The Battle for the Arab Spring by Lin Noueihed

Author:Lin Noueihed [Noueihed, Lin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300180862
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2012-03-16T00:00:00+00:00

The Endgame

Somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 Libyans had been killed by early September, six months after the intervention was launched.36 When measured as a percentage of Libya's population, and in that time period, this was a bloodier death toll than Iraq. As the situation on the ground appeared to have reached a stalemate, the intervention grew increasingly active rather than protective. There was evidence that on-the-ground ‘spotters’ from Western special forces began working with rebels to identify targets.37 In the Jebel Nafusa mountains, south-west of the capital, the French had airlifted weapons to rebel groups, violating the terms of the UN resolution. And it would later emerge that Qatar had shipped in hundreds of its soldiers to train and assist in the fighting.38 The only way of defending civilians, it now seemed, was to attack Gaddafi.

As the war struggled into a long, hot August Ramadan, several different groups of rebels, now better-organized but still suffering huge casualties, were moving towards Tripoli with increasingly robust air support from NATO. In Misrata, a largely home-grown resistance, often made up of civilians rather than army defectors and based on local resources rather than external help, had managed to lift the siege in mid-May in a hugely symbolic victory and one that gave the opposition a vital strategic foothold in the centre of the Libyan coastline. By the late summer several brigades from the city were on the offensive and beginning to take territory of their own.

A stalemate persisted along the front in the north-east between Sirte and Benghazi, with towns like Brega and Ras Lanuf frequently changing hands between the two sides. In Jebel Nafusa, armed rebel groups were making gains and moving in on towns to the west of Tripoli. The western areas were vital in bringing in supplies and fighters across the Tunisian borders, with the town of Nalut in particular becoming something of an operations base. Qatari special forces were also reported to be training rebels in the area, as the opposition grew in both quantity and quality.39 Among the most prominent militia was that from the small town of Zintan, also in the western mountains, which had played an important role in spearheading the opposition's military effort and whose airstrip would be vital in receiving and controlling money and weapons flown in from the east.40

Zintanis also helped break the deadlock in mid-August. Key to this breakthrough was the seizure of Zawiya and its oil refinery that brought the main road between Tripoli and the Tunisian border under opposition control and denied the capital its main supply line. It was as much a psychological blow as a logistical one, but essentially meant that the capital could now be encircled. A long-planned operation to storm Tripoli, dubbed Mermaid Dawn, rolled into action slightly earlier than expected. Opposition cells inside the city were activated. Some rebels moved in by road from the west and others by sea.

Dramatic scenes were captured on television during the night of 21 August, when rebels began entering Tripoli through its western suburbs.

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