Gaddafi taunts his enemies

26 August 2011 - 02:22 By Reuters
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Libyan rebel fighters protect a pro-Gaddafi loyalist fighter from angry onlookers as he is brought in for medical attention to the Tripoli Central Hospital yesterday
Libyan rebel fighters protect a pro-Gaddafi loyalist fighter from angry onlookers as he is brought in for medical attention to the Tripoli Central Hospital yesterday

Muammar Gaddafi taunted his Libyan enemies and their Western backers yesterday as rebel forces battled pockets of loyalists across Tripoli in an ever more urgent quest to find and silence the fugitive strongman.

Rumours of Gaddafi or his sons being cornered, even sighted, swirled among excitable rebel fighters engaged in heavy machinegun and rocket exchanges. But two days after his compound was overrun, hopes of a swift end to six months of war were still being frustrated by fierce rearguard actions.

Western powers demanded Gaddafi's surrender and worked to release frozen Libyan state funds, hoping to ease hardships and start reconstruction in the oil-rich state. But with loyalists holding out in the capital, in Gaddafi's coastal home city and deep in the inland desert, violence could go on for some time, testing the ability of the government in waiting to keep order.

"The tribes ... must march on Tripoli," Gaddafi said in an audio message broadcast on a sympathetic TV channel. "Do not leave Tripoli to those rats, kill them, defeat them quickly.

"The enemy is delusional, Nato is retreating," he shouted, sounding firmer and clearer than in a similar speech released on Wednesday. Though his enemies believe Gaddafi is still in the capital, they fear he could flee by long-prepared escape routes, using tunnels and bunkers, to rally an insurgency.

Diehards numbering in the hundreds were keeping at bay squads of irregular, anti-Gaddafi fighters who had swept into the capital on Sunday and who were now rushing from one site to another, firing assault rifles, machineguns and anti-aircraft cannon bolted to the backs of pick-up trucks.

Fighters besieged blocks of flats near Gaddafi's fortified compound in the belief that the fugitive despot and his sons were hiding in them.

The sense of urgency extended to the new Libyan leadership, and to their Western backers as they tried to unblock funds to bring relief and start rebuilding the country after six months of civil war.

"We need urgent help," Mahmoud Jibril, head of the government-in-waiting, told Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in Milan as Western leaders tried to persuade others at the UN to ease sanctions and a freeze on Libyan foreign assets that had been imposed to punish Gaddafi.

The despot's opponents fear that he may rally an insurgency, as Saddam Hussein did in Iraq, should he remain at large and, perhaps, in control of funds salted away for such a purpose.

With fighting still raging in Tripoli, there was evidence of the kind of bitter bloodletting in recent days that the rebel leaders are anxious to stop in the interests of uniting Libyans, including supporters of Gaddafi, in a democracy.

A Reuters correspondent counted 30 bodies, apparently of troops and gunmen who had fought for Gaddafi, at a site in Tripoli. At least two had their hands bound. One was strapped to a hospital trolley with a drip still in his arm. All the bodies had been riddled with bullets.

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