In the fluctuating fortunes of Libya’s military uprising, the rebels advanced on Muammar Gaddafi’s home town, Sirte, retaking lost ground when government forces fled under Western air strikes. But they were thrown back and forced out of the important oil town of Ben Jawad as pro-Gaddafi troops, bolstered by reinforcements, counterattacked.
Revolutionary forces had rapidly moved more than 240km west along Libya’s coastal road, seizing several towns without resistance, as the first witness accounts emerged of the devastating effect on Gaddafi’s army and militia of the aerial bombardment that broke their resistance at Ajdabiya on Saturday.
On Monday rebels retook the important oil towns of Ben Jawad, Brega and Ras Lanuf and continued on the open desert road towards Sirte, about 130km away. But resistance stiffened in the battle for the town, symbolically significant as Gaddafi’s birthplace and important in his defence of Tripoli.
However, control of the oil terminals at Brega and Ras Lanuf is, in itself, a major gain because it could bring the rebel administration significant revenue from exports if production resumes.
Rebels moved unchallenged along a road littered with evidence of the air campaign and the speed of their enemy’s retreat. The blackened carcasses of tanks, armoured vehicles and military trucks were pushed to the roadside.
Government forces abandoned piles of ammunition, including grey wooden boxes containing rockets but stamped as holding “parts of bulldozer” manufactured in North Korea.
In Ben Jawad residents said a destroyed municipal building had been hit by an air strike. As the insurgents seized control of towns that had been under Gaddafi’s military occupation for nearly a fortnight, a doctor at the hospital in Ras Lanuf described the Western air raids as causing hundreds of casualties among Gaddafi’s forces, breaking morale and leaving many soldiers faking injuries to escape the assault.
“The first days Gaddafi’s forces had very high morale and came in large numbers, thousands. There were the army soldiers and then the volunteers in the militia,” said the doctor, who asked to be identified only as Abdullah. “They were fighting the rebels and winning. But then came the bombing. The first day we had 56 seriously wounded to the head, the brain, lost arms and legs. Soldiers with a lot of shrapnel in them.”
Abdullah said all the wounded were fighters for Gaddafi, with about two-thirds injured in the bombing of Ajdabiya. He was sceptical about rebel accusation that many government solders were foreign mercenaries, saying he did not see any among the wounded. But he did say that Gaddafi’s forces had systematically maltreated the civilian population, particularly those suspected of coming from the de facto rebel capital of Benghazi. — Guardian News & Media 2011