Rebels Arm Tripoli Guerrillas and Cut Resources to Capital
Though the rebels consolidated their hold on most of the Nafusa mountains only about two weeks ago, officials from the opposition stronghold of Benghazi and the operatives from the underground network in Tripoli were all here on Friday night discussing strategies already under way. The mountain rebels showed a reporter an oil pipeline they had recently cut off to Colonel Qaddafi’s last working refinery, in Zawiya.
Now rebels have their sights on Gharyan, a city of about 85,000 that is the last Nafusa mountain town under Colonel Qaddafi’s control. It is widely known as a hotbed of opposition to Colonel Qaddafi and rose up swiftly at the start of the uprising, and if the rebels can take it within the next three weeks, as they hope to do, they will block a crucial supply route from Algeria and the south.
Meanwhile, the rebels say, they have been appealing with increasing success to the Tunisian government to choke off the supply of fuel coming through the Qaddafi-controlled coastal border crossing at Ras Jedir. “It is very painful for the people of Tripoli but unfortunately we need to do that,” said Anwar Fekini, a French-Libyan lawyer and rebel organizer who recently visited Tunis to help press the case, following a visit for the same purpose by the leader of the rebel’s National Transitional Council, Mustafa el-Jalil.
In an interview, a leader of the rebel underground visiting here in the mountains said that the rebels had been smuggling in a growing number of guns as well as C4 plastic explosives, while borrowing a tactic from their mountain allies by making their own crude (and often unsafe) handguns.
In addition to nightly attacks on Qaddafi checkpoints around the capital, he said, the rebels have been plotting more ambitious actions, including an aborted plan to assault the Rixos Hotel in the hope of capturing Colonel Qaddafi’s influential son, Saif al-Islam Qaddafi, who keeps a suite there. That plan was called off in part because of the risk it posed to foreign journalists, who are housed in the hotel.
Already, the rebels say, they are in contact with apolitical or disaffected officials in the Tripoli police force, the Interior Ministry and other government departments to make plans to secure the city in the days after a potential ouster of Colonel Qaddafi. “In every ministry of the government we have people who will be going to their offices in the days after Qaddafi falls, so the government will not collapse,” Mr. Fekini said.
Many of the intellectuals and professionals involved in leading the revolt, he said, were worried about the possibility of mobs seeking revenge on anyone implicated in the Qaddafi government — a prospect that he acknowledged may be helping to hold the Libyan leader’s loyalists together. “We don’t want revenge, but it is the problem of popular justice,” he said.
It is unclear what resources Colonel Qaddafi still commands. He is believed to have started the conflict with billions of dollars in foreign currency stashed away. But the rebels say they are counting on his inability to replenish his coffers because of international sanctions and asset freezes, and in interviews last week Tripoli residents said the strains on his resources were already beginning to show.
Gas lines stretch for miles and drivers wait as long as two weeks to fill their tanks. (Bicycles, previously rare in hot Tripoli summers, are now everywhere). Food prices have soared, with the prices of staples like a can of sardines increasing as much as tenfold, some residents said. To preserve cash, residents said, his government has recently restricted the amount any individual can withdraw from the bank — including cashing a paycheck — to the equivalent of about $800 a month.
At the moment, several Tripoli residents said, the shortages, like the fear of revenge, may also be strengthening Colonel Qaddafi’s hold on the city, in this case by giving him scarce commodities to dole out to loyalists. One Tripoli religious leader said last week that conversations with his congregation have convinced him that virtually every car with enough gas to drive on the streets belongs to a Qaddafi informant or member of the secret police.
But it is an article of faith among the opposition that only money binds most of Qaddafi’s loyalists, and the Tripoli underground leader said his organization expected the colonel’s extensive network of informants to fray as his supplies ran out.The leader, a successful Tripoli businessman who would not give his name for safety reasons, said he had been living on the run, moving from house to house in the city since the early days of the uprising.
After a relative abroad appeared on an Arabic-language news network criticizing Colonel Qaddafi, he said, two pickup trucks carrying eight Qaddafi soldiers arrived at his house looking for him while he was inside. A family guard told the police that he had moved away years ago and, bluffing, invited them to look inside. They fell for it and drove away, the underground leader said, and he has not returned since.
An underground steering committee was formed at a large meeting in Tripoli in mid-March, about 20 days after the uprising began, he said, but has met in smaller cells ever since. It is divided into a civilian branch of lawyers, doctors and intellectuals planning for a transition, and a military branch attempting to wage a guerrilla fight against the Qaddafi security forces. Underground organizers say they rely on fake identification and change cellphones constantly to avoid identification.
Although the rebels in the city remain starved for weapons, he and other underground organizers in the mountains said, their allies in other parts of the country are smuggling in more and more. Asked about a Qaddafi soldier’s recent statement to a reporter that he feared for his life because of rebel guerrilla attacks, the underground leader said, “Every night there is a death.”
He declined to say whether the rebels had their eyes on any other major targets, like the Rixos Hotel, or to comment on reports that rebels had killed a guard outside the hotel. But he predicted that as Colonel Qaddafi ran out of money Tripoli would rise up, as it did during the first uprising in February. “A few thousand men with guns can’t control two million people,” he said.
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