More on Libya

Kareem Fahim and David Kirkpatrick have an article in The New York Times about the latest in Benghazi:

Rebels seeking to overturn the forty-year rule of Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi repelled a concerted assault by his forces on cities close to the capital, removing any doubt that Libya’s patchwork of protests had evolved into an increasingly well-armed revolutionary movement.
The series of determined stands by rebel forces— especially in the strategic city of Zawiyah, near important oil resources and thirty miles from the capital, Tripoli— presented the gravest threat yet to the Libyan leader. In Zawiyah, more than one hundred people were killed as Colonel Qaddafi’s forces turned automatic weapons on a mosque filled with protesters, a witness said. Still, residents rallied afterward.
Colonel Qaddafi’s evident frustration at the resistance in Zawiyah spilled out in a rant by telephone over the state television network, charging that Osama bin Laden had drugged the town’s youth into a rebellious frenzy: “al=Qaeda is the one who has recruited our sons,” he said in a thirty-minute tirade broadcast by the network. “It is bin Laden.” Colonel Qaddafi said, “Those people who took your sons away from you and gave them drugs and said ‘Let them die’ are launching a campaign over cellphones against your sons, telling them not to obey their fathers and mothers.”
The violence underscored the contrast between the character of Libya’s revolution and the uprising that toppled autocrats in neighboring Egypt and Tunisia. Unlike those Facebook-enabled youth rebellions, the insurrection here has been led by people who are more mature and who have been actively opposing the government for some time. It started with lawyers’ syndicates that have campaigned peacefully for two years for a written constitution and some semblance of a rule of law.
Fueled by popular anger, the help of breakaway leaders of the armed forces and some of their troops, and weapons from looted military stockpiles or smuggled across the border, the uprising here has escalated toward more violence in the face of increasingly brutal government crackdowns.
At the revolt’s starting point, in the eastern city of Benghazi, Fathi Terbil, 39, the human rights lawyer whose detention first ignited the protests, drew a map of rebel-held territory in striking distance of Tripoli. “It is only a matter of days,” he said.
A turning point in the uprising’s evolution was arguably the defection of the interior minister, Abdel Fattah Younes al-Abidi, an army general who had been a close ally of Colonel Qaddafi. The break by General Abidi, who has family roots near the revolt’s eastern origins, encouraged other disaffected police, military, and state security personnel to change sides as well. “We are hoping to use his experience,” said Mr. Terbil, who some called the linchpin of the revolt.
Opposition figures in rebel-held cities like Benghazi have been appearing on cable news channels promising that opponents of Colonel Qaddafi are heading toward Tripoli to bolster the resistance there. Their ability to carry out those assertions remains to be seen.
In parts of the country, the revolutionaries, as they call themselves, appear to have access to potentially large stores of weapons, including small arms and heavy artillery, automatic weapons smuggled from the Egyptian border, and rocket-propelled grenades taken from army bases, like the Kabila in Benghazi.
Tawfik al-Shohiby, one of the rebels, said that in the early days of the revolt one of his relatives bought $75,000 in automatic weapons from arms dealers on the Egyptian border and distributed them to citizens’ groups in towns like Bayda.
So far, at least in the east, many of the weapons appear to be held in storage to defend against a future attempt by Colonel Qaddafi’s forces to retake the territory. At a former security services building in Benghazi on Thursday, men in fatigues prepared to transport anti-aircraft and antitank weapons to what one said was a storage depot.
Like their counterparts in Tunisia and Egypt, the rebels in Libya have shown tech-savvy guile in circumventing government efforts to block their communication. To sidestep the government’s blocking of the Internet and curbing of cellphone access, for example, some of the more active antigovernment protesters distribute flash drives and CDs with videos of the fighting to friends in other towns and to journalists.
Mr. Shohiby began helping lead an effort this week to shuttle foreign journalists from the Egyptian border to towns across eastern Libya. His network of contacts was built on the Internet: not on Facebook, but on a popular soccer website. “I have friends from east to west, north to south,” he said. “There are two guys in Sabha, one in Zawiyah, three friends in Misurata, for example,” he said, speaking of towns that were the scenes of some of the recent clashes.
