Amid the towering oil tanks of Ras Lanuf, the celebrations of a week earlier turned to rage and near-panic. Rebel fighters scattered as heavy shelling from government tanks was followed by huge explosions from missile strikes unleashed by high-flying warplanes.
Plumes of black smoke billowed over Libya’s biggest oil refinery. Only last weekend, jubilant Libyan rebels had fought off an attack here by forces loyal to Muammar Gadaffi and vowed to advance on Tripoli. Now they were in full, shambolic retreat.
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“Where’s the no-fly zone?” one fighter screamed hysterically, as his colleagues furiously emptied their truck-mounted anti-aircraft guns at a government plane that was safely out of range.
A few hundred yards away, a former lieutenant-colonel who had defected to rebel ranks shook his head in despair. “This is not an army,” he said. When a government rocket slammed into an unfinished mosque near the rebel-held port of Brega last week, fighters responded not by digging trenches or attempting to camouflage anti-aircraft guns, but by chanting: “God is greater than the bombs.”
On Friday morning, Libyan state television had broadcast triumphant images of pro-Gadaffi forces marching through Ras Lanuf. Later that day, the crumbling morale of dishevelled rebel units appeared close to collapse as groups of fighters inadvertently opened fire on each other.
As a line of vehicles headed east from Ras Lanuf towards opposition lines, someone — possibly a pro-Gadaffi spy — had shouted that the occupants were enemy troops disguised as rebels.
After three weeks of heady success in their improbable uprising against Gadaffi’s 41-year rule of iron, opposition forces were facing cruel military and political realities yesterday, which raised serious questions about the survival prospects of the Libyans’ would-be revolution.
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As Gadaffi’s supporters celebrated the recapture of the western Libyan city of Zawiya, and threatened to press further east towards the opposition stronghold of Benghazi, rebel leaders were paying a heavy price for a lack of military discipline and the reluctance of the international community to intervene in an increasingly murky and chaotic conflict.
Despite intensive lobbying from David Cameron and President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, the European Union last week turned its back on proposals for a no-fly zone that would prevent Gadaffi’s air force from bombing rebel lines.
A European Union summit on Friday was extended for two hours while Cameron and Sarkozy argued for tougher language in a statement of support for rebels; but other EU leaders, led by Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, strongly opposed any suggestion that they even endorse the notion of intervention, let alone participate in any action.
“I am fundamentally sceptical [about an intervention] and I have made no secret of that scepticism,” Merkel said later. “In my view, the calls for a no-fly zone are not reflecting the military necessities that would be connected to it.”
Another senior European official opposed to military intervention was scathing about Cameron and Sarkozy’s efforts. “Some leaders are now overcompensating for their initial failure to react to the situation properly,” the official complained. “Libya is a country four times the size of Germany and any military involvement would have serious consequences.”
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That view was widely shared in Washington, where President Barack Obama remained implacably opposed to American military intervention, despite mounting criticism by both conservatives and liberals that America is appearing weak by failing to intervene.
Tim Pawlenty, the former Minnesota governor and a prospective Republican presidential candidate, last week derided the White House’s “incoherent response” to Middle East upheaval, and added: “If you’re dealing with thugs and bullies, they understand strength. They don’t respect weakness.”
Marc Ginsberg, a former US ambassador to Morocco, also criticised what he described as the administration’s “empty words and meaningless gestures” and its “singular diplomatic inability to figure out a Libya strategy”.
“Even if Libya’s fate is not a core strategic interest warranting full-scale engagement, a compelling moral obligation to avoid tyranny and humanitarian catastrophe opens up a wide range of lesser, but perhaps equally effective policy options,” he said.
Others warned that America knew little about the Libyan opposition and had made the mistake in the past of helping to overthrow regimes, only to find that the new regime was worse.
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“The troubling truth Americans need to learn is that they know little or nothing about these [Arab] societies and even less about the monsters who might emerge after a civil war,” said Leslie Gelb, a former adviser to the Pentagon and the State Department.
Those words were echoed by Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, who is expected to meet rebel leaders in Cairo this week. “We are working overtime to figure out who are the people that are now claiming to be the opposition, because we know there are some with whom we want to be allied and others with whom we would not,” she said.
With the Pentagon opposed to any open-ended Libyan adventure at a time when the campaign in Afghanistan remains a punishing priority, America still appears unlikely to declare war on Gadaffi. The Arab League, whose leaders were meeting in Cairo yesterday, called on the United Nations security council to impose a no-fly zone over Libya. The African Union established an ad hoc committee “to engage with all parties in Libya”, but rejected any form of military intervention.
