Never-Never Land? Really?

Rico says that reality sometimes outruns even the wackiest fiction, and Qaddafi has done it, according to a long article in The New York Times by Robert Worth:

On the evening of 23 August, during the final hours of the battle for Tripoli, a 26-year-old lawyer named Mustafa Abdullah Atiri was lying, exhausted, against the back wall of a filthy tin-roofed warehouse crammed with 150 prisoners. He had been beaten and tortured every day since Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi’s soldiers had arrested him four days earlier. It was just after the muezzin’s first call to evening prayer— about ten minutes before 8— when a pair of guards walked to the door, raised their AK-47 rifles, and began spraying the men with bullets. Another guard threw a grenade into the densely packed crowd. Bodies fell on top of Atiri with the first fusillade, protecting him from the blast. Then the guards opened fire again. Blood began seeping down from the bodies above, soaking his jeans. As the officers walked back across the yard to reload, a guard named Abdel Razaq, who had shown the men some small mercies over the previous days, went to the door and shouted at the survivors: Run! Run!
I first met Atiri four days later. He was standing in the yard of the prison he had escaped from, a big man in a sweaty orange polo shirt with enormous, haunted eyes. It was noon under a blazing sun, and the smell of rotting corpses was stifling. Three men lay dead on the ground at our feet, their bodies bloated, dried blood pooled around them. Acrid smoke was still rising from the dark interior of the warehouse where Atiri and his fellow prisoners had been held. I walked over to take a look. I have been to a number of war zones, but nothing prepared me for what I saw. Dozens of skulls and twisted skeletons lay in a charred mound, surrounded by bones and bits of old, burned tires. There were at least fifty human remains there, and probably many more. Atiri, standing behind me, had known these men, some of them just teenagers. One was an imam who led them in prayer, he said. Atiri’s eyes roved wildly around the prison yard, his face contorted with grief. It was only after the massacre, he told me, that he realized the significance of something he saw two hours before it all began, as the guards were moving him across the prison yard. An officer had arrived at the prison’s front gate, flanked by aides. A guard whispered to Atiri that it was Khamis el-Qaddafi, the dictator’s youngest son, a military commander known for brutality. “The guard told me, ‘Khamis is signing the orders for your final release,’” Atiri said as we stood by the fire-blackened warehouse. “And he laughed.”
By that time, the last great battle of the Libyan civil war was over. After forty-two years, the bizarre pageant of Muammar Qaddafi’s rule had collapsed quickly, in a final spasm of senseless killing. Scores of prisoners, perhaps hundreds, were executed at makeshift holding facilities like the one I saw, for no apparent reason. Many of the victims were not even rebels, just citizens picked up in random sweeps in the final days. Even the guards were killed at some jails, perhaps to silence a witness, perhaps because they refused orders. No one could say.
The end left Tripoli in a state of giddy disbelief. On the day I arrived, Bab al Aziziya, the dictator’s high-walled stronghold, lay wide open, with Libyan families strolling through and gazing wonderingly at the ruins. Outside, the vast public square was a wasteland littered with burnt-out cars, twisted metal and rags. Rebels from across Libya rode wildly through the city, firing bursts from rifles and anti-aircraft guns. Young men fanned out to trash every picture of the man known as Brother Leader and to cover the walls with triumphant, satirical graffiti. Muammar— the name is similar to a word for builder— was scrawled out and replaced with the rhyming Mudammer: destroyer.
But the celebration was tinted with deep unease. There was still talk of snipers, of a counterattack by Qaddafi’s men, of a fifth column of “sleeper cells” lurking inside the capital. Victory had come too easily. Only weeks earlier, the rebels seemed in disarray, and Qaddafi’s forces, having withstood more than four months of NATO air strikes, seemed poised to hold out for many more. Then, on 20 August, a planned uprising broke out in Tripoli, as the ragged rebel army converged on the city from various directions. The final battle, expected to last weeks, was over in two days. Qaddafi and his top lieutenants fled almost immediately. Now it was hard to know who was a killer and who a mere dupe. The rumors changed every few hours: Qaddafi and his sons, who were still issuing lurid threats by satellite phone against the rebel “rats,” were hiding in the tunnels under Tripoli, people said, and might soon flood the city with mustard gas or poison its water.
