Bryan Denton for The New York Times
A rebel rested Wednesday on the outskirts of Ajdabiya, where anti-Qaddafi insurgents halted their eastward retreat for the night.
By C. J. CHIVERS and DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
Published: March 30, 2011
BREGA, Libya — Libya’s foreign minister defected to Britain on Wednesday, dealing a blow to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s government even as his forces pushed rebels into a panicked retreat and seized valuable towns they ceded just days ago under allied airstrikes.
Bryan Denton for The New York Times
A man in Ajdabiya tried to get his family out of the city on Wednesday as government forces drew closer. Fleeing residents filled the road north to Benghazi.
The government advance appeared to return control of eastern Libya’s most important oil regions to Colonel Qaddafi’s forces, giving the isolated government, at least for the day, the east’s most valuable economic prize. The rout also put into sharp relief the rebels’ absence of discipline and tactical sense, confronting the United States with a conundrum: how to persuade Colonel Qaddafi to step down while supporting a rebel force that has been unable to hold on to military gains.
But the defection of Moussa Koussa, the foreign minister, showed that at least one longtime confidant seemed to be calculating that Colonel Qaddafi could not last. The news of Mr. Koussa’s defection sent shockwaves through Tripoli on Wednesday night after it was announced by the British government. Mr. Koussa had been a pillar of his government since the early days of the revolution, and previously led the fearsome intelligence unit.
Although American officials suspected him of responsibility for the bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, Mr. Koussa also played a major role in turning over nuclear equipment and designs to the United States and in negotiating Libya back into the good graces of Western governments.
Presumably, he is now in a position to talk about the structure of Mr. Qaddafi’s remaining forces and loyalists. What is unclear is whether his defection will lead to others. “We think he could be the beginning of a stream of Libyans who think sticking with Qaddafi is a losing game,” one senior American official said. “But we don’t know.”
Having abandoned Bin Jawwad and the oil port of Ras Lanuf on Tuesday, the rebels fled helter-skelter before government shelling from another oil town, Brega, and stopped for the night at the strategic city of Ajdabiya. As the rebels retreated in disarray, a senior rebel officer, Col. Ahmaed Omar Bani, pleaded for more weapons. He conceded that rebel fighters had “dissolved like snow in the sand” but framed the retreat as a “tactical withdrawal.”
Vowing that “Ajdabiya will not fall,” he claimed that rebels were still fighting on the east and west sides of Brega, suggesting that pockets of resistance persisted even if the main force had fled.
He acknowledged that the rebels had no answer to the artillery pushing them back unless foreign governments provided parity in arms. “The truth is the truth,” he said. “Even if it leaves a bad taste in your mouth.”
The White House press secretary, Jay Carney, released a statement responding to a report of a presidential finding authorizing covert support for the rebels. It said: “No decision has been made about providing arms to the opposition or to any group in Libya. We’re not ruling it out or ruling it in.”
Whether more weapons or longer-range weapons would make a difference is an open question, however. Leadership and an appreciation for tactics were noticeably missing in the rebels’ battle lines.
Faced with fire, the rebels seemed not to know how to use the relatively simple weapons they had in any coordinated fashion, and had almost no capacity to communicate with one another midfight. Throughout the spontaneous retreats on Wednesday, not a single two-way tactical radio was visible.
The rout put civilians to flight as well. By Wednesday evening, Ajdabiya’s hospital patients were evacuated and a long stream of vehicles packed with forlorn residents filled the road north to Benghazi, the rebel capital.
Abdul Karim Baras, a young man with a crackling bullhorn, tried to buoy their spirits. “God will rescue Libya from this moment!” he shouted repeatedly as he stood on the highway median.
A few of the displaced — many of whom made the same trek a week ago, before the allied airstrikes that reversed the loyalists’ first push — smiled or gave desultory victory signs as they passed through rebels’ disoriented ranks.
