News: Qaddafi’s Army and Jets (!) Strike at Rebels

[NX Express]

Volunteers with the Libyan opposition in Benghazi, Libya, were training on Monday with weapons seized last week.

 

BENGHAZI, Libya — Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s forces struck back at his opponents on three fronts on Monday, using fighter jets, special forces units and regular army troops in an escalation of hostilities that brought Libya a step closer to civil war.

 

But the rebels dismissed the attacks as ineffectual, and Colonel Qaddafi faced a growing international campaign to force him from power, as the Obama administration announced it had seized $30 billion in Libyan assets and the European Union adopted an arms embargo and other sanctions.

 

As the Pentagon began repositioning Navy warships to support a possible humanitarian or military intervention, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton bluntly told the Libyan leader to surrender power “now, without further violence or delay.”

 

The attacks by the colonel’s troops on an oil refinery in central Libya and on cities on either side of the country unsettled rebel leaders — who have maintained that they are close to liberating the country — and showed that despite defections by the military, the government still possessed powerful assets, including fighter pilots willing to bomb Libyan cities.

 

Rebel leaders said the attacks smacked of desperation, and the ease with which at least one assault, on the western city of Zawiyah, was repelled raised questions about the ability of the government to muster a serious challenge to the rebels’ growing power.

 

In an interview with ABC News, Colonel Qaddafi said he was fighting against “terrorists,” and accused the West of seeking to “occupy Libya.” He gave no hint of surrender. “My people love me,” he said. “They would die for me.”

 

Those unyielding words, and the colonel’s attacks on Monday were met with both nerves and defiance by rebel military leaders, as the two sides seemed to steel themselves for a long battle along shifting and ever more violent front lines.

 

The anti-government protesters, who started their uprising with peaceful sit-ins but have increasingly turned to arms to counter Colonel Qaddafi’s brutal paramilitary forces, have promised a large military response but seem unsure — or incapable — of delivering one. At the same time, government forces have been unable to reverse the costly loss of territory to a popular revolt that has brought together lawyers, young people and tribal leaders.

 

Across the region, the tumult that has already toppled two leaders and threatened one autocrat after another was unabated on Monday. In Yemen, protests drove President Ali Abdullah Saleh to make a bid for a unity government, but the political opposition quickly refused. An opposition leader, Mohamed al-Sabry, said in a statement that the president’s proposal was a “desperate attempt” to counter major protests planned for Tuesday.

 

In Bahrain, protesters blocked access to Parliament, according to news agencies. In Oman, whose first major protests were reported over the weekend, demonstrations turned into violent clashes with the security forces in the port city of Sohar and spread for the first time to the capital, Muscat.

 

Libya itself seemed to be brewing a major humanitarian crisis as tens of thousands of mostly impoverished contract workers tried desperately to escape the country to its neighbors, Tunisia to the west and Egypt to the east. The United Nations refugee agency called the situation a humanitarian emergency as workers hauling suitcases stood in long lines to leave Libya, many of them uncertain how they would finally get home.

 

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/01/world/africa/01unrest.html?_r=1&hp

 

Note: Emphasis in first paragraph mine.

 

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