The tide in the conflict changed dramatically within two weeks, write JULIAN BORGER, CHRIS STEPHENin Misurata, and RICHARD NORTON-TAYLOR
JUST A fortnight ago, the revolt against Muammar Gadafy and his regime appeared to have stalled. Efforts to push west from Benghazi and Misurata were held back again and again by the government’s heavy weapons.
Worse still, for the opposition, the rebel leadership appeared to be turning on itself. The military commander Abdel Fattah Younes had been gunned down in late July, apparently by his own soldiers, and the head of the National Transitional Council, Mustafa Abdel Jalil, later dismissed his cabinet for failing to investigate the killing to his satisfaction.
Then the attempt to topple Gadafy seemed to be drifting towards disaster – and with it Nato’s hopes of extricating itself from a costly and controversial war. Yet within two weeks, the tide in the Libyan conflict has changed dramatically.
Gadafy’s defences have crumbled, one government stronghold after another has collapsed and the rebels now control most of Tripoli.
There seems to be no single reason for this reversal in fortunes. The various rebel groups got hold of more and better weapons, they learned from earlier failures and forged a closer and more effective working relationship with the Nato jets above them. Most importantly, the implosion of Gadafy’s forces may not have been as sudden as it first seemed. Instead, his strength steadily eroded through months of Nato air strikes, squeezed supply lines, multiple fronts and sagging morale. By the first week of August the Gadafy military edifice had been hollowed out and with new rebel attacks, it turned to dust and the road to Tripoli lay open.
“We turned up the pressure on the regime, and it was stretched so thin the whole thing became untenable,” a western diplomat said yesterday. While most of the world’s attention had focused throughout the conflict on the attempts by Benghazi-based rebels to secure the oil town of Brega, and efforts to break out of the opposition enclave of Misurata, a pivotal breakthrough took place in what had hitherto been considered a sideshow – the western mountains.
The Nafusa highlands forms a natural barrier between the capital and Libya’s interior. Its inhabitants, the Amazigh community, had turned against Gadafy early on but had been bottled up in their home villages since the spring by government forces. Every attempt to break through government lines into the coastal plains to the north had been rebuffed.
During the spring and early summer, however, Amazigh fighters were joined by dissidents from Tripoli and the oil-refining port of Zawiya, fleeing Gadafy’s brutal suppression of the uprising. In the Nafusa highlands a more effective fighting force was fused from these disparate elements with the help of Nato trainers and French air-drops of arms and equipment.
By early August, these fighters began to push out from their bases. They moved village by village, and the offensive was little noticed outside the region. But it quickly grew and by last week the mountain rebels had arrived at Gharyan, a fortified city 100km south of Tripoli, and were beginning to infiltrate Zawiya as well. Previous attempts to take Zawiya had been pushed back by Gadafy forces, exposing the over-ambition and tenuous supply lines of the rebel attacks. This time, the rebels took Zawiya and stayed. By Friday they had seized the oil refinery. They had not only cut the road between Tripoli and Tunisia, along which the regime imported most of its food and basic supplies, but had turned off the last trickle of refined fuel going into the capital.
“The fall of Zawiya was the pivotal moment in hindsight. It not only had practical effects, severing road links and so on, it was also an enormous psychological blow [for Gadafy forces],” said Shashank Joshi, a military analyst at the Royal United Services Institute in London. “The death of Younes had not been as bleak for the rebels as we had thought. The battle had already shifted its centre of gravity to the Nafusa range. The rebels adapted and learned. They realised that their reckless advances without consolidating their positions weren’t working. They began to move methodically, and took orders, waiting for Nato to soften up the defences before moving in.” Evidence of greater discipline and better co-ordination with Nato air strikes was apparent on every front. Rebel commanders were told not to stray over “red lines” marked out by Nato liaison officers as “free fire zones”. Rebel forces had tried to mark their vehicles to avoid friendly fire from alliance jets, painting them black or painting a white “N” on them.
When Misurata-based forces finally broke through government lines at Zlitan on Friday, however, the bonnets of their vehicles were clearly draped with red and yellow flags, provided by Nato and kept under wraps until the offensive.
Special forces played a key role in that close relationship, though British government officials declined to comment on whether serving SAS personnel were involved. Reports that France deployed special forces have also not been convincingly denied.
Qatari and Jordanian special forces also played a role, the Guardian has been told, while Qatar is believed to have paid for former SAS and western employees of private security companies.
Radar, cameras and listening devices on Nato planes, including RAF surveillance aircraft, based in Sicily and Cyprus, and US drones, could identify military targets such as tanks, armoured vehicles, as well as known command and control centres.
But as the fighting continued, and Gadafy tried to hide his commanders and troops in civilian buildings and elsewhere, Nato relied more and more on information supplied from the ground. Libyans in Britain and the US with friends or family in the country passed on information. So did defectors who were in touch with MI6 and the intelligence agencies of other Nato countries. Britain and France provided the rebels with satellite phones and other equipment which were reliable, though their communications could be intercepted by Gadafy’s forces.
It was not just this focused offensive at a critical juncture that made a difference. It was the cumulative effect of 19,751 sorties flown since the beginning of the Nato air campaign, in which government targets were hit.
The collapse in morale turned into a vicious circle for the regime, as the flow of bad news triggered more defections. They reached a peak with the arrival in Cairo last Monday of Gadafy’s interior minister, Nasr al-Mabrouk Abdullah, a regime stalwart, along with nine of his family.
“His defection was critical,” said a western diplomat. “He was part of the hardcore.”
The door to the ultimate prize in the six-month conflict swung off its hinges, revealing that Tripoli was not so much a bastion as a rotten core at the heart of Gadafy's much-vaunted fortifications. – ( Guardianservice)