence analysis, which has come to the same conclusion. Officials who spoke anonymously to the Washington Post have cautioned against the idea that Al Qathafi may be toppled quickly, despite the high-profile defection to London last week of his foreign minister and long-time intelligence chief, Mussa Kussa.
"Neither side seems capable of moving the ball down the field," a US official told the paper. "It is also true that neither side has endless resources."
If Ham's message was pessimistic, that delivered to the House armed services committee by Ham's boss, defence secretary Robert Gates, was bleak, not least for those in the opposition listening to his message in Benghazi.
Despite reported ambiguity on Barack Obama's part over the issue of arming and training the rebels, Gates made clear that the Pentagon firmly opposed it.
Repeating that it was a "certainty" that no US ground troops would be authorised by Obama, he laid into the rebels' capabilities, describing the opposition as a faction-ridden and disparate "misnomer" whose forces lacked "command and control and organisation".
If the opposition needed training and weapons, he said, "someone else" would have to provide it, a declaration that would seem to slam the door on the rebels' hopes of being armed by the West.
And it has not only been US officials who have been speaking their mind. Last week a collection of former British defence chiefs - perhaps reflecting the views of serving senior officers - used the stage of the House of Lords to warn of the dangers of "mission creep" and taking sides in a civil war if it were decided to use ground troops to break the impasse.
What is also true, however, is that in being weakened by the conflict both sides may be forced into new positions suggesting that, ultimately, negotiations rather than military force might bring the crisis in Libya to an end.
On Friday, after weeks of refusing to negotiate with the Al Qathafi regime, the head of the opposition's National Council based in Benghazi laid out its terms for a ceasefire, demanding that Al Qathafi withdraw all his forces from Libyan cities and allow "peaceful protests" – the latter condition they hope would lead to his ousting.
While Al Qathafi officials quickly rejected the offer as "a trick", it is clear, too, that members of Al Qathafi's own regime - weakened by defections, including that of Kussa, and damage to the country's economy - have also been attempting to find an end to the crisis, no matter how cynically motivated.
Libya's former Prime Minister, Abdul Ati al-Obeidi, confirming remarks by US secretary of state Hillary Clinton that regime figures were trying to get in contact, said on Friday: "We are trying to talk to the British, the French and the Americans to stop the killing of people. We are trying to find a mutual solution."
His comments followed the disclosure that a senior aide to Al Qathafi's powerful son, Saif al-Islam, had met British officials midweek on a visit to London.
While David Cameron and some of his allies in the coalition are hoping that Al Qathafi may be forced out by more defections from his inner circle following the example of Kussa, as yet - despite rumours - the most important figures, including the powerful military intelligence chief Abdullah al-Senussi, have shown no real signs of budging.
All of which has raised the increasing prospect that any solution for the crisis in Libya - as things stand now - is more likely to be political than military, a view strongly endorsed by Italy's foreign minister, Franco Frattini.
"It is not through actions of war that we can make Al Qathafi leave, but rather through strong international pressure to encourage defections by people close to him," Frattini said.
Indeed, Italy is understood to be involved in a search for countries that might be prepared to welcome Al Qathafi and his family if he agrees to leave.
This all opens a number of possible scenarios. Gates last week provided one - much wished for by the opposition - that a member of Al Qathafi's military "takes him out", then cuts a deal with the opposition. But despite persistent rumours of a failed attack last month by a group of soldiers on Al Qathafi's Tripoli compound, this seems like wishful thinking.
Another scenario – suggested by some analysts and officials – is that the regime's attempts to reach out and engage in negotiations are a kind of stalling strategy designed ultimately to split the opposition, which the regime has been doing in any case, trying to separate tribal leaders from the rebels through its own process of "national dialogue", although so far without much success.
Least likely is one of a number of scenarios allegedly most favoured by Al Qathafi and family, which would see Al Qathafi (or one of his sons) overseeing a transitional period of reform.
It is precisely this proposal - which the Turkish media was reporting before the onset of the coalition's air strikes - that Ankara was attempting to broker: envisaging that Al Qathafi would cede power to one of his sons ahead of elections.
Whatever the outcome, what seems most unlikely is that the rebels' newly visible generals will be leading their troops into Tripoli any time in the near future.
US public, Congress remain skeptical of Libyan mission
(Deutche Welle) - Barack Obama has been slow to support military action against Muammar Al Qathafi. With good reason: The Libyan mission is a contentious issue in the US, both with the American public and with Congress.
