Libya Snapshot: The Hidden Workshops of Misurata (Chivers)

C.J. Chivers reports for The New York Times:

When the bloody siege of this isolated city began, the rebels who rose against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s conventional army had almost no firearms. Many of them relied on hands, knives and stones.

Now they roam the streets as a paramilitary force built around hastily armored trucks that have been fitted with captured machine guns set on crude turrets and mounts.

See also Libya Snapshot: How the Opposition Held Misurata

The transformation, evident in an offensive late last month that chased many of Colonel Qaddafi’s forces from Misurata’s center to its outskirts, is in part the result of a hidden side of this lopsided ground war: a clandestine network of rebel workshops, where these makeshift weapons have been designed, assembled and pushed out.

The workshops are officially a rebel secret. But for three days journalists for The New York Times were granted access to two of them, on the condition that their exact locations not be disclosed and that no photographs be taken of their entrances.

On display inside were both the logistics and the mentality of the seesaw fight for Libya’s third-largest city. In Misurata, an almost spontaneously assembled civilian force has managed, alone along Libya’s central and western stretch of Mediterranean coast, to withstand a sustained conventional attack from an army with all the arms and munitions an oil state can buy.

In these places — the fledgling war industry for a force that regards itself as a democratic insurgency — weapons manufactured in cold war-era factories to be operated remotely on aircraft and tanks have been modified for manual use.

Four-door civilian pickup trucks have been converted to sinister-appearing armored vehicles. And conventional munitions designed for one thing — land mines and tank shells, for which the rebels have little use — have been converted to other types of lethal arms.

The rebels remain ill equipped and materially outmatched. Some of their production is of questionable value. But they have acquired a collective sense that, to drive back the Qaddafi troops, any contribution matters.

And there is no question that their fighting power has grown. For the beleaguered residents, just as war can be fought with rifles, it can be waged with hammers, grinders and lathes.

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