Back in Libya, more fighting

C.J. Chivers has the story in The New York Times:

Military forces loyal to Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi pressed a coordinated ground attack on Ajdabiya, bringing the front lines of the battle with the Libyan opposition forces back to the doorstep of this strategically vital rebel city, with barrages of rocket and artillery fire aimed at Ajdabiya’s center. Then, as smoke rose and confusion grew, a gun battle began as they sent a contingent of ground troops into the city.
The assault was more determined and organized than the ambushes and exchanges of rocket and artillery fire of recent days. Barrage after barrage of incoming fire thudded and exploded within the city, and loyalist troops advanced behind it. Thick smoke rose and drifted from central Ajdabiya, and by noon doctors were evacuating the city’s hospital as explosions shook the streets.
Many of the rebels fled once again, streaming north toward Benghazi, the rebel capital, their horns blaring. One rebel fighter shouted at vehicles as they passed: “Qaddafi’s forces are coming! Go! Go! Go!” But a cadre of lightly armed local residents remained to fight for their homes, stopping the loyalists on Istanbul Street in the city’s center.
“We killed ten of them,” said Said Halum, who stood in the morgue in the late afternoon over the body of his brother, Abdul Ghadir Halum, who had been shot between the eyes. “Our group split into two groups on Istanbul Street and fought them. The firing was very heavy.”
As the gun battle raged, the main rebel force rallied about ten miles north of Ajdabiya. By evening, it had begun moving past the city’s northeastern checkpoint, from where the fighters fanned out and briefly re-established a degree of control of Ajdabiya’s eastern and central districts. Gunfire ebbed in those areas, but skirmishes could be heard on the city’s southern and western sides. Then the barrages started again, leading many rebels to flee anew.
It was a confusing, fast-moving, and violent day, with both resolve and panic on display. Brutality was briefly evident, too, in the form of mob rule. In the midafternoon, as the rebels searched cars at the city’s northeastern checkpoint and the fighting continued, they dragged a man from a vehicle, rushed him to the far shoulder of the road and shot him. The man’s capture, and his hasty burial, could be seen through binoculars from a few hundred yards away, though the execution was not visible because the crowd around the prisoner was too thick.
Journalists who tried to interview the executioners were chased away by gunfire that swept the checkpoint and the area nearby, apparently by coincidence. The bullets scattered the gathered crowd. Later, after the gunfire subsided, several rebels said the man had been shot because he was known to be a loyalist agent. His name could not immediately be determined.
NATO airstrikes also came into play in the battle: at least one created a cloud over the city’s western neighborhoods at 1:25 p.m. as Colonel Qaddafi’s forces were barraging the city. But the allied air campaign was again unable to keep the military from pressing the rebels, as had been the case throughout a week of fighting that saw the ragged opposition forces losing their footholds on the main coastal road, including the city of Brega.
Mr. Halum, clutching a battered assault rifle as he wandered the morgue while his brother’s body was being washed, seemed both angry and perplexed. To reach Ajdabiya, the Qaddafi loyalists had crossed roughly fifty miles of open desert. “Where is NATO?” he said. “The Qaddafi military came from Brega to Ajdabiya. Why do they not stop them?”
Though the airstrikes have deprived the pro-Qaddafi forces use of many of their armored vehicles, the rebels have been unable to match them, and the loyalists have turned to deception and infiltration. Moving in small units in civilian trucks and cars, they have managed to evade airstrikes and to confuse the rebel forces, whom they can resemble from afar. At the same time, the loyalists have managed to creep forward with artillery or rocket launchers, which they have used to pound rebel positions for several days and have now turned on the city. The presence of the loyalists’ artillery batteries within range of Ajdabiya has led the rebels to implore NATO to relieve the city before it falls again, or suffers an extended siege. The artillery was shelling the city indiscriminately, menacing civilians who had not fled and threatening businesses and homes. The bloody remains of at least three people, all apparently civilians, including two old men, were brought to the city’s morgue in the afternoon.
It was the aftermath of the first battle for Ajdabiya in mid-March, when the rebels were routed and Colonel Qaddafi’s forces moved to attack Benghazi, that created the urgency in Western capitals to start the airstrikes. The initial allied attacks forced Colonel Qaddafi’s forces to retreat, broke the siege of Benghazi and pushed the loyalists from Ajdabiya, allowing the rebels to regroup.
In a statement issued late Saturday, Lieutenant General Charles Bouchard of Canada, the NATO operation’s commander in Naples, Italy, was silent on the government troops’ advance on Ajdabiya, except to note that allied warplanes had bombed Libyan troops that attacked civilians. “We struck armored vehicles that continue to fire on civilians in the vicinity of Misurata and Ajdabiya in the east,” General Bouchard said.
A NATO official in Brussels said that additional airstrikes against government armor and artillery were planned. Two NATO fighter jets working to maintain a no-fly zone forced a rebel pilot who had taken off in a Libyan Air Force MiG-23 fighter to return to Benina Air Base outside of Benghazi.
In Washington, the Obama administration defended NATO’s handling of the air campaign, despite two mistaken attacks on rebel troops and criticism from the opposition that the allied airstrikes have been less effective since NATO took control of the mission from the United States just over a week ago. “We have confidence in the capability of our NATO allies and partners to effectively enforce the no-fly zone and civilian protection missions,” said Tommy Vietor, a spokesman for the National Security Council. “The president has been very clear from the outset that our military effort has been focused on civilian protection, particularly in protecting the people of Benghazi, as well as working to avert a humanitarian crisis in other major population centers.”