Getting out while they can

C.J. Chivers has an article in The New York Times about Libya and the leaving thereof:

The man pressed close, patting the pockets of a foreigner, repeating a single word: “Food. Food. Food.”
Hundreds of migrant workers stranded by Libya’s war clustered outside the harbor gates of Misurata, Libya,under siege since February from Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi’s forces. Battle lines cross through several of its neighborhoods. The loyalists’ artillery or rocket batteries fire their munitions into residential areas. Electricity is mostly cut off.
“We have been here nearly sixty days,” said Fahed Mohammed, 50, an agricultural laborer from Egypt. “As you can see, we are just sitting in the road.”
“We want only to leave Libya,” said another man, Aman Abdul Latif.
The workers’ anxiety was palpable. A few ships have stopped at Misurata’s docks to ferry migrant workers to safety. But thousands of laborers still wait, unsure when their turn will come. Unconfirmed estimates claim as many as a thousand people have been killed during the siege of Misurata. Medical officials said at least two dozen were killed and many more wounded when a barrage of eighty or more rockets landed beside the port. Ruptured and smoldering shipping containers could be seen in the evening. Smoke rose in places in the city.
The Misurata hospital offers testimony to the fighting’s toll. Outside, one scene captured the rebels’ underdog status: a smashed black sedan in the parking lot, its fender curled, headlight shattered, and passenger seat and door coated in blood. The only weapon, lying beneath the driver’s seat, was a sword.
Inside, doctors and nurses crowded around the bed of Arwa Baawa, six years old, who had been struck by shrapnel in her torso and neck. A nurse touched her ankle, feeling her pulse. The girl survived, though the sounds of gunfire outside, and the occasional explosion in the night, made clear that, in the siege of Misurata, there were many more casualties to come, and ample reasons for the migrant workers, still stranded along the roads to the port, to want to leave.
The Ionian Spirit, a passenger vessel chartered by an international organization, entered Misurata with the mission of rescuing the workers, after a nearly nineteen-hour passage from Benghazi, the rebel capital in eastern Libya. Its mission is urgent, said Jeremy R. A. Haslam, head of the crisis response team on board. A brightly painted cruise ship that usually plies the Greek, Italian, and Albanian coasts, the Ionian Spirit was chartered by the International Organization for Migration, which hopes to pick up at least eight hundred of the more than 6,500 migrant workers who have been trapped in Misurata, Libya’s third largest city. For several weeks, several thousand migrant workers have been camped along two roads leading to the port, Mr. Haslam said. They have had little food, water or medical attention. Many are dehydrated, exhausted and ill.
Which workers would be selected for the Ionian Spirit’s return to Benghazi was not immediately clear. Mr. Haslam said he and a group of aid workers would survey the people massed around the road and work with a local committee to try to identify those most urgently needing evacuation. “It’s like a moral dilemma,” Mr. Haslam said. “How do we prioritize?”
One man said there had been scams. A few Libyans have pretended to sell passage on the vessels, and then kept the workers’ money and disappeared, leaving their victims in the same long and uncertain line. The Ionian Spirit, meanwhile, planned to unload its more than four hundred tons of cargo, including food and medical and hygiene supplies. It hoped to load the workers soon after, and then reverse its journey back to Benghazi, from where, after a brief recuperation period, the workers would be driven to Egypt, the next step in their repatriation.
Other ships with similar missions were also converging on Misurata, including at least two vessels that arrived near the port before the Ionian Spirit but, after hearing of rocket and artillery barrages pounding the area, opted to remain offshore. Only the Ionian Spirit pressed on. The vessel’s journey began late Wednesday night in Benghazi, where dock workers had spent the day taking on cargo. On board, there were no signs of weapons or ammunition. Nor did the vessel transport fighters. It had only a tiny group: the crew, several aid and medical workers and a cluster of journalists. The ship cast off lines and slipped out onto calm seas around 10:30 p.m., gathering speed as it passed the seawall.
War can create expediencies and incongruous scenes. This was both: a brightly painted cruise ship steaming toward a siege with a small and hastily assembled crew. Throughout the night and the following day, as the vessel rose and fell on a gentle swell, the espresso machine in the Panorama bar worked overtime, until the assembled group shrank as seasickness claimed its toll and several passengers retreated to cabins to be ill. By Thursday afternoon, as the ship drew closer to Misurata, it got reports of fresh fighting. Crew and passengers alike wondered if the captain would dock by daylight, wait for darkness or turn back altogether. “We have to get these people,” Mr. Haslam said. “I don’t want to turn around.”
By 4 p.m., the harbor was barely visible in the distance, a sprawl of warehouses and cranes rising from where the flat expanse of desert met the sea. Smoke climbed in the air from within its confines. By 4:30, the decision had been made. The vessel steamed toward the small opening in the seawall, where a rebel-controlled tugboat waited. “Qaddafi go!” its pilot shouted.
Once the boat was tied off at the pier, a handful of visitors were driven into the city, which showed signs that the rebel fighters knew at least the basics of organizing a defense. In eastern Libya, by contrast, many of the rebels have not even dug fighting positions. Here the scenes were different. Rebels had used earth-moving equipment to pile berms beside their checkpoints. Many side streets were barricaded with heavy trucks and piles of earth. And steep obstacles had been made as well, designed to slow approaching tanks and armored vehicles and leave them more vulnerable to fire.