Still, Mohammed Ali Abdallah, deputy secretary general of an opposition group in exile, The National Front for the Salvation of Libya, said the government’s fierce crackdown made organizing the spontaneous uprising a continuing challenge, especially in heavily guarded Tripoli. “It is almost like hit and run,” he said. “There are almost no ways that those young guys can organize themselves. You can’t talk on a mobile phone, and if five people get together in the street they get shot.”
Nonetheless, protesters in Tripoli were calling for a massive demonstration on Friday after noon prayers, residents of the city and those fleeing the country said. In recent days, witnesses said, Colonel Qaddafi appears to have pulled many of his militiamen and mercenaries back toward the capital to prepare for its defense. But, despite the encroaching insurrection, Colonel Qaddafi appeared determined to put on a show of strength and national unity, a stark turnabout from his approach so far. Since the start of the uprising, his government had shut out all foreign journalists, cut off communications, and even confiscated mobile phone chips and other devices that might contain pictures at the border from people fleeing the country. Libya had warned that reporters who entered the country illegally risked arrest and could be deemed collaborators of al-Qaeda.
But Colonel Qaddafi’s son and heir apparent Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi announced on television that the government would allow teams of journalists to visit Tripoli. Witnesses said preparations for the visit were already under way.
The soldiers and mercenaries who had previously roamed the streets had largely disappeared by the late afternoon, leaving only traffic police officers, and the capital’s central Green Square— the scene of violent clashes earlier in the week— had been cleaned up. Two banners, in English, now adorned the square: “al-Jazeera, BBC, don’t spread lies that reflect other’s wishful thinking,” one read. The other: “Family members talk but never fight between each other.”
But the rebels’ unexpected strength was undeniable, as they appeared to hold or contest several towns close to Colonel Qaddafi’s stronghold in Tripoli in the face of a coordinated push by his mercenaries and security forces.
In Misurata, 130 miles the east of the capital, Colonel Qaddafi’s forces struck at rebels guarding the airport with rocket-propelled grenades and mortar shells, The Associated Press reported. But the rebels seized an anti-aircraft gun used by the militias and turned it against them.
In Zuwarah, 75 miles west of the capital, the police and security forces had pulled out and a “people’s committee” was controlling the city, several people who had fled across the border reported. “The people are taking care of their own business,” said Basem Shams, 26, a fisherman.
In Sabratha, fifty miles west of the capital, witnesses reported that the police headquarters and offices of Colonel Qaddafi’s revolutionary committees were all in smoldering ruins. “We are not afraid; we are watching,” said a doctor by telephone from Sabratha. “What I am sure about, is that change is coming.”
In Zawiyah, an envoy from Colonel Qaddafi had reportedly arrived to warn rebels on Wednesday: “Either leave or you will see a massacre,” one resident said.
About 5 a.m. on Thursday, Colonel Qaddafi’s forces fulfilled their threat. Witnesses said a force that included about sixty foreign mercenaries assaulted a central mosque where some of the roughly 2,000 protesters had sought refuge. One witness said the protesters were armed mainly with rifles, sticks, and knives, but after four hours of fighting they managed to hold the square. About a hundred people were killed and two hundred were wounded, this witness said. During a telephone interview with him, a voice could be heard over a loudspeaker in the background telling the crowd, in an area known as Martyrs Square, not to be afraid.
“People came to send a clear message: We are not afraid of death or your bullets,” one resident told the Associated Press. “This regime will regret it. History will not forgive them.”
Meanwhile, the violence sowed concern across the region and beyond. President Obama spoke, in separate calls, with President Nicolas Sarkozy of France and the prime ministers of Britain and Italy, David Cameron and Silvio Berlusconi. The White House said the leaders expressed “deep concern” over the Libyan government’s use of force and discussed possible responses, without specifying what steps they were prepared to take.