Franco Pagetti/VII, for The New York Times
THE LAST STAND On Feb. 20, a suicide bomber drove into the Katiba, the fortress that looms over Benghazi. Within hours, rebel forces overtook Qaddafi loyalists in the compound. More Photos »
By ROBERT F. WORTH
Published: March 30, 2011
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 el-Qaddafi 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:God is great,
God the dearest of all Creation,
God is greater than what I fear,
I take refuge in God,
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 camel’s milk. Then Qaddafi 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 lawyers’ hands and joined them at the head of the table.
For the next two hours, Qaddafi 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,” Qaddafi 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 Qaddafi’s drugged, monotone voice that soothed him. Nor was it the Leader’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 Qaddafi’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 city’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 Qaddafi. 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 rebels’ ragged volunteer militia was vastly outgunned by Qaddafi’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. Libya’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 Qaddafi 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.
II
Saih was there when the Libyan revolt began, less than three weeks earlier. He and a group of fellow lawyers gathered after dark on Feb. 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 men’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 Feb. 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 Qaddafi’s authority left in the city, a vast compound that dominates Benghazi’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 Benghazi’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; Mahdi’s brother told me, a little regretfully, that he had been too frightened.
By Sunday, Feb. 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 city’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 Katiba’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 Qaddafi’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 son’s name was not on it. He walked to another hospital. This one was overwhelmed, too. No one recognized Emad’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 man’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 Emad’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 Emad’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.
III
When I arrived in Benghazi a few days later, the city was still drunk on victory. Crowds were gathered outside the courthouse, chanting anti-Qaddafi 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 color or advertising aside from shredded posters of the Leader and the ubiquitous anti-Qaddafi 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 Qaddafi’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 Qaddafi’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 Feb. 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 Qaddafi’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 Qaddafi and his rule. The city is the capital of Libya’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 Benghazi’s ancient history as a Greek and Roman port or even of the Italian occupation, from 1911 to 1943. The region’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 Qaddafi moved it south of the city, in a deliberate slap. By that time, Qaddafi had turned against Benghazi, where several plots against him originated, starting in the 1970s. He hanged the conspirators in public and let the city’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 country’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 city’s desert edges, half-built housing complexes lurk in the distance.
Osama came from a family that — like many in Benghazi — hated Qaddafi passionately for generations. His grandfather was a wealthy businessman whose fortune was destroyed by the Leader’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, Qaddafi 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 Qaddafi’s auditors checked his books for signs of theft. They found none. “After that we kept a very low profile,” the businessman told me.
Qaddafi 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. Qaddafi spoke of social justice, of Arab pride, of developing the country with Libya’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 Qaddafi grew frustrated with the pace of change, that his messianic and violent persona emerged. Qaddafi 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 Leader’s speech. It seems very likely that Qaddafi was hoping the conflict would distract people from their protest plans.
The ostensible goal of Qaddafi’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 Qaddafi’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 Qaddafi’s most feared lieutenants. She came to prominence in 1984, at a public hanging of several men accused of plotting to kill Qaddafi. 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 Qaddafi in Tripoli.
The poor, meanwhile, do not seem to have gained much from Qaddafi’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 Benghazi’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 “Qaddafi: The theatrics are over.” Osama chuckled as he reeled off the new revolutionary calendar Qaddafi 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 Leader’s populist neologisms, though these do not seem to have caught on with ordinary Libyans. Osama grew more and more animated as he cataloged Qaddafi’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 Koran.
“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 Qaddafi, 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 Qaddafi’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 Qaddafi 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 Qaddafi 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 Leader’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. Qaddafi’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 Leader’s excesses.
“This is where he kept his whores,” one soldier said.
He led us through to a bedroom where knotted piles of brightly colored women’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. Qaddafi 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 Qaddafi’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 el-Qaddafi had been here. Saadi, the Leader’s dissolute third son, was in Benghazi when violence broke out there on Feb. 17 and spoke on a radio station to warn Benghazi’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 driver’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.
IV
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. Qaddafi’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 Ajdabiya, 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 Qaddafi’s better-equipped military. Only French and American warplanes would halt Qaddafi’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 city’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 Attiya’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 Qaddafi’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 Qaddafi. 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 Qaddafi’s battle with the rebels. In my talks with him, he deplored Qaddafi’s excesses but also criticized the rebels, saying they lacked the ability to unify or govern the country. He portrayed himself as a rebel sympathizer 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 Feb. 16 to transport Qaddafi’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 Qaddafi’s committees had been murdered in Benghazi since the revolt began. His committee boss, the dean of the university and a prominent Qaddafi ally, fled to Tripoli at the start of the uprising. Fallah’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 Qaddafi’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 Qaddafi heard him speak at a meeting at Garyounis University in 2001, when he was an undergraduate. He said he had been inspired by Qaddafi’s left-wing rhetoric but gradually became disillusioned after seeing the Leader’s hypocrisies.
“Qaddafi 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 Qaddafi, 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 Qaddafi 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 rebels’ 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. Qaddafi 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 Qaddafi, 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 Qaddafi 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.”
Robert F. Worth (worth@nytimes.com) is a staff writer for the magazine. He last wrote about the home of a revolutionary on Tahrir Square in Cairo. Editor: Joel Lovell (j.lovell-MagGroup@nytimes.com).
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