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. More Photos »
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and C. J. CHIVERS
Published: March 31, 2011
TRIPOLI, Libya — Anxiety seized the Qaddafi government on Thursday over the second defection in two days of a senior official close to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, stirring talk of others to follow and a crackdown to stop them.
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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. More Photos »
As rebels challenging pro-Qaddafi forces struggled to regroup around the oil port of Brega, and the roar of allied warplanes was heard again over the capital, residents reacted in shock at the defection of Foreign Minister Moussa Koussa, a close ally of Colonel Qaddafi’s since the early days of the revolution, who once earned the nickname “envoy of death” for his role in the assassinations of earlier Libyan defectors.
And then came the defection to Egypt of another senior official, Ali Abdussalam el-Treki, a former foreign minister and a former United Nations ambassador who had worked closely with Colonel Qaddafi for decades.
Soon rumors swirled of a cascade of high-level defections. The pan-Arab news channel Al Jazeera reported without confirmation that the intelligence chief and the speaker of Parliament had fled to Tunisia. Other rumors, like the exit of the oil minister, were quickly shot down. But taking no chances, Libyan officials posted guards to prevent any other officials from leaving the country, two former officials said.
The defections and ensuing speculation underscored the increasing tension in the capital as allied air strikes crippled the military machine that Colonel Qaddafi deployed almost exclusively as a bulwark against his own population. Even though the rebels were retreating in the east, allied airstrikes showed no sign of relenting, fuel shortages were worsening, and Qaddafi loyalists were talking increasingly openly about the possibility of the leader’s own exit.
Western leaders hailed Mr. Koussa’s departure, in particular, as a turning point. “Moussa Koussa’s decision shows which way the wind is blowing in Tripoli,” said Tommy Vietor, a national security spokesman at the White House.
Musa Ibrahim, a government spokesman who huddled behind closed doors until well after midnight on Wednesday struggling to confirm Mr. Koussa’s departure, said in a news conference on Thursday: “This is not like a happy piece of news, is it? But people are saying, ‘So what, if someone wants to step down? That is their decision. The fight continues.’ ”
Asked if Colonel Qaddafi and his sons were still in Libya, Mr. Ibrahim smiled. “Rest assured, we are all still here,” he said. “We will remain here until the end.”
Aside from Colonel Qaddafi’s sons, the most important ally remaining at his side — rivaled in influence only by Mr. Koussa — is his brother-in-law, Abdullah Senussi, a top security adviser. “He is the right hand and the left hand of the regime,” said Ali Aujali, who was the Libyan ambassador to the United States until he defected a few weeks ago.
In a speech in London on Thursday, Foreign Secretary William Hague said Mr. Koussa, who is believed to have helped orchestrate the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, had fled to London “of his own free will” with no offer of immunity from British or international justice.
“He is voluntarily talking to British officials, including members of the British Embassy in Tripoli now based in London, and our ambassador, Richard Northern.”
The prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, said on March 3 that he would investigate “alleged crimes against humanity committed in Libya since 15 February, as peaceful demonstrators were attacked by security forces.” He placed Mr. Koussa second after Colonel Qaddafi on a list of “some individuals with formal or de facto authority, who commanded and had control over the forces that allegedly committed the crimes.”
Mr. Ibrahim, the Qaddafi government spokesman, said Mr. Koussa had been granted a leave of a few days to receive medical care in Tunisia, a common practice among the Libyan elite. But Mr. Ibrahim said Mr. Koussa had not contacted the Qaddafi government since the day after he crossed the border. “I don’t think his sick leave included London,” Mr. Ibrahim said.
The panic in the capital bore no relation to the success of the Qaddafi forces in eastern Libya battling the rebels, who in the end are likely to present a much less immediate threat to Colonel Qaddafi than a breakdown of his military or a more generalized uprising.
After beating a chaotic retreat to the city of Ajdabiya on Wednesday, the rebels on Thursday morning realized that the loyalist advance had crested for the moment, and they tried to mount a renewed push southwest down the coastal road, hoping to recapture some of their losses.
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. More Photos »
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Near the entrance to the oil port of Brega, however, they were met by resistance, and their counterattack was halted. The day passed with the two sides separated by an expanse of open desert, with Colonel Qaddafi’s forces occasionally shelling clusters of rebels, who answered with rockets and ineffective bursts of machine-gun fire.
Coalition aircraft could be heard overhead a few times during the day, but airstrikes were neither visible nor audible from rebel-held ground.
Stalled on the shoulders of the road, the rebels said they were seeking alternative routes overland into the city. “We are going on this side and that side,” said Jamal Saad Omar, 45, a weathered fighter who gestured toward Brega as artillery or rockets landed in the distance.
Some of the rebels also expressed fears of booby traps and land mines, which Colonel Qaddafi’s forces had left behind after occupying Ajdabiya.
The loyalist forces’ tactics apparently unnerved some of the fighters, who said that in the morning fighting the pro-Qaddafi militias did not fight from conventional military vehicles, but from civilian cars, which made them both harder to detect and less vulnerable to foreign air strikes.
“There were many civilian cars coming toward us,” said Fisky Iltajoury, a 31-year-old fighter. “They started to shoot us.”
By evening there had been no breakthrough. The day passed without a change in the lines.
In a display intended perhaps to show the government’s strength, government officials escorted foreign journalists for a late-night trip to the Qaddafi compound. A few hundred supporters in green bandanas and scarves were cheering a giant television screen showing the face of Shokri Ghanem, the Libyan oil minister, who had given an interview on Thursday to dispel rumors that he, too, had defected.
But at the hotel that houses foreign reporters, the government officials usually found in the lobby cafe smoking cigarettes and drinking tea until late at night were nowhere to be seen on Thursday. Usually accessible figures no longer answered their phones.
Mr. Aujali, the former ambassador to Washington, said more officials were seeking to defect. “I think anybody who has a chance to get out of the country will do the same as Moussa Koussa,” he said. “They have to do it soon, or it won’t mean very much.”
But Mr. Ibrahim, the Qaddafi spokesman, said that the government had already proved its resilience in the face of conditions that were “extremely ripe for a popular rebellion.”
“The skies are afire, the bombardment is everywhere, the rebels are in the east, there are shortages of fuel,” Mr. Ibrahim said. “Where is the popular uprising? Where are the tribes coming out to say he must go?”
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