Thread: The Libyan Crisis

Air strike flattens building in Gaddafi compound | Reuters



"(Reuters) - NATO forces flattened a building inside Muammar Gaddafi's Bab al-Aziziyah compound early on Monday, in what a press official from Gaddafi's government said was an attempt on the Libyan leader's life.

Firefighters were still working to extinguish flames in part of the ruined building a few hours after the attack, when foreign journalists were brought to the scene in Tripoli.

The press official, who asked not to be identified, said 45 people were hurt in the strike, 15 of them seriously, and some were still missing. That could not be independently confirmed.

Gaddafi's son Saif al-Islam said the Libyan government would not be cowed by such attacks.

"The bombing which targeted Muammar Gaddafi's office today... will only scare children. It's impossible that it will make us afraid or give up or raise the white flag," he was quoted as saying by the Jana state news agency.

"You, NATO, are waging a losing battle because you are backed by traitors and spies. History has proved that no state can rely on them to win."

Gaddafi's compound has been hit before, but NATO forces appear to have stepped up the pace of strikes in Tripoli in recent days. A target nearby, which the government called a car park but which appeared to cover a bunker, was hit two days ago.

The United States, Britain and France say they will not stop their air campaign over Libya until Gaddafi leaves power.

Washington has taken a backseat role in the air war since turning over command to NATO at the end of March but is under pressure to do more. Last week it sent Predator drone aircraft, which fired for the first time on Saturday.

MISRATA BOMBARDED

Government troops bombarded the western rebel bastion of Misrata again on Sunday, two days after announcing their withdrawal following a two month siege.

An engineer who works for a dissident radio station in Misrata told Al Arabiya television that at least 30 people had been killed and 60 wounded by the shelling in the coastal city.

The number of dead could not be independently verified.

"There is very intense and random shelling on residential areas. Burnt bodies are being brought into the hospital," Ahmed al-Qadi told Al Arabiya.

A doctor in a hospital in Misrata said that among the dead from what he called heavy artillery and mortar shelling was a 10-year-old boy killed while he was sleeping at home.

A government spokesman said the army was still carrying out its plan to withdraw from the city, but had fired back when retreating troops were attacked.

"As our army was withdrawing from Misrata it came under attack by the rebels. The army fought back but continued its withdrawal from the city," Mussa Ibrahim told reporters.

The government says its army is withdrawing and sending in armed tribesmen instead. Rebels say the announcement may be part of a ruse to mask troop movements or stir violence between rebels and locals in nearby towns.

Rebel leader Mustafa Abdel Jalil told a news conference in Kuwait that the Gulf state had agreed to give 50 million Kuwaiti dinars (107 million pounds) to his rebel council to help pay workers in the eastern part of the country under its control.

"This amount will help us a lot in paying the salaries of employees who did not receive their little salaries for two months," he said. "We are capable of only covering 40 percent of this amount. We are in need of urgent aid."

The rebels have been seeking international recognition as well as material support from the west and the Arab world.

Hampered by their lack of firepower, equipment and training, they have been unable to advance from eastern Libya but are fighting back and forth with Gaddafi's troops on the coast road between the towns of Ajdabiyah and Brega.

Abdel Jalil also said the rebels had received weapons from "friends and allies," but did not name them.

At least three people were killed in the mountain town of Zintan, around 160 km (100 miles) southwest of Tripoli, by fire from Gaddafi's tanks and rockets, residents said."

Three points raised, in yellow above, here:

1. US, UK and France have stated they will not stop attacking Libya until Gaddafi steps down - Regime Change

2. The Libyan government forces even though they were withdrawing are being attacked - Insurgent army will not honour the attempted ceasefire.

3. The Insurgent arm is being assisted with money and arms from outside the country.

1, 2 and 3 are illegal as they are outside the resolution 1973.

The bloody war continues aided by the crusader coalition.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/27/wo...imes&seid=auto

NATO Says It Is Broadening Attacks on Qaddafi Targets

By THOM SHANKER

Published: April 26, 2011

WASHINGTON — NATO planners say the allies are stepping up attacks on palaces, headquarters, communications centers and other prominent institutions supporting the Libyan regime, a shift of targets that is intended to weaken Col. Muammar Qaddafi’s grip on power and frustrate his forces in the field.

Officials in Europe and in Washington said that the strikes are meant to reduce the regime’s ability to harm civilians by eliminating, link by link, the command, communications and supply chains required for sustaining military operations.

The broadening of the alliance’s targets comes at a time when the rebels and the regime in Libya have been consolidating their positions along more static front lines, raising concerns of a prolonged stalemate. Although it is too soon to assess the results of the shift, a NATO official said on Tuesday that the alliance is watching closely for early signs, like the recent reports of desertions from the Libyan army.