Unlike Benghazi, the old opposition stronghold in eastern Libya where the rebellion began in February, Tripoli had been a relative bastion of support for Qaddafi. Even the bravest dissidents, who risked their lives for years, often posed as smiling backers of Qaddafi and his men. Now the masks were off, but another game of deception was under way. At all the military bases I visited, I found soldiers’ uniforms and boots, torn off in the moments before they had, presumably, slipped on sandals and djellabas and run back home. Even the prisoners I spoke with in makeshift rebel jails had shed their old identities or modified them. “I never fired my gun,” they would say. “I only did it for the money.” “I joined because they lied to me.”
Everyone in Tripoli, it seemed, had been with Qaddafi, at least for show; and now everyone was against him. But where did their loyalty end and their rebellion begin? Sometimes I wondered if the speakers themselves knew. Collectively, they offered an appealing narrative: the city had been liberated from within, not just by NATO’s relentless bombing campaign. For months, Qaddafi’s own officers and henchmen had quietly undermined his war, and ordinary citizens had slowly mustered recruits and weapons for the final battle. In some cases, with a few witnesses and a document or two, their version seemed solid enough. Others, like Mustafa Atiri, had gruesome proof of what they lived through. But many of the people I spoke with lacked those things. They were left with a story; and they were telling it in a giddy new world in which the old rules— the necessary lies, the enforced shell of deference to Qaddafi’s Mad Hatter philosophy— were suddenly gone. It was enough to make anyone feel a little drunk, a little uncertain about who they were and how they got there.
In a sense, the battle for Tripoli began long ago in Qaddafi’s mind and was foreshadowed in the elaborate layers of defense he built up between himself and ordinary Libyans. These were not just physical— the city within a city that was Bab al Aziziya, and the underground tunnels that may have allowed him to escape— but virtual. He built an extraordinary network of surveillance and control, hiring French, Chinese, and South African companies to help monitor the phones and Internet, and employing a vast network of informants and contract killers who could track his domestic opponents and critics to the ends of the earth. After the rebellion broke out in February, that network flared up in a last, furious effort to monitor and neutralize the discontent.
I met one of the men who worked in this apparatus, a 27-year-old former computer hacker named Omar. He was a big man with a plump babyish face, and a constant, faint smile that gave him the look of a mischievous, overweight child. We met through an acquaintance and talked several times at my hotel for a number of hours. He had worked for four years monitoring telephone and email traffic in the Revolutionary Committees’ Communications Office, one of several branches of the sprawling intelligence bureaucracy. Omar (who asked me not to use his full name) told me that he never wanted to work there; the government drafted him as he was applying for a tech job at a bank and then blocked his efforts to apply for other jobs. But he conceded that it was a sought-after and cushy post. He earned five thousand Libyan dinars a month (about four thousand dollars) plus a car, a laptop, and an AK-47.
“The serious work began on 6 February,” Omar said. That was when he and his colleagues began seeing Facebook pages calling for mass demonstrations, inspired by the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt. He began hacking into the activists’ email and monitoring websites. “We knew everything about the rebellion in advance, the places where people would gather, the slogans they would use, everything,” he said. His supervisors were dismissive about the threat at first, but after widespread protests on 17 February, they went into high gear. Omar and the thirteen others in his office began working fifteen hours a day, and were not allowed out of the building for about a month (they slept in dormitories on the compound, located on Tripoli’s airport road). Their work went beyond surveillance: on orders from the bosses, they contacted dozens of snipers in Ukraine, Serbia, and Slovenia and helped arrange for visas to bring them to Libya. The atmosphere grew tense. Omar overheard his superiors shouting, and on one occasion, one of them personally urged Qaddafi to make reforms, speaking on the single green phone that was reserved for direct conversations with him. On 20 February, some officers in Omar’s division were transferred to Bab al-Aziziya. Later, one of them returned and said he had witnessed the execution of scores of military officers, apparently for refusing to fire on protesters.
Omar told me he was sickened by the violence, and he soon began to subvert the work his bureau was doing. He and a friend— he only trusted one other man in the unit— began subtly altering the names and phone numbers of rebels before forwarding them to the Revolutionary Guard. They would change a digit here or there, reverse a first and last name, just enough to make the data useless to the men tasked with tracking or killing the rebels. In some cases, he said, he even contacted people who were under observation, urging them to change their email or phone, or to go into hiding. It was impossible to know how much of this was true. One of his friends told me Omar had given him such a warning, and several rebels said independently that they received warnings from people in the government. Omar also said he was arrested in late March, after a colleague told superiors about his subterfuge. He and all but one of his fourteen-member unit were jailed for a month, and then allowed to go home, thanks to a senior officer who shielded them from punishment. True or not, it was a story line that kept Omar’s hands pretty clean.
