Libya Feature: Rockets, Snipers, and Resistance in Misurata (Chivers)

Photo: Filippo Monteforte (AFP/Getty)C.J. Chivers writes for The New York Times:

Muftah Militan, a rebel with his wounded right arm in a sling and a two-way radio in his left hand, peered from a rooftop at a low-slung skyline. Occasional gunfire chattered below.

To the right, several blocks away, the bright green flag of the government of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi fluttered above a building that had been cracked and scarred by fighting. This was a headquarters of the pro-Qaddafi forces besieging this city.

To the left, another tall building, also pockmarked by fire, rose above the neighborhood. “Snipers are there,” Mr. Militan said, unwilling to venture into the open.

Between these buildings runs a long and shattered stretch of Tripoli Street, formerly one of Misurata’s main thoroughfares, now one of its main battlegrounds. The street and the adjacent blocks are a ribbon-shaped wasteland of scattered debris, shattered facades and bloodstains.

Barricades block the way, aided by the husks of charred cars and trucks. Rubble and broken glass crunch underfoot. Along this urban stretch of boulevard, in building after building, Misurata’s rebels hide in clusters, waiting for the next fight.

Misurata is nearly severed from the world, a densely inhabited city where anti-Qaddafi rebels have been all but surrounded by Colonel Qaddafi’s conventional troops. They face front lines to their south, east and west. The Mediterranean Sea is at their back.

They endure regular barrages from high-explosive munitions and shortages of equipment and ammunition. But kept alive by tenuous resupply into the port they barely hold, the rebels have created a maze of fighting positions and tank obstacles. They have managed for almost two months to prevent their city from being overrun.

On Tripoli Street, and elsewhere in Misurata, some of the reasons were visible.

In eastern Libya, the Forces of Free Libya, as the rebels call themselves, have been woefully unprepared for warfare along the highways and open desert, where the pro-Qaddafi’s forces have advantages in organization, training, numbers and firepower.

But on the streets of Misurata, the Qaddafi forces’ upper hand has been at least partly negated by advantages realized by local men fighting in the neighborhoods where they have lived their lives.

Where Tripoli Street runs through the neighborhood of Beera, for example, the men have hidden themselves in concrete buildings against the shelling and formed a defense-in-depth, with knots of fighters in the street’s storefronts supported by others many blocks back.

The rebels move back and forth on familiar streets, disappearing quickly into buildings and reappearing in courtyards, possessing an intimate knowledge of their own terrain.

They have so few weapons that many men on the front at any given moment are unarmed, and share weapons in shifts or stand ready to take up the rifle of a comrade who falls. Their ammunition supply is short enough that fighters in the second and third ranks often carry a single magazine, so that those in the storefronts might have enough.

But they have shown signs of organization and adaptability that have given them an unexpected endurance.

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