Before finally signing on to the French and British drive to use military action against Libyan leader Muammar Al Qathafi, President Obama had been biding his time.
While he had already on March 3 demanded that Al Qathafi "must go," he was initially reluctant to apply military power and to explain his stance to the American public. Even after the air strikes began following a UN Security Council mandate authorizing a no-fly zone and the protection of civilians on March 17, Obama hadn't yet publicly made his case.
That eventually happened on March 28 when the President in a televised speech explained his rationale for the Libyan mission.
But Americans generally are not yet convinced of US involvement in Libya and of the goals of this intervention. Even after Obama's speech on Libya, which was largely well received, most Americans aren't sold on US involvement, polls show.
According to a Quinnipiac University survey two days after the speech, Americans are conflicted about US involvement in Libya. While a majority approves cruise missiles to destroy Al Qathafi's air defences and military force to protect civilians, a majority also says the US should not use military power to remove Al Qathafi.
But perhaps these mixed signals of a war-weary public reflect Obama's own stance on the Libyan mission.
"This is the lowest level of support for a large-scale use of American military forces in early stages of an engagement that we have seen," Jeremy Mayer, an associate professor of political science at George Mason University in Arlington, Virginia, told Deutsche Welle. "And this is precisely because Obama has not prepared the public for this. He initially hoped that Al Qathafi would fall like Tunisia and Egypt fell."
As that turned out not to be case and instead Al Qathafi forces were rapidly defeating the rebels in one key town after another, the president had to act. The situation in Benghazi, the last major rebel-held town, forced Barack Obama's hand, especially after Al Qathafi declared he would have no mercy on the rebels there.
"The specter haunting the White House was Rwanda," said Mayer. "This has been a 550 million dollar intervention to prevent a massacre in Benghazi."
Bildunterschrift - Washington has let Nicolas Sarkozy lead the debate over military action.
What's more, while Obama's repeated assertion that this is not an American, but an international mission is of course legally accurate, it obscures the fact that without the US this operation, although now officially led by a Canadian general, would simply not have taken place.
"We have not been the leading nation, we have let Sarkozy and to a lesser extent Britain lead this publicly," argued Meyer. "But in terms of actual military material, the US is providing 90 to 95 percent of everything that gets blown up in Libya.
"It's just a simple force projection formula. There aren't other countries with the ability to do that. So it is an American mission."
Even if the US military scales back its role in Libya, it will still remain the essential backbone of the operation.
It's not just the public that remains unconvinced about the Libyan intervention. There's also opposition in Congress from both Republicans and Democrats.
Some argue that the president did too little too late, others criticise that President Obama launched the attacks unilaterally and without a debate or vote in Congress.
The argument made by some in Congress that President Obama failed to comply with the controversial War Powers Act of 1973 which gives Congress the power to authorize military action - an act which has been ignored and deemed unconstitutional by Obama's seven predecessors - appears largely academic.
However, it could damage his credibility because Obama himself explicitly supported the War Powers Act in 2007 and unlike his predecessors he also holds the title of Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
Richard Lugar, the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who has supported Obama on many previous occasions, criticized the president for both failing to seek authorization from Congress and for not explaining US goals in Libya sufficiently.
"The United States entered the civil war in Libya with little official scrutiny or debate," Lugar said after the administration briefed Congress earlier this week. "I do not believe the president has made a convincing case for American military involvement in that country."
Whether the rumblings in Congress grow louder, depends largely on how the events unfold in Libya.
Bildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift - The US provides the military muscle behind the operation"I think the longer the conflict goes on the more likely it is that there will be strains with both the Republicans in Congress, but also members of his own party who have criticised Obama for engaging in a third war with a Muslim country," Christiane Lemke, a professor of political science at Leibniz University Hannover and currently the Max Weber Chair at New York University, told Deutsche Welle.
Congress has of course a very direct role in the Libyan engagement, explained Lemke: "After all Congress has to approve all financial aspects of this military action."
But predicted Mayer, "Congress doesn't have the guts to tell a president - and they never have since the War Powers Act of 1973 - to stop this war right now."
"I would say the American Congress on this issue is very similar to Germany within NATO. The American Congress probably doesn't like this very much with some exceptions, but they are not going to stop it just as Germany which has a veto and could have stopped this in NATO and so could Turkey, but they didn't want to be the ones to do this."
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