Libyan Civil War Megathread

[derspiess]

We're backing the pot heads?

I guess if they're smoking hash they're less likely to be al Qaeda.  Though, didn't Gadafi claim al Qaeda was supplying drugz to the the rebels, or something along those lines?

[Savonarola]

BENGHAZI, Libya — Late Monday afternoon, as Libyan rebels prepared another desperate attack on the eastern oil town of Brega, a young rebel raised his rocket-propelled grenade as if to fire. The town's university, shimmering in the distance, was far beyond his weapon's maximum range. An older rebel urged him to hold fire, telling him the weapon's back-blast could do little more than reveal their position and draw a mortar attack.
The outburst midfight — and the ensuing argument between a determined young man who seemed to have almost no understanding of modern war and an older man who wisely counseled caution — underscored a fact that is self-evident almost everywhere on Libya's eastern front. The rebel military, as it sometimes called, is not really a military at all.

What is visible in battle here is less an organized force than the martial manifestation of a popular uprising.

With throaty cries and weapons they have looted and scrounged, the rebels gather along Libya's main coastal highway each day, ready to fight. Many of them are brave, even extraordinarily so. Some of them are selfless, swept along by a sense of common purpose and brotherhood that accompanies their revolution.

"Freedom!" they shout, as they pair a yearning to unseat Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi with appeals for divine help. "God is great!"

But by almost all measures by which a military might be assessed, they are a hapless bunch. They have almost no communication equipment. There is no visible officer or noncommissioned officer corps. Their weapons are a mishmash of hastily acquired arms, which few of them know how to use.

With only weeks of fighting experience, they lack an understanding of the fundamentals of offensive and defensive combat, or how to organize fire support. They fire recklessly and sometimes accidentally. Most of them have yet to learn how to hold seized ground, or to protect themselves from their battlefield's persistent rocket and mortar fire, which might be done by simply digging in.

Prone to panic, they often answer to little more than their mood, which changes in a flash. When their morale spikes upward, their attacks tend to be painfully and bloodily frontal — little more than racing columns down the highway, through a gantlet of the Qaddafi forces' rocket and mortar fire, face forward into the loyalists' machine guns.

And their numbers are small. Officials in the rebels' transitional government have provided many different figures, sometimes saying 10,000 or men are under arms in their ranks.

But a small fraction actually appear at the front each day — often only a few hundred. And some of the men appear without guns, or with aged guns that have no magazines or ammunition.

For the nations that have supported the uprising, the state of the rebels' armed wing — known as the Forces of Free Libya — raises many questions. It seems unlikely that such a force can carry the war westward, through dug-in Qaddafi units toward the stronghold of Surt, much less beyond, toward Tripoli, the Libyan capital. And a sustained war of attrition could quickly bleed their ranks dry.

Unlike many antigovernment militias in other countries, the rebel-armed column has not had the benefit of years of guerrilla fighting, which could have winnowed and seasoned its leaders and given them a skeletal field structure to build on.

Instead, Libya's rebels have entered the grim work of waging war almost spontaneously, and would need time, training, equipment and leadership to develop into even a reasonably competent force.

For now, their ranks have three elements: a so-called "special forces" detachment of former soldiers and police officers; a main column organized into self-led cells of fighters built around a few weapons and pickup trucks; and a sort of home guard that is undergoing quick training to man checkpoints and serve as a civil defense force.
There is also the "shabab," milling groups of youngsters who arrive at the front each day hoping to pitch in, but with scant idea of how. Officially, the shabab are not part of the fight.

The rebels insist the size of the special forces detachment is large, but on the battlefield it feels anything but. Colonel Ahmed Bani, the military's top spokesman, suggested that some of these soldiers are being held back for now.

"Our army, the professionals, are still waiting for armaments," he said. "Only some of them are at the front lines supporting the young men."

The largest visible body of rebels each day consists of groups of self-led fighters in cars and pickup trucks, who move up and down the highway to Brega, where the Qaddafi forces have plugged the road to Tripoli and taken custody of essential oil infrastructure — a key to the economic fortune of any Libyan government.

These men are a Libyan melting pot, a cross-section of professions and backgrounds. Businessmen and engineers fight beside students and laborers.

A few are Libyans from abroad who hurried home in February or March, answering an urge to topple Qaddafi and remake Libya on less autocratic lines.

They lack structure and they know it. Each contingent fights largely according to its own whim. Sometimes no one knows who is in charge.

"We are without command," said Ibrahim Mohammed, 32, who said he had served as a sergeant in the Libyan army. "Too many without command. And this is the problem."

