Under Heavy Assault, Libyan Rebels Flee Brega
By C. J. CHIVERS and DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
Published: April 5, 2011
BREGA, Libya — Forces loyal to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi battered rebel fighters on the road outside this strategic oil town on Tuesday with rocket fire, mortars and artillery, driving them many miles to the north and leaving them in disarray
A day after a senior Libyan rebel leader had criticized NATO for “a delay in reacting and lack of response to what’s going on on the ground,” there was still no sign of the air power that two weeks ago seemed to have the loyalist forces reeling toward the Qaddafi stronghold of Surt, more than 100 miles to the west.
The official, Ali al-Essawi, the foreign policy director of the Transitional National Council, the rebels’ coordinating group, said that the problems began after NATO took charge of the air campaign from the United States, Britain and France, and that he now foresaw a drawn-out battle. “They took the command; they will make it long,” he said in an interview in Rome.
While NATO seemingly had no presence on the battlefield here, a NATO official, Brig. Gen. Mark van Uhm, said at a news briefing that Western airstrikes had destroyed about 30 percent of Colonel Qaddafi’s military power, Reuters reported.
In a lone bright spot for the rebel government, a tanker capable of carrying a million barrels of oil was headed to a port near the city of Tobruk near the Egyptian border, The Associated Press reported. With oil prices pushing past $100 a barrel, the cargo could exceed $100 million in value.
Libyan government officials continued to talk about a negotiated solution to the crisis in which the country would “transition” to democratic rule while ultimate power remained with Colonel Qaddafi or his sons. To do otherwise, said Musa Ibrahim, the government spokesman, was to risk a “dangerous” power vacuum along the lines of Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein.
In an interview with the BBC broadcast on Tuesday, Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi appeared to spell out his proposal for a transition to democracy, suggesting that his father assume a primarily ceremonial role, “like the Queen of England.”
He argued that international pressure could never force his father from power because, he said, “the Libyan people will never allow it.” Instead, he argued that talks about Libya’s future should focus on allowing the Libyan people to govern themselves through elections of a new government, including a new prime minister.
Both rebel and Western leaders have ruled out any negotiated settlement that would leave Colonel Qaddafi or his sons in power, however, and that scenario became even more remote on Tuesday when the prosecutor for the International Criminal Court said that the shootings of protesters in the early days of the uprising in Libya was deliberate.
“We have evidence that after the Tunisia and Egypt conflicts, people in the regime were planning how to control demonstrations in Libya,” the prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, told Reuters. “The shootings of civilians was a predetermined plan.”
The rebels had seemed to be gaining ground in Brega on Monday, taking a residential quarter of the town and mounting an attack in the evening against loyalists at a university campus and oil infrastructure. But they were beaten back by ferocious heavy machine-gun fire and a single artillery or mortar barrage.
The loyalists’ firepower, coordinated and accurate, killed at least several rebel fighters and wounded many more, and sent others scrambling north in retreat. But it was intermittent, an apparent sign that ammunition stocks were low.
That changed on Tuesday, as the artillery fire came often and with deadly accuracy, turning the road from Brega into an extremely dangerous corridor where the hot steel shrapnel of an exploding shell could rip through a vehicle or rebel position at any time. In those circumstances, the ragtag rebel forces chose to withdraw to a safe distance.
Throughout Monday and Tuesday, little or no air power was visible overhead. A Pentagon spokesman, Capt. Darryn James, said that American air power had played a smaller role in the war since Sunday, and that with command and control of the air campaign officially shifted to NATO, by midnight on Monday in Washington the United States had no strike sorties planned.
American aircraft, Captain James said, would now be on a so-called standby mode and would fly only when requested by NATO and approved by the Pentagon. The withdrawal of American assets means, among other things, that the rebels will have less support from two classes of aircraft that made several successful attacks against the Qaddafi forces in eastern Libya — the AC-130 gunship and A-10 — than when the loyalist forces were turned back just short of Benghazi, the rebel capital, two weeks ago.
The quiet in the eastern skies on Monday seemed to underscore Mr. Essawi’s sentiment that the international military campaign, after initially turning back Colonel Qaddafi’s army and militias as they swept eastern Libya, had lost momentum, leaving adrift the ground war, waged by rebels with virtually no military experience or structure.
A sustained campaign could be especially hard on civilians in Misurata, a city in the west in which rebels have been battling the Qaddafi forces in a long siege. Rebels said Tuesday that they were still under heavy shelling from mortars and artillery. Aiman, a doctor whose last name was withheld for the protection of his family, said that two people were killed Tuesday — a 10-year-old child and a member of the hospital staff — and a total of seven by the end of the day on Monday.
Any long-lasting campaign raises questions as well about the prospects for rebel success in the east, where a small, ill-trained rebel column had been stalled for days along the two-lane highway to Brega.
Early on Monday, the forces loyal to Colonel Qaddafi, which had been patrolling one of the town’s residential areas, known as New Brega, slipped away, allowing rebel forces to advance. The rebels who were strung north along the highway urged anyone with a car or pickup truck to rush into the neighborhood and retrieve civilians. For a few hours, civilians streamed out of the area, which by evening became a ghost town.
But residents interviewed in New Brega said that the Qaddafi forces had never viewed New Brega as a priority. They had swept it from house to house, looking for weapons and rebel fighters, but had not dug in and occupied the area. The main body of the Qaddafi forces, they said, were in defensive positions at the university and near the oil infrastructure.
