Libya First-Hand: A Scout Oath in Brega "Duty to God and to Your Country, and to Help Others” (Anderson)

Jon Lee Anderson writes for The New Yorker:

On the morning of March 12th, Osama ben Sadik, a volunteer ambulance driver, arrived for duty at the Red Crescent clinic in Brega, an oil-refinery town in eastern Libya. The uprising against Muammar Qaddafi had turned from a protest movement into a shooting war, and casualties were expected. But no one in Brega had a clear idea of what was happening on the battlefield, not even the few fighters fidgeting by a new barricade outside the refinery’s front gate. Six days earlier, Qaddafi’s armored columns had halted the rebels on their ill-planned, euphoric advance westward toward Tripoli. Bloodied and outgunned, the rebels, a leaderless rabble of university students, mechanics, shopkeepers, and Army reservists, had been falling back ever since. After a standoff on the coastal road that ran past Ras Lanuf, another oil-refinery town, eighty miles to the west, the rebels had buckled under heavy fire and made a panicked retreat. It seemed obvious that the small desert town of Brega would be the next target of Qaddafi’s forces.

At the clinic, most of the medical staff had evacuated after an ambulance was hit by a shell, killing one of their doctors and several nurses. A lone doctor remained, along with Osama, who was friendly, and spoke extraordinarily good English. A rangy man of forty-eight with warm brown eyes and an aquiline face that resembled a beardless Abraham Lincoln’s, he showed off his ambulance. To aid the war effort, he and some friends had adapted a Toyota Land Cruiser pickup into a mobile emergency-treatment center. The vehicle, painted white with a red crescent, was parked at the clinic entrance, where Osama was busily cleaning it.

When I asked Osama how he had learned English, he said, “I’m from Martinsville, Virginia.” He was Libyan, but his wife, Suzi, was half American. A onetime Libyan Arab Airlines engineer, Osama had, with Suzi, raised four children in Benghazi. But in the nineties, with Libya isolated by international sanctions because of Qaddafi’s refusal to hand over suspects in the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, Osama had struggled to make a living. In 2007, after the sanctions had been lifted, he moved with his family to Henry County, Virginia, near where Suzi’s mother lived. There, he found he could make money by exporting construction equipment to Benghazi, and he flew back and forth to supervise the business. With pride, Osama told me that he had become a U.S. citizen, and was now a member of Henry County’s volunteer fire department.

His wife and their two young daughters were in Virginia, he explained, but he and his two sons were in Libya, doing whatever they could for the revolution. While Osama was driving his improvised ambulance, his younger son, Yousef, a seventeen-year-old high-school student who was living in Benghazi with a relative, was taking part in the rallies held daily in front of the revolution’s headquarters, a beat-up courthouse on the city’s seafront promenade. Muhannad, his elder son, a twenty-one-year-old medical student, was fighting at the front. Osama’s description of Muhannad reminded me that a few days before, in Ras Lanuf, I had noticed a young Libyan-American fighter, fair-haired and blue-eyed. He was wearing a mujahideen-style pakul cap, and he waved and smiled at me from a jeep that was making its way to the front line. I asked Osama if his son had light hair and wore an Afghan cap, and he beamed: “Yes, that’s him! That’s my son.”

Osama lamented the inexperience of rebels like Muhannad and his friends. Qaddafi’s soldiers were largely veterans and mercenaries, backed up with significant artillery, most of it Soviet-era. The rebels, by contrast, had set up a base in Benghazi where Army veterans gave volunteers a brief training in how to load, clean, and fire a Kalashnikov; many fighters did not get even this rudimentary instruction. Osama said, “The boys at the front, some of them have never seen a gun before.” Qaddafi had appeared on TV and called the rebels “cockroaches,” swearing to hunt them down “house by house.” Osama concluded, “It’s no longer only about freedom now, this revolution; it’s about survival, and protecting one’s family.”

Earlier that morning, he told me, a middle-aged man from the distant town of Tobruk had driven up to the clinic and asked him how to get to Al Uqaylah, a small way station twenty-five miles down the road. Osama warned him that it lay in the path of Qaddafi’s advancing troops, but the man said that his safety was of no importance: he was going to Al Uqaylah to look for his son’s body. His son, a rebel volunteer, had gone off to fight at the front line. After not hearing from him for several days, he called his cell phone, and a stranger answered. When the father identified himself, the stranger told him, “No, I’m not your son. Fuck your son. Come and pick him up in Al Uqaylah. He has no head.”

Osama’s face contorted. He said, “The man wept and he asked me again, ‘Where is Al Uqaylah?’ ” Osama grabbed my arm and said, “My daughters, they’re only eight and twelve, and my wife—you can’t imagine how terrified and worried she is. I can’t let them see me cry.” He leaned into me and quietly sobbed.

