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MISRATA, Libya—Rebel fighters in this besieged city hoisted their flag atop the roof of the Libya Insurance Co. on Friday capping a month long battle for the strategically and symbolically important office tower.
In the past month of fighting, the nine-story bullet-scarred building became the emblematic heart of the battle for this city.
The building marked the deepest point Mr. Gadhafi's forces penetrated into downtown Misrata in mid-March. Ever since it has served as a nest for Mr. Gadhafi's sniper teams.
Its capture on Friday gave a boost to a city that is waging a gritty fight against a siege of artillery, rockets, and cluster bombs for over two months.
"The dogs are fleeing, the insurance building is ours," a jubilant 32-year-old fighter, Nouri Misrati, told a wounded comrade recovering from shrapnel wounds in a hospital room Friday.
To be sure, the battle for Misrata, Libya's third largest city, is not over. Col. Gadhafi's snipers still occupy other buildings, though they aren't as tall and are removed from the city center. After Col. Gadhafi's forces surrendered the building, they intensified bombardment of the city from positions on the city's outskirts. Misrata shook all afternoon and evening from rocket blasts and artillery shells.
Still, its capture sends a message to the city's residents and the rest of Libya that in the face of long odds, rebel fighters in the city are slowly making gains.
The developments came after momentum on Thursday turned away from Col. Gadhafi. The White House said it would use armed drones to carry out missile strikes against Libyan government troops, and opposition forces took control of a crossing on the Tunisian border.
Then on Friday, in the opposition stronghold of Benghazi, Sen. John McCain, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, called on the U.S. and other nations to recognize the rebels as the "legitimate voice of the Libyan people" and to step up military support for them, including weapons, training and more air strikes. The White House declined to back his call to recognize the opposition.
Meanwhile, Libya's deputy foreign minister Khaled Kaim said the army may quit fighting in Misrata due to airstrikes by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and allow local tribes instead to lead the fight against rebels, Reuters reported.
The Libyan rebellion, started in mid-February, picked up steam in Misrata as the weeks drew on. Finally, on March 16, Col. Gadhafi moved to decisively crush it. He sent a column of dozens of tanks into the city. They rolled down Tripoli Street, the commercial heart of Misrata, firing rounds in every direction, residents said.
They put infantry teams and heavy machine guns in every building over five stories tall, according to rebel fighters. Tripoli street became a logistics artery supplying Mr. Gadhafi's strengthening hold on the city center.
Misrata's residents feared he was preparing to push out into the rest of the city and complete its capture just as he had done in the western city of Zawiya earlier in March.
Tripoli Street became a propaganda tool for the government, as Col. Gadhafi shuttled journalists into the downtown core to show the world Misrata's rebellion had been defeated.
A Wall Street Journal reporter visited Misrata's Tripoli Street on March 28 for a staged pro-Gadhafi rally. "They waved green flags and brandished posters of the leader," the reporter wrote.
Rebels tried in vain to push Col. Gadhafi's forces out of the city, but were overpowered, so began a new strategy.
"We began to think, how can we cut the supply line to the forces in the city," said Muad Ben-Sasi, a frontline combat medic for the rebel neighborhood militia responsible for Tripoli Street.
On April 3, just days after the visit by the Wall Street Journal reporter,the opposition forces struck back, executing an operation that stands as an example of rebel fighters' ingenuity here. They drove massive dumptrucks filled with sand onto Tripoli Street, parked them perpendicular across the thoroughfare, and blew out their tires so they couldn't be moved. The trucks sealed off the main thoroughfare at both ends preventing resupplies from reaching Col. Gadhafi's forces.
The small side streets on either side of Tripoli road are narrow and a maze of tangles difficult for a non-local, as all of Col. Gadhafi's fighters are, to navigate. They are filled with rebel fighters who know the roads intimately."They were trapped," Mr. Ben-Sasi said. "They don't know the streets. They know only Tripoli Street."
In coming days the rebels sealed off more streets. Any tanks and vehicles left behind were soon destroyed by fighters, who within five days had flushed out most of Col. Gadhafi's forces.
Government forces responded frantically to the rebels' move. They ramped up shelling of rebel positions. They pounded the barricades with tank shells and they sent in tanks trailers to dislodge the barricades, all to no avail. Rebel fighters attacked them. The scorched shells of those fighting machines now lie amid the street's rubble.
But lethal pockets of pro-Gadhafi fighters remained in a handful of high rises along Tripoli Street. Teams of government soldiers continued to wage their fearsome sniper campaign.
One building in particular, the nine-story white with green trim Libya Insurance building became the most feared landmark in Misrata. The building towers over downtown Misrata and can be seen from miles away. Even at that distance, city residents shivered when they were within line of sight of its upper floors.
Before the uprising, the city's residents bought insurance policies there and watched soccer matches at its street level café.
Navigating Misrata safely required an expert rebel escort, who knew exactly when to zoom a car past sniper alleys. Many learned the hard way. Hospital rooms filled up with sniper victims, young and old.
Rebels in downtown Misrata concentrated their efforts in recent weeks on flushing Col. Gadhafi's fighters out of the approximately 10 downtown buildings they still controlled, and most of all the Insurance building.
In some instances, they tunneled through the walls of neighboring buildings to torch the targeted building.
But the insurance building and a handful of others proved too difficult for the rebels to conquer. The soldiers in the insurance building removed anything flammable from the building's ground floor. When rebels succeeded in launching an operation to reach the building and torch it, their fire bombs simply smoked out without igniting the concrete walls.
Rebel fighters turned to the city's core of engineers, a committee of volunteers whose primary job in recent weeks has been keeping the city's struggling public services up and running, to devise a strategy for demolishing the building.
Rebel forces kept the buildings under siege, surrounded with teams of fighters working in shifts to make sure no one from Col. Gadhafi's forces could reach the buildings with supplies. They called out with bullhorns, urging those inside to surrender. They distributed flyers trying to counter Col. Gadhafi's propaganda, explaining they simply wanted freedom and assuring the Gadhafi fighters they would be treated well if they gave up.
On Wednesday, at a guard post near the Libya Insurance building, three 18-year-old rebel fighters with a pair of Kalashnikovs between them, who should have been completing their final year of high school, instead worked a 12-hour shift.
They sat in repurposed office chairs behind white sand bags tucked down an alleyway just out of view of the Gadhafi snipers, watching the northern approach to the building making sure no one came or went.
"We've tried everything, but in the end, we will take the building with patience," Mohammed Ben-Hameda, one of the rebel sentries, said. "They are running low on food and ammo. They have been 17 days now without any supplies."
That night, the streets around the besieged building came under one of the most intensive artillery barrages yet. Countless cluster bomb shells pounded the neighborhood. Their unmistakable signature—poofs of smoke overhead followed seconds later by a series of small successive explosions that from a distance sounds like popcorn in the microwave—could be heard for blocks.
The shelling killed three fighters, but didn't break their siege.
On Thursday morning there was an eerie silence around the building. No more bursts of gun fire came from its upper floors. The rebels eyed it cautiously. Finally, that evening, they came out of hiding, and approached the building to find that Col. Gadhafi's fighters had used the cover provided by the shelling overnight to surrender the building. |
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狗仔卡
发表于 2011-4-23 10:12 AM
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发表于 2011-4-23 04:53 PM