Omar seemed to relish his insider status, and it was easy to imagine that he would have happily continued in his job if not for the uprising. On the second day we met, he brought his laptop and showed me some of the files he had copied, including a long list of Qaddafi’s assassins, with their real names, cover jobs and telephone numbers. He told lengthy, detailed stories about a number of the most notorious crimes Qaddafi has been accused of, including the 1988 Lockerbie bombing (he essentially confirmed the guilt of the man convicted of the crime, Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi ) and the murder of Musa Sadr, an Iranian-Lebanese cleric who disappeared in Libya in 1978. (Omar said Sadr was beaten to death after daring to challenge Qaddafi at the dictator’s home on matters of theology.) He read about these cases in the intelligence archives, he said, which were easily accessible to those working in the unit. “Security was very lax once you were on the inside,” he told me. “It was only tough on the outside.”
Later that morning, Omar offered to show me his old office. He was nervous about being detained by rebels and insisted that we take his car, a dusty Toyota sedan that he had parked across from my hotel. We got in and drove along the seafront, where huge container cranes loomed in the distance and the hot sea breeze mixed with the stench of raw sewage. We soon passed from central Tripoli into an area that had not been cleared by the rebels. There were still green flags on the road— the emblem of the Qaddafi forces— and the area was deserted, its houses pocked with bullet marks, its streets full of trash and burned-out cars. Omar turned up the volume on his car stereo, playing techno dance tunes, and seemed almost to relish my unease. When we drove up to the first building, inside a gated compound, there was a stench of rotting flesh in the air. Omar turned off the car, and suddenly it was eerily silent, with the sound of eucalyptus leaves rustling in the breeze. Inside the building, there were smashed file cabinets, with heaps of paper spilling out to the hallways and a vast, defaced poster of Qaddafi. Omar clearly knew the building well. He showed me the computer servers that stored newer records on the main floor, the old archive room and his own office in a comfortable suite with faux-leather chairs. “Everything has been stolen,” he said, as he went through the shelves above his old desk. There were personnel documents scattered over the floor and tables; one had Omar’s full name on it. Afterward, he drove us to another intelligence building, where the lights and air-conditioning were still on, as if the Qaddafi men had run out earlier that morning. The rooms were full of odd, often sinister detritus: boxes full of Libyan and foreign passports, including blanks; a blue bag full of needles with injection tubes attached; surgical masks and gloves. Soon after we arrived, the photographer that I was traveling with, Jehad Nga, recognized the place. He had been held there in March when Qaddafi soldiers detained him for three days, subjecting him to brutal beatings and endless questioning from officers, who insisted he was a spy. Nga found the desk where he was interrogated for eight hours at a stretch. He traced a message in the thick dust that now covered the desk surface: I told you I’d be back.
Omar guided us through the complex, pointing out a rest house where he said Moussa Koussa, who ran the spy agency from 1994 to 2009, would sometimes play the Arabian lute for fellow officers. Walking through one of the executive office suites, Omar narrated the life of a mukhabarat boss, with what sounded like a trace of wistfulness: “Here you have your secretary: you walk in and she greets you with a kiss,” he said, pointing to a chair. “You have your deputies, you have a private room to relax, everything you need.” Later, back on the road, I pointed out that all the doors in town seemed to be green. Instantly Omar recited from memory a passage that he said was from Qaddafi’s Green Book about the color green: all other colors represent depression and decay, only green represents hope.
It was hard to say where Omar’s true sympathies lay, or if he had any. He said he was glad Qaddafi had been overthrown, but spoke dismissively about both camps. He brushed off any concerns about his own safety, saying he had four fake passports and plenty of cash. “I know how to cover my tracks,” he said. “This is a stupid society, and in a stupid society, it is easy to cover your tracks.” Ultimately, that is what he did. On the day of our last meeting, my Libyan fixer decided— without consulting me— to report Omar to one of the rebel militias that were arresting and interrogating Qaddafi officials. Omar promptly disappeared, and I never saw the documents he had been promising to bring me.
I was left wondering whether Omar had really made such a clean break with Qaddafi. But it was pretty clear that he suffered no sentimental illusions about his bosses and had seen which way the wind was blowing. Many other former loyalists made the same calculation in the final weeks and months, pulling back from their roles in the crackdown. One rebel faction leader, a 47-year-old businessman named Fawzi al-Usta, told me that he owed his life to an assassin’s refusal to keep pulling the trigger.
