07 October 2011
SIRTE, Libya: Snipers loyal to Moammar Gadhafi held back government forces trying to capture his hometown Thursday and the deposed leader warned the heads of the developing world who have recognized Libya’s new rulers that they would face a similar fate to his own.
Hiding in a mosque and a building that was once Gadhafi’s favorite venue for international summits, loyalists blocked the advance of government forces, making forecasts of a quick end to the battle for Sirte look premature.
Thousands of civilians in the town of Sirte are caught up in the fighting. Red Cross workers who were able to reach the town’s hospital described patients sheltering from the gunfire in the corridors and a lack of staff to treat them.
Taking Sirte is of huge symbolic importance to Libya’s new rulers, and until it is captured they are putting on hold plans to start rebuilding the oil-producing North African state.
Once a sleepy fishing town and Gadhafi’s birthplace, Sirte was transformed by the former Libyan leader into the country’s second capital.
Parliament often sat in Sirte and summit meetings were staged in a marble-clad conference center in the south of the Mediterranean coastal city, from where fighters loyal to him fired on the attacking forces Thursday.
Commanders with the National Transitional Council have predicted they will have Sirte, which has a population of 75,000, under their full control by the weekend.
They pledged that units on Sirte’s outskirts would be brought into the fight Friday in a coordinated offensive.
An audio recording of Gadhafi Thursday from Syria-based Arrai television was the first sign of life from him since Sept. 20, when the same station last aired a speech by him.
“If the power of [international] fleets give legitimacy, then let the rulers in the Third World be ready,” Gadhafi said in an apparent reference to NATO’s support for NTC forces.
“To those who recognize this council, be ready for the creation of transitional councils imposed by the power of fleets to replace you one by one from now on,” said Gadhafi.
Gadhafi’s son Mutassim has reportedly fled Sirte and was last heard of heading south, a Libyan government military spokesman told Al-Jazeera television Thursday.
Gadhafi loyalists who pulled back to Sirte when they lost control of other cities are putting up fierce resistance. They have nowhere else to go.
“They are not going to give up,” said Van Dyke, who said he came to Libya seven months ago to visit friends, was arrested by Gadhafi forces, and joined the fighting on his release. “It’s going to take a while. [Because of] the snipers, we are going to take a lot of casualties.”
Anti-Gadhafi fighters Thursday had advanced just over 1 kilometer into Sirte from the luxury hotel on the Mediterranean shore that had earlier marked the front line.
They were hunkered down in a neighborhood of villas and five-storey residential blocks from where they were using machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades to try to take out loyalist sniper positions.
They set up firing positions, fortified with sandbags, next to the apartment block windows. But they were drawing heavy fire: buildings were riddled with bullets and their balconies had been partially demolished by heavy-caliber rounds.
A Reuters reporter saw a rocket-propelled grenade crash into one of the apartment buildings with NTC fighters inside. Anti-Gadhafi fighters used binoculars to watch for muzzle flashes from loyalist sniper rifles. They said the snipers were positioned in the minaret of a nearby mosque and in the Ouagadougou conference hall.
The street-by-street fighting was taking place on the northeastern corner of Sirte while anti-Gadhafi forces on the western side of the city held back.
Commanders there were bringing up tanks in preparation for what they said would be a coordinated assault on both fronts.
“There is high morale among our boys,” Ali Abdullah Ismail, commander of the Zawiyat Al-Mahjoub brigade, told Reuters. “Today there will be no ground assault. It’s tomorrow.”
With the NTC focus on Sirte, Libya has been left in a political limbo. It has only a makeshift government and in Tripoli rival armed militias are jockeying for power.
An NTC spokesman said council chairman Mustafa Abdel Jalil would travel to Tripoli Saturday to handle the “delicate situation” in the capital.
The battle for Sirte has exacted a high cost for civilians. They have been trapped, with dwindling supplies of food and water and no proper medical facilities to treat the wounded.
Many of Sirte’s residents are members of Gadhafi’s own tribe. The NTC says there will be a place for them in the new Libya, but the fighting has caused hostility that it likely to hamper the new government’s efforts to unite the country once the violence is over.
Copyright The Daily Star 2011.
