The maimed soldier being dragged through the mosque in Martyrs’ Square, Seaway, was screaming, not only because of the pain where his ankles had been blown away, but also from fear.
This was a member of Muammar Gadaffi’s 32nd Battalion and he had fallen into opposition hands. A group outside wanted to lynch him and they were hammering on the door.
A few minutes earlier, the soldier had been trying to kill these people. Now he was begging for his life.
He was about to be shown a compassion that his crack unit — the Khamis Brigade, led by Gadaffi’s son — had failed to show the citizens of Zawiya.
The mosque was in the middle of a battleground. Bullets pinged in a courtyard outside. Tank fire boomed behind the wall of a storeroom where we had hidden just inside. We were under attack from the wounded soldier’s comrades.
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A boy next to me started sobbing. He was 15, the same age as my son Nat. I held him. He was not the only one who thought he was going to die. We all did. Somehow his terror made me pull myself together.
A doctor remonstrated with the men who wanted to get their hands on the soldier. He asked me to show my face. “We have foreign journalists here and a woman,” he told them. It worked. Revenge could wait. They had to survive.
The doctor knelt down and started binding the soldier’s ankles. “We are humanitarians,” he said. “We will treat him. He will live.”
As the soldier’s wounds were tended, he explained that between 25 and 30 tanks from Tripoli had been involved in the attack.
“They told us you were all terrorists,” he said. “But you are decent people.”
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Three of us from Sky News had come to Zawiya — Martin Smith, a cameraman, Tim Miller, the deputy foreign editor, and me. We were trapped by fighting for 48 hours. It felt a lot longer.
What we witnessed was a massacre. The city was being strangled and its residents slaughtered. Unarmed protesters came under fire from tanks and machineguns. We saw ambulances targeted, medical staff fired at, children strafed and women shot in the head.
Bombs landed so close to the main hospital that nurses ran for cover and stacked beds against the windows.
The Gadaffi regime would like you to believe that this never happened. Throughout the shooting, shelling and heavy artillery fire that were clearly audible during my telephone calls to London, the Libyan authorities were denying it all. They claimed the city was filled with Al-Qaeda terrorists.
We saw the most horrible injuries as Gadaffi’s troops unleashed their weapons. The doctors who set up a makeshift clinic in the mosque had nothing but saline drips, bandages and painkillers. But the casualties who kept on coming had battlefield wounds: holes in heads, eyes, chests, arms, legs. The overwhelming majority were civilians.
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A man of about 60 was stretchered in with a gaping hole in his head. His brain was exposed but somehow he was still muttering “Allahu akbar” (“God is the greatest”) as the doctors tried to bandage his skull. He was not a fighter; he was not a soldier; he was not Al-Qaeda. He looked like somebody’s grandfather.
By the time the authorities cut the mobile phone network last weekend, fighter jets were flying low over the city and tanks were making repeated forays into the streets, shelling and firing on anything and everything.
But every time the tanks withdrew, the residents reclaimed the city square. To win here, the Gadaffi regime would have to crush the place — and that is what he has tried to do.
Zawiya, with 200,000 inhabitants, is Libya’s third-largest city. It normally exports 200,000 barrels of oil a day and it is only 30 miles from Tripoli. It is crucial to Gadaffi that he is seen to control it.
Most of those who opposed him here were not rebellious armed soldiers but civilians with few weapons and little knowhow.
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We were told that they had formed a 10-man military council with several high-ranking officers who had defected from Gadaffi’s forces. The officers had brought weapons with them, and anti-aircraft guns were positioned around the square as well as a number of tanks parked on corners.
Before dawn we heard tanks shelling houses on their way into the centre of the city. Sprays of tracer fire were lighting their way and the smoke was getting closer and closer.
At rebel HQ, young men were desperately trying to piece together the equipment. One was trying to show his friend how to use a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.
“Just put it on your shoulder like this,” he said. “Then kneel and fire.” The friend, who would not have looked out of place in a university bar, nodded and off he went to battle. This did not look like an army of trained soldiers. It looked like a city trying to defend itself with what little it had.
Several days after I left the city, a Sunday Times journalist, Miles Amoore, entered Zawiya to find that it had succumbed. Green flags, a symbol of Gadaffi loyalism, fluttered from gaping holes in the sides of buildings. The dome of the mosque that had housed the makeshift hospital had caved in. The top of the minaret had been blown off by artillery fire.
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While the world was debating whether to intervene, the people of Zawiya had tried to fight a military machine with far more firepower that was hellbent on crushing them. The bodies of 20 men who had died in doing so were buried in unmarked graves at the centre of Martyrs’ Square.
Alex Crawford is a Sky News special correspondent
Further reading:
‘We’ll never forgive the West for selling us short’
Time is up, Gadaffi Jr tells rebel capital
Andrew Sullivan: Leaving Libya to fight it out is brutal but smart