Nice shirt

Kareem Fahim has an article in The New York Times about Sirte, still hanging on:

The commander, defying a shower of bullets, urged his men to train their heavy weapons on a nest of pro-Qaddafi snipers in a school down the street. But then someone said that the loyalists had asked to surrender, and he told his men to hold their fire. It was a hopeful moment. After weeks of violence, the fighters were exhausted, the city was destroyed and hundreds of civilians were trapped in their homes in the area. But someone fired shots and the moment passed. The commander, Ali Imrakibi, declared that there would be no truce. “They can’t be trusted,” he said during the fighting. “They’re all traitors.”
The battle for Sirte was supposed to be a postscript to the Libyan conflict, a moment before revolutionaries unified the country and started the process of electing a government. Instead, it has stretched into one of the war’s most bitter periods, threatening the prospects for reconciliation as new tales of violence and revenge have drifted through the country.
While the long fight is now winding down, it has underscored the problem Libya’s weak transitional government faces as it tries to stitch together a country divided by the war into competing regions and factions and racked by the vendettas emerging after Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi’s four decades of bizarre and oppressive rule.
High on the agenda of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton for her surprise visit to Libya was a discussion of ways to heal the fissures, to protect civilians from human rights abuses at the hands of unaccountable militias and to help the provisional government establish political control of the country. As the weeks go by, with Colonel Qaddafi still at large, these tasks are beginning to seem formidable.
As Mrs. Clinton said before meeting with Libya’s new leaders: “Now the hard part begins.”
The problems seem to multiply by the day. After months of relative calm in the east, former rebel leaders have been caught off guard by the depth of the divisions in western Libya, where the colonel’s policy of playing favorites and stoking rivalries has resulted in a series of violent confrontations.
The question of loyalty to the old government has fueled a series of tribal, racial and ethnic disputes, pitting Arab villages against Berber hamlets, militias from the mountains against those from the coast and lighter-skinned Libyans against their black neighbors.
The new authorities have presided over their own divisive policies, failing to curb harassment and violence against black people in the territory they control, or to rein in their militiamen, some of whom have looted or burned loyalist homes and mimicked the techniques of the former government by detaining suspects arbitrarily and torturing prisoners.
Fathi Terbil, a lawyer whose detention in February set off the Libyan uprising, said he was frustrated by the reports of torture. “These violations will make people hate the revolution,” said Terbil, who is also a member of the transitional government.
After Sirte finally falls, the chairman of the Transitional National Council, Mustafa Abdel-Jalil, is supposed to declare the country liberated, starting a timetable that will to lead to elections for a national council within eight months and an elected government of an unknown complexion a year after that. That process is likely to bring its own sticking points: questions about how different parts of the country should be represented in the national council, including cities like Sirte that supported the former government.
For the moment, though, civilian rule still feels far away. The fighting has given the country a martial character, marked by men in fatigues, religious battle cries and the suspicions nurtured by war. Tripoli’s impoverished Abu Salim neighborhood was recovering from a virtual invasion the day before by anti-Qaddafi militiamen who claimed that they had been fired upon by armed supporters of Colonel Qaddafi holding a demonstration.
Residents of the neighborhood told a different story. They said that a group of twenty or so unarmed young men had held a pro-Qaddafi rally, and that the anti-Qaddafi fighters had responded with gunfire. There were no signs of armed resistance to the anti-Qaddafi fighters, who had no obvious single commander, and who fired heavy weapons repeatedly at the apartment blocks where the demonstration was supposed to have taken place. “We want change,” said Nasser Salah, a longtime resident of the area, as he watched a group of fighters fire their weapons in a courtyard next to his apartment. “We want a good life. But not like this.”
The next day, the fighters returned to the residential neighborhood, a new front line, aiming anti-aircraft guns at the buildings as their colleagues kicked down doors while searching houses for weapons. There was little sympathy for the idea that Colonel Qaddafi’s partisans had any right to demonstrate.
“The blood is still flowing,” said Hisham Krekshi, the deputy chairman of a local council working under the new government. “It is too soon.”
The legacy of mistrust was starkly apparent on the outskirts of Sirte last week, where fleeing residents said they had been afraid to leave the city, convinced by the former government that the anti-Qaddafi fighters were waiting to steal from them, or worse.
At the same time, the former rebels treated nearly every man as a potential enemy. Fighters wandered down the halls of Sirte’s hospital, interrogating patients. At a checkpoint on the edge of town, young fighters questioned residents who were leaving, focusing on a man driving alone in a Volkswagen. A few of the fighters grabbed him by his collar, examining his neck, where they found burns. “My house is on fire,” the man said. They rifled through his belongings, holding up an X-ray and plastic ties that the fighters suspected were used as handcuffs.
“You’re not clean,” a young anti-Qaddafi fighter told the man.
“I swear to God, I am,” the man replied. “My hands aren’t stained with blood.”
“You don’t know God,” the fighter said, and told him to be quiet.
On the streets of the shattered city, some rivalries gained new steam. Fighters from Misurata who favor virile phrases to describe their town— like “factory of men”— chided their colleagues from the eastern city of Benghazi for lacking bravery. The Benghazi fighters complained that they were often left to face the pro-Qaddafi soldiers alone.
Disorganized, they accidently fired at one another from behind their own lines. Then many were killed or wounded during a fight that their leaders had repeatedly promised would end quickly.
The battle in Sirte turned nearly two weeks ago, after a prolonged stalemate, when the anti-Qaddafi fighters laid siege to an enormous convention center that the pro-Qaddafi troops had used as a base.
The former rebels said they had held off their advance for fear of harming civilians trapped in the fighting. There was no sign of restraint as they shelled the conference center, some nearby apartment blocks and the city beyond.
“Sirte is on fire,” said Jamal Tunally, a fighter from Misurata who sat with his son, Mustafa, watching tanks pound a group of apartment buildings as they waited for a path into the city on 7 October. “A lovely view.”
A day later, the elder Tunally was dead, killed by a mortar shell that landed in a crowd, and his son had moved on to fight in the narrow confines of the center of the city. The opposing forces could not have been more different. The loyalists, disciplined but hemmed into an ever-shrinking corner of the city, held off hundreds of their opponents with steady sniper fire and precise mortar and rocket strikes. The loyalists’ refusal to surrender led the former rebels to speculate that they were guarding Colonel Qaddafi, or one of his sons. The bodies of executed men, discovered as the former rebels advanced, raised the possibility that they were fighting for their lives.
Men like Imrakibi, who runs a successful business in Benghazi renting funeral tents, led the former rebels. Bravely, his men, some of whom had not been home in months, followed him into the sniper fire. They attacked with overwhelming firepower but little discipline.
After a week of trying, they finally stormed the school.

Rico says the photo shows the local attitude...