His fighting cell consisted of six men, two pickup trucks, a rebel flag, a heavy machine gun, a few Kalashnikov rifles, a Lee-Enfield bolt-action rifle and a surface-to-air missile. The six men — excepting two who are related — had not known each other before the uprising began.

Now they lived in the desert, roaming a single road, dodging mortar and rocket fire. Their truck beds contained blankets, a tarp, ammunition, bottled water and ammunition crates packed with fresh vegetables and canned food.

The third group is made up of more recent volunteers, who turn up each morning for training at a military base at the edge of Benghazi.

Mindful that the rebels lack weapons and trainers, and that sending them into battle against Colonel Qaddafi's conventional military will get too many of them killed, the rebels' military leadership is training them for the more limited duties of civil defense.

On two recent mornings, slightly more than 600 volunteers showed up at the base for a half-day of training. They looked to be from 18 to 60 years old.

They briefly marched and jogged on a parade ground. (On the first morning, one of them fainted within 10 minutes.) After this warm-up, the volunteers attended open-air classes on various weapons — the assault rifle, the heavy machine gun, the 82-millimeter mortar.

But the classes contained little more than the nomenclature of each weapon's parts, a discussion of each weapon's basic characteristics, and demonstrations of how to assemble and disassemble the weapons, and to clean them.

Tellingly, only the instructors had weapons.

Marey el-Bejou, an Airbus pilot serving as a spokesman for the training camp, said the indoctrination course would last a week. He had no illusions about whether it might produce a real military. He noted that the troops were unpaid and their training was marginal. The military had no barracks, no blankets, no uniforms and, in the eyes of many who showed up, little time.

"Can I be clear?" Mr. Bejou asked. "We are not organized. We do not have weapons, other than anti-aircraft machine guns. If Qaddafi wanted to be here, he could be here in four hours."

Out on the battle lines near Brega in the afternoon, where spirits were high but fighting skills and ammunition were in short supply, the rebels were engaged in a contest for which they were clearly unprepared. One of their most fearsome weapons said much. It consisted of Grad rocket-launcher tubes, jury-rigged into pods of four. Each was then welded to heavy machine-gun mounts welded or bolted to the bed of a pickup truck. Car batteries provided the power to launch each barrage. The firing switch was a box holding four doorbells, one for each rocket.

As monuments to the rebels' resourcefulness and determination, these homemade launchers were impressive. As instruments of war, they were not.

To use them against the Qaddafi forces, the rebels sped forward with loaded tubes, stopped along the highway, and fired the rockets toward Brega.

Each of the rockets, slightly more than nine feet long, climbed into the air with tremendous whooshes and long plumes of smoke. They accelerated out of sight.

No one knew for sure where they might land, and firing them this way exposed the rebels to charges that they are waging indiscriminate war.

"God is great!" the rebels cheered. Then they pulled back quickly, before the Qaddafi forces fired back, and the highway was pounded with incoming fire, another of the daily exchanges of fire in a ground war bogged down.

Somewhere in the rebel troops there's an idealistic young British expatriate gathering notes that will become "Homage to Cyrenaica."

[jimmy olsen]

Yeah...lets no do that.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42468330/ns/world_news-mideastn_africa/

AJDABIYAH, Libya  — The U.S. may consider sending troops into Libya with a possible international ground force that could aid the rebels, the former U.S. commander of the military mission said Thursday, describing the ongoing operation as a stalemate that is more likely to go on now that America has handed control to NATO.

But Army Gen. Carter Ham also told lawmakers that American participation in a ground force would not be ideal, since it could erode the international coalition attacking Moammar Gadhafi's forces and make it more difficult to get Arab support for operations in Libya.

He said NATO has done an effective job in an increasingly complex combat situation. But he noted that, in a new tactic, Gadhafi's forces are making airstrikes more difficult by staging their fighters and vehicles near civilian areas such as schools and mosques.

The use of an international ground force is a possible plan to bolster the Libyan rebels, Ham said at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing.

Asked whether the U.S. would provide troops, Ham said, "I suspect there might be some consideration of that. My personal view at this point would be that that's probably not the ideal circumstance, again for the regional reaction that having American boots on the ground would entail."

President Barack Obama has said repeatedly there will be no U.S. troops on the ground in Libya, although there are reports of small CIA teams in the country.

Pressed by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., about the situation in Libya, Ham agreed that a stalemate "is now more likely" since NATO took command.

Ham also disclosed that the U.S. is providing some strike aircraft to the NATO operation that do not need to go through the special approval process recently established. The powerful side-firing AC-130 gunship is available to NATO commanders, he said.