Strikes on significant bulwarks of Colonel Qaddafi’s power over recent days included bombing his residential compound in the heart of Tripoli — an array of bunkers that are also home to administrative offices and a military command post — as well as knocking state television briefly off the air.

If the new approach effectively cripples Colonel Qaddafi’s ability to command his military and visibly erodes his legitimacy, NATO strategists say, that may eventually persuade him to flee into exile — or it might prompt someone in his inner circle to force him out.

The strike on Colonel Qaddafi’s palace and command center was denounced by Libyan officials as an assassination attempt, but alliance officers rejected the suggestion. Pentagon officials said the mission was mounted against a legitimate military target, and noted that it was carried out by F-16 jets from Norway — a nation hardly associated with assassination attempts against foreign leaders.

For now, they said, the armed Predator drone aircraft being used in Libya have been flying over rebel-held towns that are under attack or are threatened by loyalist forces — not over the capital city.

But officials acknowledged that the alliance is turning to intelligence based on cellular phone and radio intercepts that might indicate which barracks, buildings or compounds are serving as the government’s hidden command posts.

One NATO officials said that from the Libyans’ point of view, “if you know your main headquarters is going to be hit, you get out and set up an alternative in some non-descript barracks.” Attacks on those hidden military command posts are wholly legitimate, officials said — but there is always a chance that Colonel Qaddafi may be inside one of them.

NATO put its new campaign plan in place over the past week or more, but so far the North African climate has not been cooperative. The alliance had intended to step up air strikes on prominent institutional targets over this past weekend, but the effort was postponed because of bad weather.

In interviews, NATO officials acknowledged that overall, their air campaign had been frustratingly slow in taking shape after a vigorous start. But they said it was following a carefully planned step-by-step progression spanning the front lines, the middle echelons of the supply chain and now the rear areas, mostly in the capital, where the centralized command and control institutions are located.

The heavy strikes by American cruise missiles and warplanes across the country that began the campaign were aimed mainly at crippling air defense systems so allied combat jets could fly without hindrance. The American military turned over command of the mission to the alliance once it had established a no-flight zone for Libyan warplanes. NATO strikes then focused on the front lines of the fighting, to suppress government forces’ attacks on the rebels and on population centers that were sympathetic to them.

“After the early attacks on his integrated air-defense systems, the next stage was to stop the pro-Qaddafi forces that were schwacking the villages and cities,” said one NATO official. “You have to stop the bleeding. Only then can you treat the wound.”

As the frontlines began to stabilize — some senior officials describe the current situation as a stalemate — NATO warplanes tried to smash the supply lines snaking toward government troops in the field, which were calling for ammunition and reinforcements as they besieged rebel-held cities.

More than 80 government arms caches have been destroyed, officials said. Military transport and fuel trucks have been hit. Armored vehicles and rocket launchers have been targets for attacks, including the first by a Predator. But pro-Qaddafi forces began digging in under cover and using unmarked civilian vehicles, making them harder to identify and attack from the air. Meanwhile, the shelling of rebel towns has ebbed and flowed.

So last week, as Western political leaders pronounced that they had no intention of allowing Colonel Qaddafi to remain in power indefinitely, the alliance turned its attention to a target set of static military and government structures.

“Now we are going after his rear echelon,” one NATO official said. “We are going after his ability to command and control his forces — his headquarters, his command posts, his communications — all those things that allow him to coordinate his attacks at the front.”

Military officials privately acknowledge that removing Colonel Qaddafi from power is the desired secondary effect of striking at state television and other symbols of his authoritarian rule. “His people may see the futility of continued resistance,” said one Pentagon official.

On Tuesday, Lt. Gen. Charles Bouchard, the operational commander of the NATO mission, told reporters at his headquarters in Italy that alliance intelligence officers were picking up reports of Libyan government soldiers abandoning their positions. “We are well aware of troops not reporting for duty,” he said.

Senior officers who served in NATO’s previous air war, fought in 1999 to protect the population of Kosovo from advancing Serbian forces, said that the current air campaign over Libya drew on lessons from Kosovo.

Gen. John P. Jumper, who commanded American Air Force units in Europe during the Kosovo campaign, recalled that allied “air power was getting its paper graded on the number of tanks killed” — even though taking out armored vehicles one by one was never going to halt “ethnic cleansing.”

So NATO began to hit high-profile institutional targets in Belgrade, the Serbian capital, instead of forces in the field. While they were legitimate military targets, General Jumper said, destroying them also had the effect of undermining popular support for the Serbian leader, Slobodan Milosevic.