It happened in June, Usta said, when he was on the Tunisian island of Djerba, helping to organize resistance fighters. He heard through a friend that a man in Qaddafi’s security services wanted to talk to him. Usta agreed, uneasily, and they arranged to meet with the mutual contact in a cafe at noon. The man promptly explained that Qaddafi’s people had paid him $175,000 to kill Usta, and that he didn’t want to do it. “He was very tall and broad, and he had a husky voice,” Usta told me. The man glanced through the window at the thirty-odd colleagues Usta had gathered outside the cafe, just in case. “These people are supposed to protect you?” the man said derisively. “I could kill them in a second.” The assassin then laid out all the details of Usta’s history and activities, his family, his movements. He had been following him for days. He had a dozen people to help with the job, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. “There’s been too much blood already,” the man said. “But I need something to take back with me.” He wanted a faked photograph, something to make it look as if Usta was dead. Usta said he and his friends staged a suitably gory photograph, which the man took back to Tripoli.
Most of the Qaddafi loyalists with blood on their hands appear to have fled or disguised themselves. Every time I saw a pickup truck full of young rebels roar through a checkpoint, it occurred to me that Khamis Qaddafi himself could probably avoid detection in Tripoli as long as he had a rebel flag wrapped around his head and had spray-painted Free Libya on his truck. There were a few signs of organization: the men at the checkpoints often had lists of wanted names to check against the ID’s that people handed them. Thousands of loyalist soldiers had already been arrested and were being held at makeshift rebel bases, but almost all of them claimed to be mere cogs in the Qaddafi machine. At Maitiga Hospital, in a reclaimed military base, dozens of wounded loyalist soldiers lay in beds. Many of them told me their cases had been referred for eventual trial, but it was hard to see who would take on that responsibility, or when: there was no legal or administrative authority in Tripoli. The hospital itself was a vivid illustration of the city’s chaos. It was abandoned by its Qaddafi-era staff members days earlier, and now everyone in the building was a volunteer. Some were doctors and nurses from other hospitals, and some were civic-minded local women— teachers, administrators, and housewives— who were doing whatever they could.
One volunteer told me about a prisoner in the hospital who admitted to killing for Qaddafi in the final days of the war. Her name was Nisreen al-Furjani, and she said she executed about a dozen rebel prisoners with a pistol, possibly more. When I met her, she was lying on her back in a hospital bed with a broken pelvis and leg. She said it happened when she leapt out of a window trying to escape from the Qaddafi soldiers. She was a slim, sweet-looking woman of nineteen, with wide-set eyes, full lips and plucked eyebrows. She had a rebel flag spread over her body like a protective blanket. A guard with a rifle was posted outside her door. Furjani said Qaddafi soldiers had forced her at gunpoint to carry out the executions. She was raped repeatedly during the time she served with Qaddafi’s Popular Guards, she said, and was dragooned into service in the first place, against her own and her family’s wishes. She wept as she told her story, narrating the killings in graphic detail in a tiny, almost inaudible voice. “They brought the prisoners to stand in front of a tree,” she said. “Three men stood around me, one behind me, one on two sides. They made me shoot them.” A pediatrician named Rabia al -Gajum, sitting near Nisreen’s bed, bolstered her story, saying she had spoken to Furjani’s mother and heard similar accounts of women forced to commit crimes by Qaddafi.
Furjani’s story of rape and forced execution became a minor sensation. A photograph of her, taken by Agence France Presse in June when she was with Qaddafi’s Popular Guard, made the cover of The New York Post. In the photo— apparently rediscovered in the archives after her story emerged— she is smiling and holding a gun, standing alongside two other camouflage-clad women members of the Popular Guard. The story hit a popular nerve, in part because it matched the legends about Qaddafi’s female bodyguards and his regime’s habit of training women for brutality. I had heard my share of stories about ruthless brothel madams who recruited snipers for Qaddafi, about routine rapes in government offices and drug-fueled parties at which orphans would be recruited into the Brother Leader’s army.
But a few days later, when I visited Gajum at her own clinic, she said she had concluded that Furjani was lying and had killed voluntarily. Many of the details of her story didn’t add up or seemed implausible. I went to the building where she said she had killed the men and could not match it with her description. It turned out that Furjani’s mother— who had called during one of my visits to her hospital room— was a member of Qaddafi’s Revolutionary Committees herself, Gajum told me. The rebels in charge of the hospital where Furjani had been held had also concluded that she was a willing executioner, and had transferred her to a prison. But the strangest part of her story was this: Furjani was her own accuser. No one else witnessed the executions. In the end, all I could be sure of was that Furjani had been part of something awful, and now she was struggling to hide from its consequences.