His answer countered earlier claims by the Pentagon that all strike aircraft must be requested through U.S. European Command and approved by top U.S. leaders, including Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

Ham said that process still applies to other fighters and the A-10 Thunderbolt, which can provide close air support for ground forces, He said that process is quick, and other defense officials have said it can take about a day for the U.S. to approve the request and move the aircraft in from bases in Europe.

Overall, he said the U.S. is providing less than 15 percent of the airstrikes and between 60 percent and 70 percent of the support effort, which includes intelligence gathering, surveillance, electronic warfare and refueling.

Recent bad weather and threats from Gadhafi's mobile surface-to-air missile systems have hampered efforts to use the AC-130 and A-10 aircraft for close air support for friendly ground forces. Ham said those conditions, which include as many as 20,000 shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles, contributed to the stalemate.

Ham said he believes some Arab nations are starting to provide training or weapons to the rebels. And he repeated assertions that the U.S. needs to know more about the opposition forces before it would get more deeply involved in assisting them.

Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, complained that the lack of knowledge about the rebels is a U.S. intelligence failure.

"It strikes me as unusual and maybe something that Congress needs to look at further, that our intelligence capabilities are so limited that we don't even know the composition of the opposition force in Libya, " Cornyn said.

Ham said it was important for the U.S. to turn control over to NATO because many of the troops involved in the Libya strikes are preparing to go to Iran or Afghanistan or have just recently returned from the warfront.

"While we can certainly surge to meet operational needs," Ham said, "there is a longer-term effect if greater numbers of U.S. forces had been committed for a longer period of time in Libya and it would have had downstream operational effects in other missions."

Separately, State Department spokesman Mark Toner said U.S. envoy Chris Stevens' talks continue with the Libyan opposition in Benghazi.

"He is going to stay there for several more days at least," Toner said. "He is working with the opposition members to try to get a good sense of what kind of practical assistance we can provide them, what are their needs and how we can help then moving forward. There is a sense of urgency here."

He said Stevens is also getting a better assessment of who the rebels are.

The Armed Services Committee's chairman, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., said he remains concerned about increasing activity by al-Qaida-linked militants in Africa, and said the military must make sure the terror group does not "take advantage of the fog of war in Libya."

Ham said al-Qaida extremists have said they intend to partner with the Libyan rebels, which increases worries about arming the opposition.

Friendly fire?
Wounded rebels being brought to a hospital in Ajdabiyah in rebel-held east Libya said they were hit by a NATO strike on their trucks and tanks outside the contested port of Brega.

NATO said it was investigating an attack by its aircraft on a tank column in the area on Thursday.

Medical workers carried blood-soaked uniforms from hospital rooms in Ajdabiyah, gateway to the insurgent stronghold of Benghazi in the east, after wounded fighters were ferried back from Brega.

"It was a NATO air strike on us. We were near our vehicles near Brega," wounded fighter Younes Jumaa said from a stretcher at the hospital.

Nurse Mohamed Ali said at least five rebels were dead.

Rebel fighters were weeping on their knees in the corridor.

"NATO are liars. They are siding with Gadhafi," said Salem Mislat, one of the rebels.

NBC News reported that the strike occurred about six miles from Brega. A bus was among the vehicles hit, according to witnesses.

A NATO spokesman told NBC News that officials were "aware of media reports regarding events on the ground in Libya but we have not been able to confirm anything."

It was the second time in less than a week that rebels had blamed NATO for bombing their comrades by mistake. Thirteen were killed in an air strike not far from the same spot on Saturday.
Miseries abound for besieged Libyans

A doctor who had been at the front among rebel ambulance crews said they were hit by a government rocket attack immediately after the air strike. One medical worker was killed.

The rebels have been fighting to seize control of Brega from forces loyal to Gadhafi for a week in a see-saw battle along the Mediterranean coast.

Rebel spokesmen told Reuters Gadhafi forces killed five people and wounded 25 in an artillery bombardment of the isolated and besieged western city of Misrata on Wednesday.

The barrage forced the temporary closure of Misrata's port, a vital lifeline for supplies to besieged civilians, the spokesmen said. They added that NATO air strikes hit pro-Gadhafi positions around Misrata.

Misrata, Libya's third city, rose up with other towns against Gadhafi in mid-February and has been under siege for weeks, after a violent crackdown put an end to most protests elsewhere in the west of the country.

A rebel spokesman told Reuters people in Misrata were crammed five families to a house in the few safe districts to escape a rain of mortar shells from Gadhafi forces which have subjected them to weeks of sniper and artillery fire.

