From the east and west, working with Nato air strikes, resurgent rebels have battled Libyan government forces at flashpoints along the Mediterranean coast, rebel commanders reported. The government said their victory claims were “wishful reporting”.
Insurgents had reported fighting street by street to retake the Mediterranean port city of Zawiya, 30km west of Tripoli, a prize that would put them within striking distance of the capital and cut off one of Muammar Gaddafi’s last supply routes from Tunisia.
But government spokesperson Moussa Ibrahim said late on Sunday that Gaddafi forces had driven off the attackers, and reporters taken to Zawiya saw secure streets and the green national flag flying over a central square. The insurgents, for their part, claimed a high-ranking Gaddafi commander was badly wounded in the fighting.
“The wishful reporting of some journalists that the rebels are gaining more power and more control of some areas is not correct,” he said.
The rebel thrust at Zawiya and reported movements farther east — near Misrata and Brega — suggested the stalemated uprising had been reinvigorated, and that Gaddafi’s defenders may become stretched thin.
“Over the past three days, we set fire under the feet of Gaddafi forces everywhere,” Colonel Hamid al-Hasi, a rebel battalion commander, told the Associated Press. He said the rebels attacked “in very good coordination with Nato “to avoid friendly-fire incidents. “We don’t move unless we have very clear instructions from Nato.”
Crimping supplies
In addition, the Nato blockade of ports still under government control and alliance control of Libyan airspace have severely crimped the North African dictator’s ability to resupply his forces. And his control has been hard hit by defections from his military and government inner circle.
Nato, meanwhile, has stepped up bombing of Gaddafi’s compound in the centre of Tripoli, striking it again on Sunday, along with a military airport in eastern Tripoli. The government did not immediately report casualties or damage.
The rebels’ Transitional National Council scored a political success, meanwhile, winning recognition from the United Arab Emirates, adding a wealthy, influential Arab state to the handful of nations thus far accepting the insurgents as Libyans’ sole legitimate representatives.
The rebels had first taken Zawiya, an important oil port, in early March but were driven out by a government counterattack two weeks later.
In a surprising show of resilience, rebels regrouped and rearmed for their drive on Zawiya in an offensive that began on Saturday, according to an opposition spokesman based in London. On Sunday, Kamal, a rebel fighter from Zawiya who would give only his first name, said about 30 of his fellow fighters had been killed and 20 wounded in the fighting.
Speaking with the AP by telephone, he claimed the city’s western Mutred and Harsha districts were under rebel control. But later on Sunday government officials took reporters from Tripoli to Zawiya to show that the city was under government control. Some rebel fighters were besieged just outside Zawiya, said government spokesperson Ibrahim.
In the eastern Libyan rebel centre of Benghazi, meanwhile, the rebel military spokesperson Colonel Ahmed Bani claimed that a Gaddafi commander, the high-ranking el-Khouwildy el-Ahmeidy, was critically wounded in a Nato air attack late on Saturday as he rushed to Zawiya. That report could not otherwise be confirmed.
Fighting also continued near the country’s main port of Misrata, a western redoubt of the rebels, who control about a third of eastern Libya from Benghazi.
From Dafniyah, just west of Misrata, rebel units were moving farther west toward the city of Zlitan, said rebel Abdel-Qadir Fastouka. “This is to gain some territory and to try to put up barricades along the coast,” he said.
Fierce fighting
The rebel forces in Misrata have kept a large government force tied down besieging the city, 210km east of Tripoli. Government troops under the command of Gaddafi’s sons Khamis and al-Moatassem and top aide Abdullah al-Senoussi have killed nearly 40 rebel fighters in intense shelling over the past three days.
Doctors at Misrata’s Hikma hospital said six people were killed in Sunday’s shelling of the city and 16 were wounded. One was a civilian woman killed when a Grad missile crashed through the roof of her home. The doctors refused to allow use of their names, fearing retribution.
Further clashes were reported farther east, around the oil port of Brega, but conflicting rebel accounts left a confused picture.
Meantime, a new front could be opening in an unexpected southern Libyan salient as well, as residents reported growing anti-Gaddafi sentiment in the once-quiescent city of Sabha. Young men and members of a big anti-government tribe were protesting in the streets and readying their weapons — some brought in from rebel forces in the north — to join the fight.
The lightly populated south of the country was long believed solidly behind Gaddafi. Much of the population in Sabha, for example, was originally from Chad, Niger and Sudan, brought to Libya by Gaddafi in the 1980s. They were given government stipends and jobs in return for mercenary support of his regime.
Many of those men now have gone north to fight with Gaddafi forces, leaving behind heavily armed and restive young men who are native to the region and the anti-Gaddafi Awlad Suleiman tribe, the largest in the city and a force throughout the country.
Reports filtering belatedly out of Sabha said protesters had set up checkpoints in a main residential district, Souk al-Namla. Last Wednesday, security forces fired into the air to disperse the crowd, sparking a bloody clash. Residents said they feared Gaddafi was readying a mercenary force in the north to return to Sabha and subdue the uprising. – Sapa-AP