“It was when we went in and began to disturb important and symbolic sites in Belgrade, and began to bring to a halt the middle-class life in Belgrade, that Milosevic’s own people began to turn on him,” General Jumper said. “They began to question why the whole thing in Kosovo was going on, because it was ruining the country.”

From a Qaddafi Daughter, a Glimpse Inside the Bunker

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/27/wo...isha.html?_r=1



"TRIPOLI, Libya — Aisha el-Qaddafi, the daughter of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya, likes to tell her three young children bedtime stories about the afterlife. Now, she says, they are especially appropriate.

“To make them ready,” she said, “because in a time of war you never know when a rocket or a bomb might hit you, and that will be the end.”

In a rare interview at her charitable foundation here, Ms. Qaddafi, 36, a Libyan-trained lawyer who once worked on Saddam Hussein’s legal defense team, offered a glimpse into the fatalistic mind-set of the increasingly isolated family at the core of the battle for Libya, the bloodiest arena in the democratic uprising that is sweeping the region.

She dismissed the rebels as “terrorists” but suggested that some former Qaddafi officials who are now in the opposition’s governing council still “keep in touch with us.” She pleaded for dialogue and talked about democratic reforms. But she dismissed the rebels as unfit for such talks because of their use of violence, hurled personal barbs at President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and, at one point, appeared to disparage the basic idea of electoral democracy.

After arranging the interview last week, Ms. Qaddafi spoke for more than an hour late Sunday afternoon, just hours before NATO escalated its airstrikes with an attack that disrupted state television and another on the Libyan leader’s compound in Tripoli. Ms. Qaddafi, one of the many unofficial and sometimes rivalrous Qaddafi family power brokers who dominate Libya’s economic and political life, said the crisis had pulled the family together “like one hand.”

Ms. Qaddafi said that she and her seven brothers “have a dialogue between us and exchange points of view” before anyone takes a major step in their common defense. She acknowledged that she had seen news reports that her siblings had proposed easing their father from power in a transition under the direction of her brother Seif al-Islam, but she declined to comment on the details.

She also pointedly declined to answer when asked if Abdel Fattah Younes, a top rebel military official who was a longtime interior minister, was among the leaders who had kept in touch with the Qaddafi family.

“They say to us that they have their own families, daughters, sons, spouses, and they fear for them, and that is why they have taken those positions,” she said of those rebel leaders. “There are many members of the council who have worked with my father for 42 years and been loyal to him. Do you think they would just go like that?”

Instead of the angry defiance and vows of retribution issued by her father and her brother Seif, Ms. Qaddafi focused on how the West would rue the chaos she predicted would engulf a post-Qaddafi Libya. When pressed repeatedly on how her family could stay in power, she said more than once, “We have a great hope in God.”

Ms. Qaddafi has appeared in public twice since the bombings began, before cheering crowds at the colonel’s compound, but she seldom speaks in public. During the interview, she wore close-fitting jeans, Gucci shoes and a pale scarf that did not cover her long blond hair. At times, she laughed at her fate, recalling how the United Nations, after “begging” her to be an envoy for peace in the past, has now referred her to the International Criminal Court. Her staff presented an illustrated biography entitled “Princess of Peace.”

She said her experience as a volunteer on Saddam Hussein’s defense team offered relevant parallels.

“The opposition in Iraq told the West that when you come to Iraq they will greet you with roses,” she said. “Almost 10 years later they are receiving the Americans with bullets, and, believe me, the situation in Libya will be much worse.”

She taunted both President Obama and Mrs. Clinton, saying that Mr. Obama had “achieved nothing so far” and laughing as she posed a question to Mrs. Clinton: “Why didn’t you leave the White House when you found out about the cheating of your husband?”

Even as she deprecated the American leaders, she repeatedly called for talks. “The world should come together at a round table,” she said, “under the auspices of international organizations.”

At the same time, she ruled out any dialogue with the Libyan rebels who now control the eastern half of the country; its commercial center, Misurata; and the western mountain towns of Zintan and Nalut, dismissing them as “terrorists” who “are just fighting for the sake of fighting.”

Under her brother Seif’s unofficial leadership, she said, the Libyan government had been on the verge of unveiling a constitution as a step toward democratic reform when “this tragedy happened and spoiled things.”

At the same time, she also derided, and possibly misunderstood, the basic ideas of checks and balances and public accountability in an electoral democracy. “Let me say something about the Western elections that they say are a democratic system of ruling,” she volunteered, referring to handwritten notes she had prepared for the interview. In an election where one candidate won with 50 percent of the vote and another lost with 48 percent, she asked, “Do you call this democracy? Just this one vote? What happened to the 48 percent who said ‘no’?”