Of all the former Qaddafi loyalists I spoke with, only one offered a rationale that went beyond money or compulsion. His name was Idris, and he was a handsome 21-year-old medical student with a downy wisp of beard, a pink t-shirt and jeans. Idris (he asked me not to use his full name) talked about Qaddafi’s loss in a baffled, crestfallen way. We drove to a cafe not far from Algeria Square— since renamed Qatar Square by the rebels, in deference to Qatar’s support for the Libyan revolt— and got a table. I was amazed to see that Idris still had an image of Qaddafi on the screen of his cellphone. “I’ve been passionate for Qaddafi ever since I was born,” he said. His parents felt the same way, though he insisted they had not held any position or drawn any special benefits. “Libya is just a bunch of tribes, and there are blood feuds,” Idris said, when I asked him why. “We see Qaddafi as the only wise man with the power to stop the feuds. If he fails, there will be no one to mediate.” I asked what he thought of Qaddafi’s apparent support for terrorists and his reputation as a maniac in the West. “We see him as a brave man who speaks out against American bullying, as other Arab leaders do not,” Idris said. “So they accuse him of these things.” Idris conceded that Qaddafi made the mistake of surrounding himself with bloodthirsty people like Abdullah Senussi, his security chief and brother-in-law. He also said, like many loyalists, that he was misled about the rebels by Libyan state television, which portrayed them as terrorists. Yet he gave no ground in his love for Qaddafi. When I asked how he felt about Tripoli’s fall, he said: “Devastated. It’s like someone you love, and they’re gone.”
Our conversation began to draw interest from two men sitting at a nearby table, and Idris was getting nervous. We got back into the car and drove to his neighborhood, Abu Selim, a stronghold of support for Qaddafi. The neighborhood is known for criminals and immigrants— a ready base of support for the regime— but Idris’ area was more middle-class. As we drove down his own street, he pointed derisively to the new rebel flags hanging outside the houses. “This was all green flags until last week,” he said. “They love Qaddafi. They haven’t opened their shops, everything is still closed. They are afraid.” Later, he added: “Honestly, before February there was no such thing as pro-Qaddafi or anti-Qaddafi. Only those people who were directly affected, the prisoners or the very religious men, had any view.” We drove past the stalls of a local market, blackened by fire in the final days of fighting. Idris gazed out sadly. “Change is not worth this kind of destruction,” he said. On one wall, I saw the words Who are you? It was a satire, like so much of the graffiti, aimed at one of Qaddafi’s recent speeches, in which he repeatedly asked the rebels who they were. But in this neighborhood, full of silent and resentful young men like Idris, the words took on a very different meaning.
In most other parts of Tripoli, the dynamic was reversed. A new geography appeared overnight, visible to anyone driving through: even minor regime supporters, once feared, became outcasts, confined to their homes. Schools and hospitals, abandoned by the old Qaddafi-era administrators, were taken over by local volunteers. In Zawiyat Dahmani, a middle-class area along Tripoli’s seafront, I saw a shuttered storefront with the words You Rat written diagonally across the front in Arabic. (Qaddafi labeled the rebels “rats” in his speeches, and they promptly turned the word on his supporters.) The owner, I was told, was a vehement Qaddafi booster, whose sister was a notorious killer for the regime. Just down the street was a man named Yusef Hamali, who had been a low-level member of Qaddafi’s Revolutionary Committees, local people said. He had also worked as an informer, passing on tips about suspicious activities in the neighborhood.
I knocked on Hamali’s door one night, with a neighbor who knew him, and Hamali answered. He was a haggard-looking man in his sixties, with dark skin and a gaunt face. He glanced anxiously around the hall behind us as we spoke to him, as if he feared someone else might leap past us and attack him. He confirmed everything the neighbors had told me: he had a role in the Revolutionary Committees, but only as a guard. He had never harmed anyone, he said. “Thanks be to God, I have been treated well,” he said. “The people of the neighborhood have been kind.” A stale, closeted smell wafted out from the kitchen behind him. Hamali had barricaded himself and his family into the apartment on the day Tripoli fell. One of his neighbors, a sympathetic man with a round face and broken teeth named Muhammad al-Bahri, told me he reassured Hamali through the keyhole on the first day. Young men were hunting for Hamali at the time, demanding his arrest. Bahri left two water bottles in front of the door, but Hamali had been too frightened to take them. Later, Bahri’s cellphone rang. It was Hamali, cowering in his apartment. “His voice sounded like it was coming from the bottom of a well,” Bahri told me. “I went to the door, and he unlocked it. His face was white from adrenaline. I could see his poor little son tiptoeing behind him, so that no one would hear. I promised him he would not be harmed as long as he gave up his weapons. He gave them to me, two Kalashnikovs and a pistol.”
