MUAMMAR GADAFY’S seat of power in Tripoli fell yesterday as rebel fighters swarmed into his fortified compound, stamping on a gilded bronze head of the deposed despot and setting fire to his famous tent in an end to his 42-year dictatorship.
The Libyan leader and his family were nowhere to be found. If they had spent the last days of their rule inside their walled citadel, Bab al-Aziziya, they had since left, possibly through the labyrinth of tunnels that lie beneath the compound.
With Gadafy’s fate unknown, nobody could say whether the bloodshed was over. In the streets beyond the compound, gunfire continued to ring out, although it was unclear whether it was a result of continued skirmishes or celebrations. There were also reports of sporadic looting as darkness fell.
Government strongholds remained in the coastal town of Sirte, Gadafy’s birthplace, and the southern desert city of Sabha, and there was no word last night on whether his supporters would carry on fighting.
But the fall of Gadafy’s fortress-like city within a city represented a symbolic moment of victory after a six-month civil war.
Khalifa Yusuf, a 27-year-old electronic engineer from the western town of Jadu, led a unit of 50 fighters into Gadafy’s compound yesterday as the rebels stormed the complex. He lost two close friends in the ensuing fighting.
Sitting in a hospital in his hometown last night, his face sprinkled with shrapnel wounds, Khalifa was triumphant. “The Bab Al-Azizia is the symbol of Gadafy, the man we have suffered under for more than 40 years,” he told The Irish Times.
“Now that we have Bab Al-Azizia, we have finally tasted victory.”
Earlier in the day, loyalist snipers and mortars had held the rebels at bay in the streets around Bab al- Aziziya. The rebels responded with artillery, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades. By the afternoon, bolstered by waves of opposition fighters who had streamed in from Libya’s western mountains and the rebel enclave of Misrata to the east, they began to move forward on Bab al-Aziziya.
They massed at the outer walls and blew the gates off, pouring into what had once been the regime’s inner sanctum on foot, in cars, even in requisitioned golf carts. Another two layers of fortifications were quickly breached and the rebels reached Gadafy’s residence, climbing on its statue of a fist clutching a US warplane, a symbol of his defiance after a US bombing raid in 1986.
A handful of rebels also tore the golden face off Gadafy’s statue, throwing it to the ground, prodding it with rifles and kicking it, while others climbed on to the roof of the building, little more than a shell after repeated Nato bombing sorties, and unfurled the red, black and green flag of pre-Gadafy Libya.
A few yards away, Gadafy’s trademark tent, where he would receive visiting dignitaries, burned.
Outside, a rebel guerrilla had donned one of Gadafy’s grey and gold ceremonial caps and draped a gold chain around his neck. “Libyans will shock the world,” he promised Sky News. “We want to start a new life, a new Libya.”
In the midst of the triumph, however, it soon became clear that the dictator had slipped away, as had his sons. The National Transitional Council appeared keen to avoid any further miscalculations. Members of the rebels’ Tripoli Brigade, made up of city residents and specially trained in Qatar, had been assigned to guard the national museum in Tripoli and other cultural sites. – (Guardian Service)