By Joseph Krauss

BENGHAZI, Apr 02, 2011 (AFP) - A few hours before the eruption of the Libyan rebellion, loyalists of strongman Moamer Kadhafi came into Anas Abdelfatah's printing shop with an offer he could not refuse.

"They were from a local sports club. They wanted 1,000 tee-shirts with Kadhafi's picture on them and large portraits of his sons. They would have paid me thousands of dinars (dollars)," he said.

"But I never finished the job."

For nearly 42 years Kadhafi's portraits, made by Abdelfatah and other local printers, lined the dingy streets of Benghazi and other Libyan cities, a perpetual reminder of the "Brother Leader of the Revolution."

Now the walls of this eastern rebel stronghold, many of them shredded during the heavy fighting in the early days of the weeks-old uprising, scream curses against him in both English and Arabic.

"Kadhafi is a Nazi... Kadhafi is Mossad... Kadhafi is a rat," the graffiti reads along one highway.

The city's printers have, meanwhile, unveiled a new line of posters, bumper stickers and billboards decked in the green, black and red of the resurrected pre-Kadhafi flag and slogans of the revolution.

As Abdelfatah scrolls through the pictures on his laptop from previous orders, he traces a history of Kadhafi's long reign and the rebellion that aims to end it.

There are photos of the youthful Kadhafi, a dapper young army officer and Arab nationalist with a mop of black curls and in military fatigues.

In more recent portraits he is cloaked in colorful robes against a backdrop map of Africa, signifying his shift towards the sub-Sahara.

There are pictures of him meeting world leaders as the international community tentatively welcomed him in from the cold after he gave up his nuclear programme in 2003.

One shows him shaking hands with French President Nicolas Sarkozy, now a hero to the rebels for launching air strikes against Kadhafi's forces.

"It's an old picture," one of Abdelfatah's employees says, as he pulls out a more recent item -- a red, white and blue windscreen sticker reading "Merci France."

The orders for the billboards used to come from members of Kadhafi's Revolutionary Committees, who would provide the pictures and pay for the work.

"It wasn't compulsory. It was business," says Faraj al-Muqasabi, 55, another print shop owner, who made posters of Kadhafi even though his nephew was arrested several times by the regime for being an alleged Islamist.

Around five years ago the orders began to change, with more requests for pictures of Kadhafi's sons and possible heirs.

There were portraits of the self-styled technocrat Seif al-Islam giving a speech in a coat and tie, and Saadi during his extremely brief run as a professional footballer in Italy.

"They started asking for pictures of his sons, but they always wanted Moamer too," Abdelfatah says.

As the uprising exploded in late February the pictures were torn down, pelted with shoes, burned or shot. A tank shell punched a hole in the wall across the street from Muqasabi's shop.

A few blocks away, Ahmed Hamouda has hung a small poster outside his pizza joint with side-by-side pictures of a teenager killed during the uprising and his father, who was killed in a prison massacre in 1996.

He is concerned about recent news from the front -- the rebels have fled under heavy fire from a string of villages they had captured outside Benghazi -- but he says Kadhafi will never return.

"He will never come back here. If he does, it means we are all dead."

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Copyright AFP 2011.