airstrikes on Saturday night killed a son and three grandchildren of Colonel Qaddafi, according to the government, which accused the NATO coalition powers of “a direct operation to assassinate the leader of this country” in violation of international law. Qaddafi supporters in Tripoli burned or vandalized the closed American, British and Italian embassies and ransacked United Nations buildings, forcing the evacuation of the 12 remaining international staff members. And Colonel Qaddafi’s military showed no sign of restraint after the airstrikes, shelling rebel positions in the besieged port city of Misurata and elsewhere.
Russia, a permanent member of the Security Council, said the NATO attack aroused “serious doubts about coalition members’ statement that the strikes in Libya do not have the goal of physically annihilating Mr. Qaddafi and members of his family.”
While the Obama administration had no comment about the airstrikes, it criticized the Libyans’ attacks on the embassies in Tripoli. Mark Toner, a State Department spokesman, condemned the retaliation “in the strongest possible terms.”
The United Nations’ secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, also did not comment on the airstrikes, which were authorized under a Security Council resolution to prevent Colonel Qaddafi’s military from killing civilians in Libya’s two-month-old civil war.
NATO commanders, Western leaders and officials in Washington, who had signaled last week that they intended to escalate the airstrike campaign in Libya, said the attack on Saturday had hit a legitimate military target.
They reiterated that they were not specifically trying to kill Colonel Qaddafi, whose four decades of repressive rule has been upended by a rebellion inspired by the downfalls of autocrats in neighboring Tunisia and Egypt.
Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain told the BBC that the airstrike fell within the Security Council mandate to stop a “loss of civilian life by targeting Qaddafi’s war-making machine.”
NATO officials say that the intense bombing in Tripoli is designed to batter Col. Qaddafi’s military apparatus. Such a strategy is freighted with risk for the already fragile coalition. In Libya, the officials argue, the boundary between legitimate military targets and residential compounds is often blurry.
Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, said that the strikes on the command posts are “clearly” beyond the mandate of the Security Council resolution, but he called the new attacks a strategy to “terminate the campaign” as quickly as possible.
And, he said, war planners at NATO headquarters in Brussels have been “telegraphing it pretty openly” that the bombings would include strikes against Colonel Qaddafi’s command posts.
Still, the international condemnation of Saturday’s strike could create fissures in NATO and cause some officials to rethink the allies’ strategy. And it could create a backlash among Libyans who have been willing to put aside misgivings about the foreign military intervention because it was intended to prevent Colonel Qaddafi’s loyalists from killing civilians.