Amid all the chaos of Libya’s transition from war to peace, one remarkable theme stood out: the relative absence of revenge. Despite the atrocities carried out by Qaddafi’s forces in the final months and even days, I heard very few reports of retaliatory killings. Once, as I watched a wounded Qaddafi soldier being brought into a hospital on a gurney, a rebel walked past and smacked him on the head. Instantly, the rebel standing next to me apologized. My Libyan fixer told me in late August that he had found the man who tortured him in prison a few weeks earlier. The torturer was now himself in a rebel prison. “I gave him a coffee and a cigarette,” he said. “We have all seen what happened in Iraq.” That restraint was easy to admire.
Yet it was also hard to imagine Libya’s various factions coalescing easily into a nation. Even amid the euphoria of victory, many Tripoli residents spoke resentfully of the rebels from other regions who virtually colonized parts of the capital, setting up checkpoints and spray-painting the names of their cities on the walls. Those divisions are likely to grow worse. Aside from a brief respite in the 1950s and 1960s, modern Libya has always been under the boot of a colonial power or a tyrant. Before that, it was divided into three Ottoman territories with distinct identities. Qaddafi deftly gutted the country of any real institutions; unlike Egypt, it does not even have a unified army to rally around. In the coming months, the Transitional National Council will oversee the first national elections and start redistributing the country’s oil revenues, delicate tasks at the best of times.
Many Tripoli residents seem not to have known how much they hated Qaddafi until after the rebellion broke out in February, and they realized, perhaps for the first time, that he could be overthrown. Slowly, plans began to form for an armed uprising. One of the men who helped initiate them, Jamal al Ragai, was a 31-year-old manufacturer of uniforms for Qaddafi’s army. His work involved spending lots of time gassing around with military officers, he told me. He knew he disliked Qaddafi, but he thought it was a battle for his children to fight. “Then my close friends and I started to say to ourselves: we are men in the prime of our life, between thirty and fifty years old, and we have no dignity,” Ragai told me. “We are living under a dictator who wants us to worship his Green Book.”
I met Ragai in a reclaimed Intelligence Ministry barracks in Tajoura, an eastern suburb of Tripoli. He had a militia of about seventy men, many of them veterans of bloody street battles in Misrata and other towns, and he was still running operations against Qaddafi hideouts. He was a short, powerfully built man dressed in loose fatigues, with a thick, bushy beard and a machine gun strapped over his back. (“It’s Israeli,” he told me proudly. “I stole it from the Khamis Brigade.”) It was clear from the way other men treated him that he was held in high esteem. But he didn’t exude the air of a commander. His eyes seemed to lurch around the room as if he were drunk. He apologized for his appearance, saying he had scarcely slept in days. He had also spent much of the preceding two months in jail, where he was tortured horribly; he showed me scars on his forearms and neck. At one point, he pulled out a passport-size photo and held it out to me. “This is me when I was a normal person,” he said. It was almost unrecognizable: a smiling, well-groomed young man in a button-down shirt.
It was in March, Ragai told me, after the initial protests in Tripoli had been brutally put down, that he began organizing his friends to fight Qaddafi. They started small, with leaflets, Facebook campaigns, and spray-painting. As he saw the battles raging in Misrata and other Libyan cities, he grew frustrated and stepped up his commitment. He began building homemade bombs and importing weapons from Tunisia. At the same time, he was urgently cursing the rebel cause in his regular chats with Qaddafi’s military men, whom he pumped for information about battle plans and the locations of bases and weapons depots. He would then report this information to members of the Transitional National Council in Benghazi. The contradiction between his nominal and underground lives became fiercer all the time. “I managed to persuade people in the military that I was teaching political-awareness classes,” Ragai told me, citing the regime propaganda rooted in Qaddafi’s Green Book. He smiled in amazement at the extent of his own lies. “I was copying Qaddafi’s own personality, his acts,” he said. “It was crazy.”