All of which has left Libya’s ragtag rebels looking ominously vulnerable as they struggle to regroup. As renewed airstrikes pounded Ras Lanuf yesterday, a rebel spokesman, Mohamed al-Moghrabe, insisted that his units had pulled back only a couple of miles from the outskirts of the town they once held.
His fighters vowed to retake the town “within days”, yet most rebel vehicles in the area were heading east yesterday — away from the fighting.
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Last week James Clapper, Obama’s national intelligence director, caused a stir when he warned a congressional committee that “over the longer term”, the superior firepower of Gadaffi forces “will prevail” over the opposition.
To which one rebel fighter, Anis Mabrouk, retorted last week: “We can’t prevail unless there’s a no-fly zone. Give us the cover and we’ll go all the way to Tripoli and kill [Gadaffi].”
Yesterday Gadaffi’s regime turned to a novel form of wartime propaganda by using the national mobile phone network to send text messages to all subscribers in the eastern cities of Ajdabiya and Benghazi.
Subscribers in Ajdabiya were told to “be happy because the day of liberation is near”. Residents of Benghazi were told to “prepare for happiness”.
One young rebel leader confessed miserably: “We simply cannot confront his air force.” Another complained: “What is the West waiting for — a massacre? — before they help?”
The exuberance of the early uprising was shifting to murkier emotions as some Libyans tried to cash in on the chaos and others were reduced to sober contemplation of the reprisals that may lie ahead should Gadaffi reassert his grip.
In one vehicle near Ras Lanuf last week I found three young men from the Warfala tribe — the largest in Libya — who said they had fled their home town of Bani Walid when pro-Gadaffi forces arrived.
They first headed west to the dictator’s hometown of Sirte, where they offered their services as fighters for the regime. They claimed to have been handed weapons and cash and were sent off to fight with pro-government forces in Ras Lanuf. Instead, they promptly surrendered to rebel forces and handed over their government-supplied weapons.
Yet that small rebel victory paled in the chaos of what may prove a pivotal defeat around the oil tanks of Ras Lanuf. Religious conviction and reckless enthusiasm are proving no match for ruthless counterattack. “If Gadaffi is allowed to return to Benghazi and quash the rebellion here like he did in Zawiya while the West watches and does nothing, the West will be responsible and we the Libyan people will never forgive them,” one fighter said.
Suddenly erupting in anger, he shouted: “We will make them pay the price for selling us short.” And he fired his gun uselessly into the sky.
Green-scarved gangs dispense terror in Tripoli
The pack of young men, wielding machetes and pocket knives, rushed at us, shouting pro-Gadaffi slogans, as we skirted the edge of a mosque. Displaying a frightening mixture of hatred and zeal, they demanded to know what we were doing in Tajura, a working-class part of Tripoli, writes Miles Amoore.
My companion, another journalist, was dragged down the street by a man with a Kalashnikov assault rifle slung over his shoulder. We had unwittingly walked into a group of plain-clothed Gadaffi loyalists as we tried to reach an opposition demonstration after Friday prayers.
Two weeks ago security forces opened fire on protesters near the same mosque, killing five people. But the men who swarmed around us were not police, soldiers or the armed militiamen who roam the streets in pickup trucks.
The youths who bundled us into the back of a car before handing us over to the secret police for questioning appeared to be ordinary civilians armed by the regime to disperse dissidents inside the capital.
Saif al-Islam Gadaffi, the Libyan leader’s son, said last week that the void left by the army as its soldiers left to fight the rebels in the east of the country had been filled by 4,000 volunteers. These were the men we saw brandishing machetes and knives.
Most checkpoints at night are manned by similar gangs of young men. Yet despite their presence, hundreds of worshippers gathered on Friday to chant protest slogans against the regime.
They said the secret police had beaten and arrested 200 people from Tajura over the past two weeks. “We don’t know where they were taken,” said one young man. “We cannot visit them. We have no contact with them. They will be executed, maybe hanged.”
The protesters alleged that the police had offered residents and taxi drivers money to spy on their neighbours.
Before the demonstration had a chance to gather steam, gangs of young men, with green scarves wrapped around their heads, began to chase the protesters down side alleys.
Residents in Tajura remain defiant. “They will not stop us,” said one protester. “We are all against Gadaffi here. We cannot give up now.”
Further reading:
Time is up, Gadaffi Jr tells rebel capital
A city strangled, its people slaughtered
Andrew Sullivan: Leaving Libya to fight it out is brutal but smart