There were few signs of renewed airstrikes. But an American military spokesman said coalition warplanes resumed bombing pro-Qaddafi units on Wednesday, without specifying where. “The operation is continuing and will continue throughout the transition” to NATO command, Capt. Clint Gebke said.
There were 102 airstrikes over a 24-hour period ending at 12 a.m. Eastern time, according to the United States Africa Command. The airstrikes did little to reverse the momentum of the ground battle, which shifted decisively in the early afternoon.
Mahmud Hams/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Rebel fighters retreated from Ras Lanuf to Uqayla, 12 miles further east, on Wednesday as forces loyal to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi overran the key oil town.
Multimedia
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After a brief ground-to-ground rocket or artillery attack on the approaches to Brega, the rebels hastily abandoned their positions, fleeing pell-mell in perhaps 200 cars and trucks, heading east with horns honking and lights flashing. They clogged both lanes of the narrow highway as they raced for Ajdabiya, recaptured from loyalist troops days ago.
Some rebels said Colonel Qaddafi’s forces, pushing eastward from Ras Lanuf, were within 10 miles of Brega. As artillery or rockets pursued the fleeing rebels several miles north of the city, the colonel’s forces seemed closer than that.
The retreating column seemed rudderless, a sea of vehicles and fighters armed with infantry weapons and light rockets, but lacking the resolve, training or leadership to stand up to even a modest display of force by Colonel Qaddafi’s conventional armed forces. They were an unmistakably intimidated lot.
After several minutes of wild driving, some of the rebels tried to regroup, pulling over on the shoulder of the highway between Brega and Ajdabiya beside an abandoned restaurant and a small mosque.
A man standing on a pickup truck and brandishing an assault rifle led a crowd in chants of “God is great!” Morale appeared to stabilize.
Then a single artillery shell or rocket exploded several hundred yards away, kicking up dust and black smoke. The crunch of the impact made the rebels flinch.
The chanting ceased at once. The rebels scattered, dashing for their vehicles and speeding east anew, their panic both infectious and a display of an absence of command and control.
At one point, midafternoon, a government T-72 tank was seen afire half a mile or so off the road, beside another tank that appeared recently abandoned.
The rebels thought a coalition aircraft had stopped a flanking attack. But after the tank erupted in a tremendous flash, curious rebels approaching it determined it had succumbed not to violence but vandalism. Someone, a bearded rebel said, had simply set the tank on fire, causing its ammunition to explode.
The nervous column pushed on, regrouping at last at the gate of Ajdabiya, where the rebels arrayed their mud-streaked trucks along the road. Some of them began to argue bitterly.
The reversal was almost complete. Last week on the same highway, allied airstrikes pounded loyalists, enabling the rebels to advance toward the Libyan leader’s hometown, Surt, a symbolic and strategically important objective on the way to Tripoli.
Military analysts said that even after days of airstrikes, loyalist forces had enough resources to defend Colonel Qaddafi’s urban strongholds, including Surt, where the dense civilian population could preclude air attacks.
As loyalists extend their lines east along the coast toward rebel redoubts, experts said, Colonel Qaddafi’s forces risk opening themselves to renewed allied strikes. But rebels also said many loyalists now roamed the battlefield in pickups, making them indistinguishable from rebels when viewed by pilots overhead — a shift in tactics that could render air power less effective.
In Beijing, President Hu Jintao criticized France’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy, meeting there with finance officials, saying the Western air campaign he championed risked killing even more civilians than the attacks it was meant to stop.
Human Rights Watch, based in New York, said Colonel Qaddafi’s forces had laid antipersonnel and antitank mines. It said about 60 mines had been found in Ajdabiya after government forces held it from March 17 to Sunday.
“Libya should immediately stop using antipersonnel mines, which most of the world banned years ago,” said Peter Bouckaert, the group’s emergencies director. “Qaddafi’s forces should ensure that mines of every type that already have been laid are cleared as soon as possible to avoid civilian casualties.”
The authorities in Tripoli had no immediate comment.
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