One morning in mid-June, Ragai was walking to meet a contact for a weapons deal when he felt two gun barrels in his sides. He stopped, and two soldiers grabbed his arms and threw him into a car. “The beatings started right there in the car,” he told me. He was taken to a holding pen known as Yarmouk, outside of town— the same one from which Mustafa Atiri escaped the massacre almost three months later. Another man who was in the prison at the same time told me that Ragai was known for his bravery and generosity. “The guards used to throw water bottles at a group of prisoners, and people would grab and fight over them,” the man said. “Jamal would catch the bottles and share them with other prisoners.”
At the prison, Ragai and other inmates witnessed a toxic blend of desperation and indiscipline among the officers as the regime slowly collapsed. Some seemed to take a vindictive pleasure in torturing prisoners, knowing the tables could soon be turned. It was not just physical, he told me, but psychological: guards would persuade the prisoners that they had lost track of time and it was August, then tell them it was October the next day. Prisoners who wanted to fast for the holy month of Ramadan were told that it was long past. Others would be told their families were dead, or they were forced to sign documents relinquishing all their property in exchange for freedom, only to be kept in prison. Much of the torture was carried out by women, a special humiliation in Libya’s patriarchal Arab culture. There was a Chadian woman with a shaved head who used to beat the men on their genitals, several inmates told me. Her Libyan supervisor, also a woman, would watch these beatings approvingly, then jeer at the male guards: See, she’s more of a man than you are! Strangest of all, to me, was the drug and alcohol use. Several inmates told me the guards were almost constantly drunk or stoned, and that this often seemed to make the torture worse. This was apparently widespread under Qaddafi. I asked an army officer, who was being held by rebels at one of their bases, whether smoking hashish had been common in the military. His face lit up in a smile, and he said: One hundred percent!
In a sense, Ragai was lucky: he was transferred from the Yarmouk prison, where the massacre later took place, to a smaller jail not far away, on the grounds of a construction company. He was there on the evening of 20 August, when the uprising broke out in Tripoli. Ragai told me he knew instantly that everyone in the prisons would be killed if they did not escape right away. I asked him how he knew. The prisoners, after all, included many ordinary people as well as rebels, and killing them would hardly shield the Qaddafi regime from any conceivable accusation. There were plenty of other witnesses. Ragai looked at me blankly and said, “We have come to expect this from Qaddafi.” It was at a prison, he reminded me, that Qaddafi carried out one of his worst atrocities: the murder of twelve hundred inmates at Abu Selim prison in 1996.
Early on the morning of 21 August, the guards opened the door of the cell next to Ragai’s and led out six prisoners. Ragai told me he spoke to one of the guards, a man named Munir, whom he had befriended. It was a last chance. “Munir, we are Libyans,” Ragai said. The guard said not to worry, the six men were being taken for interrogation. “Munir, we are Muslims,” Ragai said. The guard looked back uneasily, and their eyes met. Ragai asked him if he could go to the bathroom. The guard let him out. Minutes later, the men heard gunshots. The six men were being executed. But at the same time, Ragai realized that the guard had left him in a cell that could be opened from the inside. He got out, and began releasing all the remaining men, who fled the compound. The guards did not even try to stop them; instead, they piled into cars and began fleeing themselves.
Ragai told me he borrowed a car from a man he met near the prison and drove back to Tajoura. There he reunited with his old rebel friends and joined the Tripoli uprising. It started the night before, when each of Tripoli’s principal neighborhoods (except Abu Selim) deployed armed teams, according to a plan agreed upon a month earlier. They set up barricades, arrested Qaddafi loyalists and mounted checkpoints. As NATO warplanes bombed Qaddafi’s bases, gun battles erupted all over the city. Many of the loyalists quickly folded, surrendering to the rebels, or just abandoning their posts. By the time the first armed convoys began reaching Tripoli on the morning of 21 August, the roads had mostly been left empty by deserting troops, and there was a clear path to Qaddafi’s stronghold, Bab al-Aziziya.
Ragai’s own concern, he told me, was to free the 150 prisoners at Yarmouk. He knew many of the men held in that tin-roofed warehouse, and he knew that their proximity to Khamis Qaddafi’s 32nd Brigade would put them in jeopardy. Ragai gathered as many men as he could, and a large group of seasoned fighters from Misrata joined them. Soon they had a force of about 150 cars, and they drove west toward Yarmouk in an armed caravan.
