DENTAL STUDENT Radwan Suleiman was shot in the head yesterday morning. By evening the Libyan fighter was in a neck brace, had blood seeping from a bandage, and was looking for his unit to rejoin the battle for Sirte.
He had been fighting that morning with Misrata’s Halbus brigade, nicknamed the Black Brigade, the biggest of a plethora of anti-Gadafy units from the city, through the streets of Sirte, Muammar Gadafy’s birthplace.
Anti-Gadafy units captured the city on Thursday night, or thought they did, only to find loyalist forces still holding out yesterday morning in a city centre insurance building and along a string of beachfront villas.
Meanwhile, rocket and artillery fire began to land on the city from loyalist positions at Al-Gurdabia air base and amid the olive groves south of the city. So with the coastal highway that runs south of the city secure, anti-Gadafy tanks and artillery began to pound their foe.
Four weeks after anti-Gadafy forces entered the capital, Tripoli, and with David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy visiting the newly crowned National Transitional Council installed in the city, it astonishes even the anti-Gadafy fighters that loyalist forces continue to hold out.
“He is crazy, stupid,” said Suleiman, who had been due to graduate this year when war got in the way.
Sirte has become the final redoubt for Gadafy’s forces – and possibly, the rumours go, Gadafy himself – that many thought Tripoli would be.
This city is his birthplace and home to the Gadafy tribe, whom he has showered with largesse, jobs and free homes and cars for much of his 43-year rule.
They have returned the favour, say the attackers, by providing militiamen who refuse to cede this city, the last strategic target in Libya, from being captured by the pro-democracy forces.
And so Suleiman went in this morning. He remembers little, except that he was on foot, patrolling with others from Halbus, when something hammered into the side of his head.
“Sirte is a dangerous place,” he said in flawless English. “You don’t know who is with you and who is against you.” The city remains ringed by anti-Gadafy forces, with 900 pick-up trucks mounting guns jamming roads and providing a problem anti-Gadafy units have never previously encountered – traffic jams.
Fighting through the day, anti-Gadafy units said they had secured the city centre’s district one, where families originally from Misrata live; reports that they were being targeted by pro-Gadafy militias led to this offensive. “There’s a whole area, its called district one. All are Misrata families, they killed a lot of them,” he said.
By nightfall the airport had been captured and Halbus units were fighting outside Abu Habi, the hamlet where Gadafy was born, south of the city. And Suleiman, patched up with neck brace and bandage, was on the coastal highway with a great mass of anti-Gadafy traffic, determined to rejoin his unit and fight.
But did the wound not make him fear rejoining the war? He pointed to his hand, wounded in a car crash four days before, and shook his head. And smiled. “Sirte won’t be the end, there will be Beni Walid and Sabha (two Gadafy strongholds further south), but I won’t fight there.” So why fight at Sirte, 150 miles from his home town, Misrata. “Funny world, ha?” he says with a smile.
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Turkish prime minister Tayyip Erdogan told a cheering crowd in Tripoli’s Martyrs’ Squarethat by ousting Gadafy the Libyan people had set an example to others seeking to throw off oppression. Stepping up his rhetoric against Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, he said those in Syria who inflict repression on the people would not survive.