She complained of the “betrayal” of Arabs whose causes her father had supported and the Western allies to whom he had turned over his weapons of mass destruction. “Is this the reward that we get?” she asked. “This would lead every country that has weapons of mass destruction to keep them or make more so they will not meet the same fate as Libya.”

Without Colonel Qaddafi, she predicted, illegal immigrants from Africa would pour into Europe, Islamic radicals would establish a base on the Mediterranean’s shores, and Libyan tribes would turn their guns on one another.

Citing unconfirmed Libyan intelligence reports, she asserted that the weapons-starved rebels had actually sold arms to the Islamist groups Hamas and Hezbollah. “When my father was there, see how safe Europe was and how safe Libya was?” she asked.

Ms. Qaddafi initially dismissed reports of the handful of nights two months ago when protesters took over the streets of Tripoli and almost every other big city, pulling down Qaddafi posters and burning police stations. Then, told that journalists had seen the evidence, she argued the destruction proved they were not civilian protesters but “saboteurs.”

She also appeared to dismiss witnesses’ accounts of Colonel Qaddafi’s forces shooting unarmed demonstrators. “I am not sure that happened,” she said. “But let’s say it did: it was limited in scope.”

As for her father’s state of mind, she said with a laugh that he was not worried at all. “He is as strong as the world knows him,” she said. “He is quite sure that the Libyan people are loyal to him.”

Her family still hoped, she said, to go back to its previous position, what she called “a return to normal.” But, she added, “of course we can expedite that if NATO will stop bombing us.”"

"Soldiers of Fortune" fight for Gaddafi: Voice of Russia



"Several hundred mercenaries, mainly from EU and East European countries, are fighting on the side of Col. Gaddafi in Libya, European experts say. EU security agencies and NATO officials neither confirm nor deny these reports.

Reports to this effect came from EUObserver.

http://euobserver.com/9/32228

The Internet edition published an article by Greek expert Michel Koutouzis in which he says that most mercenaries arrive from Belarus, Ukraine and Serbia, and some are from Poland, Belgium, Britain, France and Greece. The so-called ‘soldiers of fortune’ are paid several thousand dollars daily.

Michel Koutouzis oversees research on security-related issues for the EU, the UN and the government of France. It took him two months in North Africa to collect data on Libya. In his opinion, Gaddafi is employing mercenaries because he doesn’t trust Libyans, particularly in light of numerous coup and assassination attempts over the past 40 years. Cases of desertion have been frequent since the start of the NATO operation in March. Gaddafi’s army currently consists of about 25,000 soldiers. Another 50,000 thousand well-armed volunteers are under the command of his sons. In these circumstances, using mercenaries is understandable and logical, provided there is money to pay them. Vladimir Yevseev, Director of the Social and Political Research Center, shared his opinion in an interview with a Voice of Russia correspondent:

"A number of mercenaries from Eastern Europe are fighting on the side of Colonel Gaddafi. This doesn’t mean that the countries they come from support Gaddafi or encourage their citizens to go and fight in Libya. These people chose to fight in Libya of their own accord and their decision was not prompted by ideological considerations."

Far from all experts tend to trust EUObserver. Experts say that Belarusian and Ukrainian military experts are working in Libya by contract. And these experts came to work in Libya well before the February uprising. They arrived to assist with the maintenance of Libya’s air defense systems and armored vehicles, made in Russia, Belarus or Ukraine. Political analyst Anton Chernov says that Koutouzis’s article should not be regarded as ultimate truth:

"The first reports to the effect that there were mercenaries in Gaddafi’s army came from a UN official. The official said that some mercenaries came from Belarus. Earlier, UN workers accused Belarus of supplying Ivory Coast with helicopters, and the UN had to apologize after it became clear that the helicopters did not come from Belarus."

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EUobserver / UN says EU soldiers could endanger aid workers



"21.04.2011 [at] 09:29 CET
EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - One of the United Nations's top humanitarian officials has said it will not be seeking the support of EU troops in the provision of assistance in Libya, warning that aid workers will become associated with military actors.

Valerie Amos, emergency relief co-ordinator with the UN's Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (Ocha) told a press conference in New York on Wednesday (20 April) that an EU mission was needed "not at the moment. We are able to get in using civilian means.

The words come as it emerged that the EU is readying a 1,000-strong military mission to support humanitarian assistance in the country.

Amos said she is worried that aid officials and soldiers would be viewed in the minds of some as being linked.

"Our responsibility, all the time, is to ensure that our aid is offered on an impartial basis," she said. Aid workers' lives would be endangered were they to lose their neutral reputation, she continued: "We have to be extremely careful about that and make sure the lines are not blurred."

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