Libyan Forces Rout Rebels as West’s Effort for No-Flight Zone Stalls
Goran Tomasevic/Reuters
Rebel fighters and civilians fled Ajdabiyah, Libya, on Tuesday. More Photos »
By ANTHONY SHADID
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Goran Tomasevic/Reuters
Libyan rebel fighters fired anti-aircraft guns as they fled from Ajdabiyah to Benghazi on Tuesday under attack from heavy artillery and airstrikes from forces loyal to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. More Photos »
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Blasts of incoming fire came every few seconds at the edge of this city straddling a strategic highway intersection, where rebels have bulldozed berms and filled hundreds of sandbags around two metal green arches marking the western approaches to the city.
As the shelling intensified Tuesday, hundreds of cars packed with children, mattresses, suitcases — anything that could be grabbed and packed in — careened through the streets as residents fled. Long lines of cars could be seen on the highway heading north to Benghazi, about 100 miles away.
In Benghazi itself, though, there were no signs of preparations for a vigorous defense, and there were reports on Tuesday night that rebels may have retaken parts of Ajdabiya. Witnesses said that by evening rebel fighters seemed to be patrolling the streets, and there was speculation that loyalist soldiers may have withdrawn to the perimeter after overrunning the city, a pattern they have followed in previous battles.
Amid the conflicting reports on Tuesday night, gunfire — apparently celebratory — could be heard throughout Benghazi, where tracer bullets lit up the sky.
The barrage here offered a loud and ferocious counterpoint to stalled efforts by Western diplomats to agree on help for the retreating rebels, like a no-flight zone, even as Colonel Qaddafi warned the insurgents on Tuesday that they had only two choices: surrender or flee. With the advances made by loyalists, there is growing consensus in the Obama administration that imposing a no-flight zone over Libya would no longer make much of a difference, a senior official said. Just moving the ships and planes into place to impose an effective no-flight zone, the official said, would take until April, too late to help rebels hunkered down in Benghazi.
While administration officials said the United States would not obstruct efforts by other countries to build support for a no-flight zone in the United Nations, President Obama met with his National Security Council on Tuesday to consider a variety of other options to respond to the deteriorating situation.
Among those options are jamming Libyan government radio signals and financing the rebel forces with $32 billion in Libyan government and Qaddafi family funds frozen by the United States. That money could be used either for weapons or relief. The meeting broke without a decision, the official said.
“This is another indication of the constant exploration of different options that we have to increase the pressure on the Qaddafi regime as we go forward,” the White House press secretary, Jay Carney, said Tuesday.
But in fact, the administration’s options have narrowed with the dwindling viability of a no-flight zone. The White House is considering more aggressive airstrikes, which would make targets of Colonel Qaddafi’s tanks and heavy artillery — an option sometimes referred to as a “no-drive zone.” The United States or its allies could also send military personnel to advise and train the rebels, an official said.
But given the lack of consensus behind a no-flight zone, these options are viewed as even less likely. It is also not clear that airstrikes would be more effective than a no-flight zone.
“Most of these weapons are no longer stored in ammunition depots; most of them have been dispersed into towns and cities,” said James M. Lindsay, the director of studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Singling out these weapons individually, he said, greatly increases the chances of civilian casualties.
Moreover, senior officials, notably the national security adviser, Thomas E. Donilon, have made it clear that the United States does not view Libya as a vital strategic interest.
For the rebels, the battle was strategically critical, because Ajdabiya controls access to the highways that would permit loyalist forces to encircle and besiege Benghazi in a campaign for cities whose names evoke the World War II battles of Rommel and Montgomery.
Yet, after swearing in recent days to make a last ditch, do-or-die stand here, the rebels offered little resistance. Within an hour of the opening salvos, they began falling back from the city’s approaches as the shelling came closer to their positions.
Some still spoke valiantly about drawing a line in the desert sand, but the superior firepower and numbers of the loyalist troops suggested otherwise. The crash of heavy ordnance almost drowned out the cries of a muezzin from the minaret at a mosque on the frontline: “God is great and to God, praise.”
A billboard from the days before the uprising began in mid-February proclaimed: “Ajdabiya — land of jihad and sacrifice.” By midafternoon, the slogan had taken on an ominous new meaning.
“I swear to God I am expecting a battle in the streets. Qaddafi has already shelled us with artillery and planes, and I suspect the army is coming,” said Mohammed Abdullah, a 50-year-old resident among a group of people peering at the sky as a loyalist spotter plane circled the city, illustrating how little restraint the loyalist forces feel about deploying their unchallenged air power as diplomacy falters.
By day’s end, however, the loyalist army seemed to be in complete control, its tanks standing outside the gates and its soldiers moving through the town at will during the day. After nightfall they seemed to withdraw, and rebels reappeared to claim control that seemed tenuous.
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In what might have been a lone break in the dark clouds gathering around the rebels, an opposition Web site reported that a 1970s-era MIG-23 fighter plane and a helicopter from the rebel forces hit at least one government warship as it bombarded Ajdabiya from the sea, Reuters and other news agencies reported. The accounts could not be independently confirmed.
The grim news from Ajdabiya was met with anger, anguish and tears by rebel leaders in Benghazi. On Tuesday afternoon, many of them privately acknowledged that an attack on the seat of rebel power was inevitable, if not imminent, and they again pleaded for Western intervention.
Iman Bugaighis, a professor who has become a spokeswoman for the rebels, lost her composure as she spoke about the recent death of a friend’s son, who died in battle last week. Her friend’s other son, a doctor, was still missing. Western nations, she said, had “lost any credibility.”
“I am not crying out of weakness,” she said. “I’ll stay here until the end. Libyans are brave. We will stand for what we believe in. But we will never forget the people who stood with us and the people who betrayed us.”
There were mixed signals about the prospects of Western military help. After a meeting of the Group of 8 foreign ministers in Paris, the French foreign minister, Alain Juppé, said he had been unable to secure agreement on the imposition of a no-flight zone. “If we had used military force last week to neutralize a certain number of airfields and the dozens of airplanes” available to Colonel Qaddafi, “perhaps the reversals suffered by the opposition would not have happened,” he said. “But that is the past.”
The United Nations Security Council was discussing a resolution that would authorize a no-flight zone to protect civilians, but its prospects were uncertain at best, diplomats said. In Cairo, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said the United States stood ready to help, though she did not mention a no-flight zone.
“We understand the urgency of this,” she said at a news conference in Cairo, where she is visiting before heading on to Tunisia. “And therefore we are upping our humanitarian assistance. We are looking for ways to support the opposition.”
In an interview with the Italian newspaper Il Giornale, published on Tuesday, Colonel Qaddafi expressed disappointment with his onetime European partners — particularly Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy, formerly his closest Western ally — and again depicted his adversaries in Libya as terrorists steered by Al Qaeda.
Asked if he was prepared to open a dialogue with them, he replied: “Dialogue with whom? The people are on my side.”
As for the rebels, regrouping toward their eastern stronghold in Benghazi as loyalist troops claimed advances, Colonel Qaddafi said: “They have no hope. Their cause is lost. There are only possibilities: to surrender or run away.”
