Not quite gone, Qaddafi

Kareem Fahim has an article in The New York Times about protests in Libya:

In darkness, rebel soldiers from towns throughout the Nafusah Mountain region gathered to put the finishing touches on a bold mission: they planned to capture a sprawling military base controlled by government soldiers that was still stocked, they believed, with the kinds of weapons and ammunition that would help level their fight against the Libyan leader, Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi. A group of the fighters spent the night at a safe house, and as the sun rose in the mountains of western Libya, hundreds of other fighters joined them in positions around the base. By midday, the rebels had routed a hundred or so of Colonel Qaddafi’s soldiers who had been guarding the base and had left their potatoes, trash, and crumpled green uniforms behind. The soldiers also left a dubious bounty for the rebels, who carried off crates of outdated and aging ammunition and weapons parts, including components for heat-seeking antiaircraft missiles that security experts worry about falling into the hands of terrorists. There was no sight of the rifles they desperately needed. But that could not diminish the glow of a hard-fought victory, and the fighters fired in celebration as they drove from the base in trucks packed with olive-colored crates.
As the rebel offensive has faltered in other parts of Libya, it seems to have picked up momentum in the West. The rebels have ambitious plans of consolidating control of the western mountain region and using it as a staging ground for an assault on the oil city of Zawiyah and, finally, the heavily fortified capital, Tripoli.
Colonel Qaddafi is holed up there, and the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, predicted that the colonel’s days as head of state were numbered, urging his associates to arrest him on the warrant recently issued by the court, news agencies reported.
The rebels are not banking on that turn of events, however. They made their farthest advance yet toward Tripoli, in a fight with Colonel Qaddafi’s soldiers in Bir al-Ghanem. The victory at the base also seemed to signal progress, in that the Qaddafi loyalists had kept control of the depot despite repeated bombings by NATO warplanes.
As hundreds of people rummaged through concrete ammunition stores, one rebel leader, buoyed by the victory, framed the attack as one more step in preparation for an inevitable advance. “We will go to Tripoli,” said the leader, Said al-Fasatwi, a revolutionary commander from the town of Jadu. “But we won’t leave anything behind.”
As fighters gathered at the headquarters of the military council in the town of Rogeban, Colonel Mohamed Ethish and another officer reviewed a map of the battlefield surrounding the military base. Other men prepared their weapons, and a few fighters set out to scout the area. Their offensive started about 6 a.m., when rebels in trucks with antiaircraft guns and rocket launchers took up positions around the base, a meandering collection of more than seventy concrete bunkers and buildings that stretched for miles. An hour later, the pro-Qaddafi soldiers were fighting back fiercely but aiming poorly. For hours, Grad rocket barrages and mortar rounds landed harmlessly in the desert scrub, sometimes far behind the rebel lines.
The rebels have boasted recently of a much-improved communications system that, coupled with the degradation of the Qaddafi forces’ communications, is giving them a major advantage on the battlefield. While there is no cellphone service here, the rebels were equipped with wireless radios, which did seem to give them some tactical advantage.
By 10:00 a.m., spectators watching with binoculars from nearby hills decided the battle was going well enough that they could move closer. Two hours later, the hills were filled with brown dust, as rebel vehicles drove in convoys toward the base, reacting to the news: Colonel Qaddafi’s soldiers had fled. The rebels said only one of their fighters was dead, by rounds from an antiaircraft gun. One man returning from the front lines thought some of the loyalist soldiers had been killed, though he did not know how many. “I saw blood,” he said.
If the attack on the base was a showcase of rebel organization, its aftermath was a picture of the movement’s shortcomings. Apart from men directing traffic, there seemed to be no effort to secure the ammunition or weapons. On a road outside the base, a truck hauled away cases of ammunition bearing stickers that showed two hands shaking above the words United States of America. A traffic jam clogged the narrow entrance. Young men hitched rides in pickup trucks, hoping to find a Kalashnikov or any other gun. There were none to be had, so the men hauled away anything they could find. “I found a new gun,” said Murad Ruheibi, 33, holding up an emptied plastic water bottle with a snake he found in one of the warehouses. A teenager slung what appeared to be part of an antiaircraft weapon on his shoulder as others carted away dozens of similar tubes. All but a handful of the concrete storage bunkers had been partly or totally destroyed by several waves of NATO airstrikes, rebels said. Carpets of metal stretched for hundreds of feet in front of the damaged buildings, consisting of destroyed ammunition and unexploded tank shells.
In undamaged bunkers, people ripped apart ammunition cases, striking them with crowbars or gun butts. At least one person died while handling the ammunition, according to people at the hospital in the nearby town of Zintan. By day’s end, there were signs that the rebel momentum might be fleeting: hundreds of people fled the base, after a rumor that the pro-Qaddafi soldiers were returning. But they did not. A fighter from Jadu, who asked to be identified by his first name, Sufian, suggested than talk of an attack on Tripoli was premature. “We are going to have to organize ourselves out here first.”

Rico says he wonders how you do say 'clusterfuck' in Arabic...