Peace plan
Turkey's prime minister on Thursday proposed a roadmap for peace, urging forces aligned with Gadhafi to withdraw from besieged cities, the establishment of humanitarian aid corridors and comprehensive democratic change.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the measures would be discussed at a meeting by a group set up to guide the international intervention in Libya in Qatar next week.

Erdogan also assured the Libyan opposition that Turkey supports their demands, following recent protests in Libya against Turkey by some opposition members.

Turkey initially balked at the idea of military action in Libya, but is now taking part in the enforcement of a no-fly zone to shield civilians and has volunteered to lead humanitarian aid efforts.

Britain's Foreign Office said the contact group that will meet in Qatar, which includes European powers, the U.S., allies from the Middle East and a number of international organizations will meet in Doha on Wednesday.

The ministry could not confirm precisely who has been invited to attend. British government officials said the U.S. would be represented, and that the Arab League is also expected to be at the talks.

British Foreign Secretary William Hague said last week that he planned to travel to the talks alongside about a dozen other Arab, European and international officials.

The group was established during a summit in London last week to act as the political guide to the NATO-led military operation and humanitarian assistance mission in Libya.

Hague told Britain's Parliament last week that the panel would "maintain international unity and bring together a wide range of nations in support of a better future for Libya."

Gadhafi has been widely excluded from international efforts to broker a peace plan, with rebels insisting that his four-decade rule must end.

In Scotland, prosecutors confirmed that they would not have a chance Thursday to interview Moussa Koussa, the ex-Libyan foreign minister who fled to Britain via Tunisia last week and has spent eight days in discussions with diplomats and intelligence officials.

Prosecutors said on Monday they hoped to speak with Koussa within days over the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over the Scottish town of Lockerbie, which killed 270 people — mostly Americans.

In 2003, Libya acknowledged responsibility for the bombing and Scottish authorities believe Koussa could offer vital information to their ongoing inquiry.

Another former Gadhafi loyalist, Libya's ex-energy minister Omar Fathi bin Shatwan, has also held talks with British and other European diplomats to discuss the state of Gadhafi's regime. He told The Associated Press on Wednesday that he had fled to Malta on a fishing vessel.

Oil production plunges
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon expressed concern about deteriorating conditions for civilians in Misrata and Zintan in the west, and Brega in the east.

He said the situation in Misrata was particularly grave and called for an end to attacks on civilians.

The civil war has cut Libyan oil output by 80 percent, a senior government official said on Thursday, as rebels and Gadhafi's forces traded charges over who had attacked oil fields vital to both sides.

Rebels say government attacks on three different installations in the east have halted production of the oil they need to finance the eight-week-old uprising against Gadhafi.

The government's Deputy Foreign Minister Khaled Kaim told reporters the British air force had damaged an oil pipeline in a strike against the Sarir oilfield which killed three guards.

NATO denied the alliance carried out any air strikes in the Sarir area and said forces loyal to Gadhafi were responsible for an attack which started a fire in the oilfield. It said Gadhafi was trying to disrupt oil supplies to the rebel-held port of Tobruk.

Shokri Ghanem, chairman of the government National Oil Corporation, told Reuters on Thursday the country's production had fallen to 250,000 to 300,000 barrels per day compared with 1.6 million before the uprising.

He called a reported shipment of Libyan oil by the rebels "very sad" and said it would only contribute to tension and divide the country.

The Liberian-registered tanker Equator sailed from the port of Marsa el-Hariga, near Tobruk, on Wednesday, apparently with the first cargo of crude sold by rebels since their uprising began in February. Oil traders said the cargo, vital to fund the uprising, was headed for China.

Frozen assets
There was confusion on Thursday about the fighting near Brega, but one rebel fighter said government rockets had hit the town's western boundary.

Al Jazeera television said Gadhafi's forces were advancing on the town from the coast and the desert and rebels were trying to reinforce its western approaches. This could not immediately be confirmed.

Other insurgents said a 130-strong rebel force was about 25 km (15 miles) east of Brega, which has been fought over for a week with neither side able to make major gains.

A senior U.S. Treasury official said Washington had frozen more than $34 billion of Libyan assets as part of sanctions against Gadhafi and his top officials. European governments had also frozen a substantial amount he said.

Gadhafi appealed for a halt in the air campaign in a rambling three-page letter to U.S. President Barack Obama bluntly dismissed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Wednesday.

"Mr. Gadhafi knows what he must do," Clinton told a news conference with Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini, reiterating calls for a ceasefire, the withdrawal of his forces from cities they have stormed and his departure from Libya.

