Fractured Lands by Scott Anderson

Author:Scott Anderson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2017-05-01T16:00:00+00:00

Libyan refugees at the Tunisian border near Ben Gardane, 2011

Instead, it ended very suddenly on October 20, 2011. That morning, a fierce firefight erupted in the western part of Sirte, punctuated by a series of air strikes from Western coalition warplanes; from his perch on the bypass road, Majdi saw enormous plumes of fire and dust rising up from the bombs exploding around the city. Around 2:00 P.M., there came another concentrated flurry of small-arms fire from the western suburbs, one that lasted about twenty minutes, before all fell quiet. Initially, Majdi and his comrades thought it meant that Qaddafi’s men had surrendered, but there soon came even better news: the dictator himself had been captured and killed. “We all cheered and hugged each other,” Majdi recalled, “because we knew it meant the war was over. After all that killing—and after forty-two years of Qaddafi—a new day had finally come to Libya.”

With the fighting at an end, Majdi returned to Misurata and transferred to a militia unit involved in tasks more suited to his gentle character: he joined an ambulance crew ferrying the more severely war-wounded from Misurata’s hospitals to the airport for advanced medical treatment abroad. He greatly enjoyed this work, which he felt showed tangible evidence of recovery after so much death and devastation, and it fortified his optimism about the future.

Then one December day at the Misurata airport, Majdi received a visitor. He was Sameh al-Drisi, the older brother of his friend Jalal, and he had traveled the five hundred miles from Benghazi to ask a favor.

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