LIBYA’S FRONT LINES
Posted by Jon Lee Anderson
For several hours Wednesday, after days suspended in an ill-defined political limbo, eastern Libya’s “liberated” territory acquired a western front line in an actual shooting war. Ever since an air strike on Monday on an arms depot west of Benghazi, the capital of “Free Libya,” tensions had been ratcheting up. This morning, word came that a large armed convoy of pro-Qaddafi militiamen had invaded the oil town of Brega, a hundred and fifty miles southwest of the city. The word was that they had come from Sirt, Qaddafi’s hometown and the main government bastion between here and Tripoli.
I drove out toward Brega with a few companions. We headed west across a desert landscape, its monotony relieved only by a few sheepherders with their flocks, electrical lines, and, at one point, a dismally vast, utilitarian “new Benghazi” development being built on the plain by the Chinese—a soulless grid of hundreds upon hundreds of unfinished gray cement apartment buildings. In Ajdabiya, a benighted whistlestop an hour or so down the road, we found activity around the hospital. A group of doctors and volunteers milled around excitedly, and everyone yelled at once. There was fighting in Brega, they said; they were sending ambulances. The ambulances roared off, and we followed.
On the outskirts of Ajdabiya, there was a scene of high theatre at the double green arch, covered with sayings from Qaddafi’s “Green Book,” that marked the exit from the town. Hundreds of cars and pickups had pulled up, and on either side of the road people were manning—and trying to learn how to use—anti-aircraft batteries, urged on by a throng of men and boys wielding machetes, butcher knifes, Kalashnikovs, and revolvers, chanting, cheering, and shouting, “God is great.” More and more volunteer fighters began arriving, racing at high speed to join the crowd at the gates, waving their weapons. Sometimes the crowd threw water on them, apparently a Libyan benediction.
Continue here: Dispatches from Libya: News Desk : The New Yorker.