Osama had flown from Virginia to Benghazi in mid-February, when the demonstrations against the authorities there suddenly turned violent. Following the successful revolts in Tunisia and Egypt, Libya’s own “day of rage” was scheduled for February 17th, but in Benghazi—the country’s second-largest city, and a longtime opposition stronghold—protests erupted early. Qaddafi dispatched his brother-in-law Abdullah Senussi, the country’s intelligence chief, and his son Saadi, a businessman, to subdue the city. But Senussi blundered: he arrested a human-rights lawyer named Fathi Terbil, who represented the families of an estimated twelve hundred political prisoners who had been massacred in Tripoli’s Abu Salim prison in 1996—an episode in which Senussi was personally implicated. Benghazi exploded in protests, and though Terbil was quickly freed, his release did nothing to stop their momentum.

The authorities enlisted groups of seasoned fighters from Mali, Chad, Niger, and elsewhere; assisted by security forces, they beat and shot protesters, killing dozens. Watching from the United States, Osama worried about the safety of his sons, who were both in Benghazi. “Muhannad was already helping out the demonstrators,” Osama said. His son was strong-willed, he told me, adding, “I knew that he was capable of doing something crazy.”

On February 17th, Muhannad telephoned Osama. “He said to me, ‘Dad, I need your blessing, because fighting has started now, and they are killing my friends. I must join in.’ I asked him to wait. I said, ‘Let me give you my blessing to your face.’ ” He flew at once to Benghazi. “It was the last flight before they closed the airport.”

By the time Osama arrived, Benghazi’s uprising had become a full-scale insurrection, with hundreds of protesters rioting in front of the city’s infamous Katiba, the main security garrison. The violence had also spread to other cities throughout coastal Libya. On February 22nd, as the situation deteriorated, Qaddafi’s interior minister and longtime confidant Abdel Fattah Younes announced that he and his contingent of special-forces troops were switching sides. His forces helped take over the embattled Katiba, allowing the rioters to enter it, and, ultimately, to sack and burn it.

Within hours, rebels had set fire to Benghazi’s police stations and Army barracks and looted their arsenals. In the chaos, a thousand prisoners escaped from the city’s prison. The shabab, the youths who made up the hard core of the rebel fighters, torched the old Italianate town hall, where, in 1951, King Idris I had announced the nation’s independence. They also set fire to a villa owned by the city’s fugitive mayor, Huda Ben Amer, reviled for stepping forward during the public hanging of a young dissident in 1984 and tugging on the victim’s feet as he writhed on the rope. The rioters appropriated hundreds of new Chinese-made pickups from a stockyard and fitted them with heavy machine guns and anti-aircraft guns. After a week of protests, at least two hundred and thirty people had been killed in Benghazi, most of them by the security forces.

At first, Osama joined the crowds that gathered every day in front of the Benghazi courthouse. Inside, an ad-hoc alliance of lawyers, students, professors, and businesspeople was struggling to create a semblance of order by forming a leadership council. The council named a political-science professor as its education minister (though the schools were all closed) and a human-rights lawyer as its official spokesman. Outside the courthouse, a festive, anarchic atmosphere prevailed. Tents sprang up, with volunteers inside offering free food, coffee, and first aid; one hosted an exhibition of anti-Qaddafi cartoons, portraying him as a vampire, a madman, and a dog. A young Libyan set up a live Web stream on the courthouse roof, and a posse of students opened a media office inside a burned-out secret-police building.

By the end of February, rebels had assumed control of a series of coastal cities throughout the east. Soon after, military units operating out of Qaddafi’s tribal stronghold of Surt, halfway along the coast toward Tripoli, began advancing on the “liberated” territory. They struck first in Brega, on March 2nd, and were repulsed after a day of combat in which about a dozen civilian volunteers from Benghazi were killed. Osama decided that he needed to do more: “I could see that this is war now, and it is necessary to help.”

Since then, Osama had undergone a transformation. “Before I left Libya, there was nothing left for me here,” he said. “Now, when I see the sea, I smell a different air. I can see the sky, blue; I have never seen it so beautiful.” He said that his friends in Martinsville had appealed to him not to go to Libya. “I reminded them that Henry County was named after Patrick Henry—and remember what he said, ‘Give me liberty or give me death’? Well, that’s what we’re facing here. I’d like to see my country have some of the freedom that America has.” Osama’s eyes shone. “You know, my son Muhannad has showed me what it is to be a man. He woke me up.” On February 25th, a ship had evacuated American citizens to Malta. “I told him to go and join his mother in the States, but he said, ‘No, Dad, I must stay.’ He’s a great guy, a basketball player, you know. And a Boy Scout.”

Near Ras Lanuf, I had seen teen-agers with kerchiefs around their necks helping doctors rush wounded men into the overwhelmed emergency ward, but it didn’t occur to me that they might be actual Boy Scouts. Osama explained that Qaddafi had once banned the Scouts as an insidious Western influence but later allowed them to reëmerge. After the uprising, most police disappeared from the streets, and tens of thousands of migrant workers fled the country. Scouts stepped in to fill public-service jobs, helping at the hospitals, sorting out aid supplies, even directing traffic. It was Muhannad’s Scout membership that drew him into the uprising. “Remember the Scout oath?” Osama asked. “Duty to God and to your country, and to help others.”

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