Rebels fired ground-to-ground rockets at the suspected loyalist positions for hours. Smoke rose from the city, and at one point a rocket seemed to ignite a much larger explosion, sending a mushroom cloud billowing over the desert.
Late in the afternoon, the rebels tried to advance down the road to the university, but were met by withering machine-gun fire. And when many of the rebels began to pull back with their wounded and their dead, the loyalists shelled the nearest rebel checkpoint with an artillery or heavy mortar barrage, wounding at least six rebel fighters and setting off a panicked withdrawal that did not stop for several miles.
The fighting fit into a recent pattern of inconclusive skirmishes, as the seesaw battle up and down the Mediterranean coast has seemed to settle into a stalemate.
In another development on Monday, Italy and Kuwait joined France and Qatar in recognizing the Transitional National Council as the legitimate government of Libya. “We have decided to recognize the council as the only political, legitimate interlocutor to represent Libya,” said Foreign Minister Franco Frattini of Italy, which plans to send an envoy to Benghazi within days.
That followed a proposed resolution to the Libyan conflict from at least two of Colonel Qaddafi’s sons. Under their plan, Colonel Qaddafi would step aside to make way for a transition to a constitutional democracy under the direction of his son Seif al-Islam, according to a diplomat and a Libyan official briefed on the plan.
The rebels, as well as the American and European nations supporting them, have so far insisted on a more radical break with Colonel Qaddafi’s rule of nearly 40 years. Mr. Essawi said the proposal was unacceptable. “There’s no way to replace Qaddafi with a small Qaddafi,” he said in an interview.
But a diplomat familiar with the proposal said that discussions were still in the initial stages, and that “the bargaining has yet to commence.”
Noting that the United Nations resolution authorizing the airstrikes also precludes “a foreign occupation force of any form” in Libya, the diplomat said he wondered how the fighting could end without a negotiated solution.
Proposals and counterproposals even for a cease-fire appeared deadlocked thus far. “For Qaddafi, a cease-fire means everyone should cease firing, but the Qaddafi forces should stay where they are,” the diplomat said. “But for the rebels, it means that the Qaddafi forces should withdraw.”
“They will continue until the ammunition is finished, this stupid fighting along the highway,” the diplomat said.
Any long-lasting campaign raises questions as well about the prospects for rebel success in the east, where a small, ill-trained rebel column had been stalled for days along the two-lane highway to Brega.
Early on Monday, the forces loyal to Colonel Qaddafi, which had been patrolling one of the town’s residential areas, known as New Brega, slipped away, allowing rebel forces to advance. The rebels who were strung north along the highway urged anyone with a car or pickup truck to rush into the neighborhood and retrieve civilians. For a few hours, civilians streamed out of the area, which by evening became a ghost town.
But residents interviewed in New Brega said that the Qaddafi forces had never viewed New Brega as a priority. They had swept it from house to house, looking for weapons and rebel fighters, but had not dug in and occupied the area. The main body of the Qaddafi forces, they said, were in defensive positions at the university and near the oil infrastructure.
Rebels fired ground-to-ground rockets at the suspected loyalist positions for hours. Smoke rose from the city, and at one point a rocket seemed to ignite a much larger explosion, sending a mushroom cloud billowing over the desert.
Late in the afternoon, the rebels tried to advance down the road to the university, but were met by withering machine-gun fire. And when many of the rebels began to pull back with their wounded and their dead, the loyalists shelled the nearest rebel checkpoint with an artillery or heavy mortar barrage, wounding at least six rebel fighters and setting off a panicked withdrawal that did not stop for several miles.
The fighting fit into a recent pattern of inconclusive skirmishes, as the seesaw battle up and down the Mediterranean coast has seemed to settle into a stalemate.
In another development on Monday, Italy and Kuwait joined France and Qatar in recognizing the Transitional National Council as the legitimate government of Libya. “We have decided to recognize the council as the only political, legitimate interlocutor to represent Libya,” said Foreign Minister Franco Frattini of Italy, which plans to send an envoy to Benghazi within days.
That followed a proposed resolution to the Libyan conflict from at least two of Colonel Qaddafi’s sons. Under their plan, Colonel Qaddafi would step aside to make way for a transition to a constitutional democracy under the direction of his son Seif al-Islam, according to a diplomat and a Libyan official briefed on the plan.
The rebels, as well as the American and European nations supporting them, have so far insisted on a more radical break with Colonel Qaddafi’s rule of nearly 40 years. Mr. Essawi said the proposal was unacceptable. “There’s no way to replace Qaddafi with a small Qaddafi,” he said in an interview.
But a diplomat familiar with the proposal said that discussions were still in the initial stages, and that “the bargaining has yet to commence.”
Noting that the United Nations resolution authorizing the airstrikes also precludes “a foreign occupation force of any form” in Libya, the diplomat said he wondered how the fighting could end without a negotiated solution.
Proposals and counterproposals even for a cease-fire appeared deadlocked thus far. “For Qaddafi, a cease-fire means everyone should cease firing, but the Qaddafi forces should stay where they are,” the diplomat said. “But for the rebels, it means that the Qaddafi forces should withdraw.”
“They will continue until the ammunition is finished, this stupid fighting along the highway,” the diplomat said.
No comments:
Post a Comment