Civil war in the vast North African desert oil producer ignited in February when Gadhafi tried to crush pro-democracy rallies against his 41-year-old rule inspired by uprisings that have toppled or endangered other rulers across the Arab world.

A senior aid worker said on Thursday desperate refugees from North Africa had dragged each other under water and drowned when an overloaded migrant boat sank off Sicily. Up to 250 people wre still missing from the capsized boat, which was said to have left Libya on Monday.

Reuters, NBC News' Stephanie Gosk and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

[Siege]

The readiness level of that tank crew is amazing.

[sbr]

[Mr.Penguin]

Interesting video of a British Tornado fighter bomber taking out a rebel Tank...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/libya/libya-video/8437848/Tank-destroyed-by-Nato-warplane-in-Libya.html

[Slargos]

So the west is shelling out huge amount of money on this operation, and if it was not for this fact Qudafi would've killed probably a thousand times more people than were whacked in this incident, but no let's focus on the fact that you were "betrayed" by NATO you piddly fucking ingrates.

We're bombing the wrong people.

[Admiral Yi]

sbr's thing is amusing.

And lookey lookey, I didn't even have to quote his pictures.

[The Brain]

[Slargos]

[Viking]

We're backing the pot heads?

The are taking Bill Maher's advice, making their country a place where it is a good thing to get stoned.

[Zanza2]

Germany and Libya

Return of the Afrika (aid) Korps?

Apr 8th 2011, 23:31 by The Economist|BRUSSELS

GERMANY has a complicated relationship with military force, for reasons that are more than understandable. But what is one to make of its contortions over the intervention in Libya?

One moment Germany is Europe's most awkward critic of the air campaign to save Benghazi; the next it is first to put up its hand to volunteer forces, including the despatch of ground troops if necessary, to deliver humanitarian aid to Misrata.

So are we about to see the return of German troops to North Africa for the first time since the defeat of Erwin Rommel's Afrikakorps in the second world war? Maybe.

[...]

It would be a cruel irony if Germany, in its attempt to restore its battered credibility among its allies, were to expose its forces to greater danger on the ground in Misrata than if it had taken part in the air or maritime operations to begin with.

Our government is even more retarded than I thought.

[Razgovory]

Read this article in the doctor's office.

http://www.newsweek.com/2011/04/03/nicolas-sarkozy-s-war-on-gaddafi-influenced-by-philosopher-bernard-henri-levy.html


Apparently, we are war with Libya because Qaddafi embarrassed poor little Sarkozy.  We're lucky we aren't at war with Britain.

[Duque de Bragança]

Germany and Libya

Return of the Afrika (aid) Korps?

Apr 8th 2011, 23:31 by The Economist|BRUSSELS

GERMANY has a complicated relationship with military force, for reasons that are more than understandable. But what is one to make of its contortions over the intervention in Libya?

One moment Germany is Europe's most awkward critic of the air campaign to save Benghazi; the next it is first to put up its hand to volunteer forces, including the despatch of ground troops if necessary, to deliver humanitarian aid to Misrata.

So are we about to see the return of German troops to North Africa for the first time since the defeat of Erwin Rommel's Afrikakorps in the second world war? Maybe.

[...]

It would be a cruel irony if Germany, in its attempt to restore its battered credibility among its allies, were to expose its forces to greater danger on the ground in Misrata than if it had taken part in the air or maritime operations to begin with.

Our government is even more retarded than I thought.

Don't be so hard on yourselves. You go there without Italians this time

[CountDeMoney]

Germany and Libya

Return of the Afrika (aid) Korps?

Apr 8th 2011, 23:31 by The Economist|BRUSSELS

GERMANY has a complicated relationship with military force, for reasons that are more than understandable. But what is one to make of its contortions over the intervention in Libya?

One moment Germany is Europe's most awkward critic of the air campaign to save Benghazi; the next it is first to put up its hand to volunteer forces, including the despatch of ground troops if necessary, to deliver humanitarian aid to Misrata.

So are we about to see the return of German troops to North Africa for the first time since the defeat of Erwin Rommel's Afrikakorps in the second world war? Maybe.

[...]

It would be a cruel irony if Germany, in its attempt to restore its battered credibility among its allies, were to expose its forces to greater danger on the ground in Misrata than if it had taken part in the air or maritime operations to begin with.

Our government is even more retarded than I thought.

Every Kraut I known loved to remind me that Germans invented Accounting, but they never seemed to mention how much its been involved in the historical development of Psychiatry.