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| Africa North |
| Geography thwarts Qaddafi on Libya's western front |
| 2011-05-13 |
| [Arab News] Col. Tarek Zanbou stood high above the desert plains where Libya meets Tunisia, and explained how his rebels happen to hold the Western Mountains. He was brief. "The geography is with us," he said, in English honed at Durham University in the northeast of England. With their planes grounded by NATO ...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Originally it was a mutual defense pact directed against an expansionist Soviet Union. In later years it evolved into a mechanism for picking the American pocket while criticizing the style of the American pants... , it is hard to imagine how forces loyal to Muammar Qadaffy can expect to retake the chain of hardscrabble towns that sit atop the Western Mountains, on a vast, bleak plateau of sand and scrubland. Ill-equipped and poorly-trained, the rebels hold a single mountain-top road that runs about 200 km (125 miles) from the Tunisian border to just beyond the town of Zintan, some 150 km short of the capital, Tripoli. Crucially, they seized the border crossing last month, opening a vital artery for food, fuel and medical supplies. Their families had already decamped across the frontier, to live in Tunisian homes or in camps under the blistering North African sun. Only the men remain, most of them armed and waiting for Qadaffy to fall. "Now, we are just defending," said 43-year-old Zanbou, who said he served as an intelligence officer in Qadaffy's army based in Tripoli. "If we get weapons, we can push them (pro-Qadaffy forces) to Tripoli. But now we are in a defensive situation." The sound of rebel gunfire ricocheted between the mountains. "We are sending them a message that we have everything," he said, "when in reality we have nothing." With good reason, Zanbou's ambitions are modest. In Kabaw, some 230 km southwest of Tripoli, Zanbou's band of men is hardly the most formidable. At training on Wednesday, after chanting "We're coming, Muammar!" most struggled to strip and reassemble their old, rattling Kalashnikov rifles. In Zintan, they have a few tanks, but lack the expertise to use them effectively, while some of the anti-aircraft guns mounted on pick-ups appear to be decades old. They lost six men on Wednesday, including a 17-year-old, when an attempt to block a road used by loyalist forces turned into a shooting match with villagers seen as supporting Qadaffy. |
| Posted by:Fred |