At about midday, Ragai said, he got a call from one of the other fighters on his cellphone. The man had reached the Yarmouk prison and seen the deserted grounds. “It’s too late,” the man said. “Everyone is dead.”
Not quite everyone. Mustafa Atiri had escaped two nights before, along with about fifteen other men. Atiri told me that, after running from the warehouse, they leapt over a low wall at the far end of the prison, then sprinted between empty houses and farms. They could hear the whine of bullets slicing into the fields around them, and shouts from the guards at the prison. Some of them, after days with little food and water, stopped to drink from a faucet outside a farmhouse and were gunned down. Atiri kept on running. It was dark by then, but the soldiers fired flares into the sky, illuminating the kill zone. Finally, Atiri and another prisoner named Taha banged on the door of a farmhouse and found a family willing to hide them for the night.
His ordeal was not over. The next morning, Atiri woke up in the barn after a fitful rest, and he and Taha were told they could not stay, as there were still Qaddafi soldiers in the area. The family gave them new clothes and some money, and the eldest son drove the two escapees to a neighboring town and dropped them off. They tried to blend in, without success. A group of local men quickly surrounded them. One put a gun to Atiri’s head and began shouting: You rat, you rat! Where do you come from? At that point, a man named Ahmed al-Farjani pushed through the crowd and began arguing heatedly with the gunman. He told the gathered crowd that Khamis Qaddafi’s soldiers had left town, and no one would be harmed for harboring the two escapees. He then led Atiri and Taha to his own house and locked the door.
In fact, Farjani, a 42-year-old construction worker, had no idea whether the soldiers were gone or not, he told me later. I met Farjani, still protecting Atiri in his house, in Tripoli, and listened to both men narrate the events of that day. I asked why he had risked his life to save a man he had never met. He seemed surprised by the question. “First, I hate Qaddafi,” he said. “Second, my morals would not allow me to leave someone alone in this situation.”
Even then, a week after his escape, Atiri walked with a limp and seemed terrified that the prison overseers would find him. “The Brigades are still roaming around, and I still fear they will kill me,” he told me. “They have sleeper cells. I saw a list of names, before I was arrested, of people who have been given money and weapons to destabilize the country, like Iraq.” Perhaps there was such a plan, but it seems possible that Qaddafi’s last loyalists, lacking money and support, abandoned it.
A few days later, I went back to the Yarmouk prison. Volunteers were digging in the sand; more bodies had been found buried in the yard. Down the road, the headquarters of the Khamis Brigade was empty and covered with graffiti, and someone had stolen the numbers from its front gate. Not far away, I found a family still living in their house, one of the few that had not abandoned the area. They invited me in for tea. Their house was large and clean and cool, an unexpected refuge in that desert full of dead bodies and burned buildings. They had stayed there, often in a state of terror, through the entire period from February until August, as the war was raging. They told me Khamis Qaddafi’s soldiers had taken over the entire area in the preceding months. Huge trucks had arrived at all hours of the day and night, stockpiling weapons in preparation for the city’s defense against the rebels. Many of the weapons were still there, some of them packed in crates, some of them spilling across the warehouse floors, totally unguarded. Among the weapons I saw that day were shoulder-fired heat-seeking missiles, the kind that could take down a commercial jet. (A few days after I visited, the missiles had disappeared.)
“We have been living on the edge of a volcano,” I was told by one of the family’s sons, a 32-year-old named Ahmed Zaydan, who took me to the roof of a nearby house, where we could see a field full of munitions left by the Khamis Brigade. There was a stack of boxed land mines about thirty yards long and fifteen feet high. Beyond them, in a copse of withered fruit trees, were crates of TNT in wooden boxes. “This is how Qaddafi spent our oil money,” Zaydan said. “Enough weapons to wage ten more wars.” We walked to the other side of the roof, and Zaydan pointed to the Yarmouk prison, only a few hundred yards away. He winced as he recalled the massacre. He said the smoke had lasted for days, and he had smelled the burning bodies from his home. We were both silent for a minute. It was midday, and there was no sound but the breeze and the buzzing of the flies. “I want Qaddafi to die,” Zaydan said. “And not just to die once, but to die every minute, every hour. Because for 42 years, he was killing us every minute, every hour.”

Rico says it's all like a bad dream, even at this remove; imagine how it must be for those waking up in it... But maybe those missing missiles were the ones mentioned in the NSM piece on 60 Minutes last Sunday?