/ 22 March 2011

Gaddafi strongholds bombed, endgame uncertain

Gaddafi Strongholds Bombed

Western forces lost their first warplane as they pounded strongholds of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi into a fourth day, while doubts grew on Tuesday over where the campaign is leading.

The United States Africa Command in the German city of Stuttgart said a US F-15 jet crashed in rebel-held eastern Libya late on Monday following a malfunction. Its two crew members ejected and were safe.

Command spokesperson Nicole Dalrymple told Agence France-Presse (AFP) that the crew had sustained minor injuries and that one had been recovered while an operation to pick up the second was ongoing.

She said the aircraft was taking part in a raid to neutralise Libyan anti-aircraft defences but the crash was not a result of hostile action.

US officials said the attacks should diminish after the success of the first strikes but the United Nations-mandated no-fly zone would be widened.

US Defence Secretary Robert Gates, speaking in Moscow on Tuesday, said “significant” military action in Libya should recede within days, while his Russian counterpart, Anatoly Serdyukov, called for an immediate ceasefire and the start of political negotiations.

General Carter Ham, the head of the US Africa Command, told reporters on Monday that the focus would now be on extending the no-fly zone.

“The extension of the no-fly zone … essentially across the coastal part of the country, almost from boundary to boundary, will enable us to have a greater freedom of movement,” Ham said.

“My sense is that unless something unusual or unexpected happens, we may see a decline in the frequency of attacks … because that’s the nature of the types of targets.”

Intense attack
Fighting continued on the ground, however, as the rebels battling Gaddafi’s forces for more than a month said they were under intense attack in their enclave of Misrata near Tripoli.

But a stand-off persisted in eastern Libya, where Gaddafi forces in and around Ajdabiya, south of the insurgents’ capital of Benghazi, easily repulsed attempts by the disorganised and ill-armed rebels to advance against them.

Ham said that US forces had no mission to support a ground offensive by the rebels, but at the same time Gaddafi’s troops show “little will or capability to resume offensive operations”.

Coalition forces, led by the US, France and Britain and including some other European states and Arab country Qatar, are acting under a UN Security Council resolution authorising all necessary means to stop Gaddafi’s forces harming civilians as they battle the rebellion.

There is coordination but no unified command, and moves to hand over control of the operation to Nato are dividing the alliance.

And while US President Barack Obama said on Monday Washington’s ultimate goal was the departure of Gaddafi, British Prime Minister David Cameron said there was no legal authority for regime change in Libya.

As darkness fell over Tripoli on Monday, loud explosions and anti-aircraft fire ripped across the night sky near Gaddafi’s residence, and Libyan state television said the capital had come under attack.

Witnesses said a Libyan navy base about 10km east of the capital was also bombarded early Tuesday.

Libyan government spokesperson Mussa Ibrahim told a Tripoli news conference that coalition warplanes had targeted the southern town of Sebha, bastion of Gaddafi’s Guededfa tribe and home to an important military base.

He did not indicate if any damage or casualties had resulted.

Ibrahim also claimed that Misrata, Libya’s third city 214km east of Tripoli, was “liberated three days ago” and that Gaddafi’s forces were hunting “terrorist elements.”

In control
But a rebel spokesperson reached by telephone in Misrata insisted the insurgents remained in control despite an onslaught by Gaddafi loyalists, who he said opened fire with tanks and set snipers on roofs to gun down people in the streets.

The spokesperson said five people, four of them children, had been killed on Tuesday, a day after a medic in the city confirmed a death toll of 40 and said at least 300 people had been wounded.

Natoofficials said alliance ambassadors were likely to resume talks on Tuesday after “very difficult” discussions on Monday that failed to overcome divisions about a role in the military operation in Libya.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan ruled out the possibility of Ankara sending any combat mission to Libya but said it could take part in operations with humanitarian purposes.

France also has doubts about the impact on Arab countries of Nato taking control — though the Arab League has backed the no-fly zone — while Germany refused to vote for UN resolution 1973.

Norway said on Monday its six fighter jets would stay grounded as long as it was unclear who was running the operations, while Britain, the US and Italy, whose air bases are the main platform for missions to Libya, are pushing the strongest for a Nato role.

Belgian and Spanish warplanes began patrolling Libyan skies on Monday, British Typhoon fighters launched their first missions from an Italian base and France said its aircraft carrier, Charles de Gaulle, should join the operation from Tuesday.

Italian pilots said they had helped suppress air defences, despite Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, whose country has close ties with former colony Libya, saying Italian planes “are not firing and will not fire”.

The Libyan situation kept oil prices volatile, with New York’s main contract, light sweet crude for delivery in April, up five cents to $102,38 a barrel in Asian trading. Brent North Sea crude for May was down 18 cents to $114,78.

Arrested
Meanwhile, it emerged that three Western journalists who went missing in eastern Libya last week, including two from AFP, were arrested by Gaddafi’s forces.

AFP reporter Dave Clark and photographer Roberto Schmidt, and Getty agency photographer Joe Raedle, had not been heard from since Friday evening.

Their driver, Mohammed Hamed, told AFP that on Saturday morning near Ajdabiya they ran into a Libyan military convoy. They turned around, but were caught after a chase by soldiers who shot out their tyres.

Four soldiers ordered the journalists out of their vehicle at gunpoint and ordered them to kneel on the side of the road with their hands on their heads, before putting them into a military vehicle and driving them away.

“We don’t know where they were taken,” their interpreter, Sudki Abdulkarim Jibril, told the rebel Radio Tobruk. “They were allowed to keep their telephones but not their cameras.”

The UN refugee agency said on Tuesday that thousands of Libyans had fled their homes in the east of the country, taking refuge in homes, schools and university halls.

Adrian Edwards, a spokesperson for the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), said people arriving at Libya’s border with Egypt feared reprisal attacks by pro-government supporters.

Chorus of criticism
Meanwhile, China said on Tuesday that Western air strikes on Libya risked a “humanitarian disaster”, adding to the chorus of criticism from big emerging powers over the UN-authorised campaign.

China, Russia, India, Brazil and other developing countries have condemned the US.-led air strikes on Gaddafi as risky and unwarranted overreaching by the West.

The shared opposition to the Libya campaign could become a point of diplomatic convergence among the “Brics” bloc of major emerging economies — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — which hold a summit in south China next month.

But it is unlikely to evolve into united action by this disparate group of countries, with their own mutual rivalries, said Shi Yinhong, a professor of international security at Renmin University in Beijing.

“Undoubtedly, many developing countries see a dangerous precedent in the Western attacks and intervention [in Libya] in what is fundamentally a civil war,” said Shi.

“But Russia, China and the others will be afraid of a serious break with the US or offending the Arab countries, so they won’t push their opposition far,” he said. — AFP, Reuters