A town in western Libya is coming under almost as much fire as Misurata But no one is paying much attention.
It is the unknown frontline in Libya's civil war, a rebel town besieged by Gaddafi's forces but almost ignored by the outside world.
Rockets and Scud missiles pour down. Water is running short. Tens of thousands are desperately trying to flee.
But transfixed by the horrors of Misurata, the international community - and the Nato military alliance - have all but overlooked the closely parallel drama in the mountain towns of Zintan and Yafran, little more than an hour's drive from the capital.
"We have been under fire for about an hour and a half now," said one Zintan resident, Mustafa Haider, by telephone from the town on Friday afternoon.
"From the south, from the north, from the east, from everywhere. They fire with Grad missiles, Scud missiles, anything. They have tried to enter Zintan many times but they couldn't." Homes, schools, and the town's main hospital had been hit, causing panic, he said.
A spokesman for Human Rights Watch, Fred Abrahams, accused the Libyan regime of committing "indiscriminate attacks" in the district. "They are firing into residential areas without targeting a military object," he said. "It is in essence the same tactic as in Misurata."
Zintan and Yafran are at the tip of the largest rebel-held pocket in western Libya - a crescent running along the Nafusa mountain range from the towns, south-west of Tripoli, to the Tunisian border.
In normal times, this dramatic area, studded with fortified castle-granaries carved out of the rock, is one of Libya's main tourist attractions. Now it just might be the place where the country's long military stalemate is starting to shift a little.
Zintan, whose Berber people have long been at odds with Tripoli, was one of the first places to rebel against the regime, resisting even a proffered $750,000-per-family bribe by Gaddafi's security chief to stay loyal. Col Gaddafi, in turn, singled out the town for special mention in his first key anti-uprising speech, promising to hunt its rebel "greasy rats" from "alley to alley."
Until two weeks ago, the enclave was isolated.
But then the rebels captured the Wazin-Dehiba frontier post into Tunisia, opening a vital supply line. At that border, earlier this week, the pre-Gaddafi flag flew, rebel troops manned a rickety checkpoint and food and stores flowed across into Libya.
But there was far greater traffic in the opposite direction, of fearful and sometimes traumatised refugees from the regime attacks.
Saleh Aouni, from Yafran, was crying as he crossed over to safety. "We can no longer live there. Not an hour goes by without shelling," he said. "I hope this will end and I can return to a Libya without Gaddafi."
The rocky, moon-like landscape in this part of Tunisia is best known to outsiders as the filming location for Luke Skywalker's home planet in theStar Wars movies. The film-makers named their imaginary world after Tataouine, the nearest large town.
But now the real war, just across the border, has come here too.
As control of the frontier crossing shifted back and forth, Gaddafi troops in pickup trucks invaded Tunisian territory and exchanged fire with Tunisian troops after chasing rebels into the town of Dehiba. The regime shelled the frontier last weekend, with some of the missiles landing inside Tunisia, though there were no reported casualties on the Tunisian side.
A furious Tunisian government has now set up six lines of checkpoints to stop it happening again, with Tunisian troops sitting behind improvised walls of rock at the border.
They can do nothing, however, about the regime's intensifying attacks inside Libya itself, which could be plainly heard echoing round the mountains across the frontier.
Only Nato can do that - and there are complaints that it is saving most of its firepower for better-publicised battlefronts.
On Saturday, rebels in the western city of Misurata said that the government had dropped bombs on four large oil storage tanks, using small crop dusting planes in order to escape the attention of the Nato aircraft enforcing the no-fly zone.
The regime, which still has military bases in the Zintan area, is trying hard to cut the road between Zintan and the border, making life extremely difficult for the towns along the route. The town closest to the frontier, Nalut, was shelled repeatedly last week, with at least four dead, and shells continued to land on Zintan yesterday.
But Nato bombing of regime forces in the area does not appear to have started until recently and comes with pauses which can last days, allowing government troops to regroup. The vast majority of the alliance's sorties have been along the coast and in the east.
A rebel spokesman in Zintan, Abdulrahman, reached by telephone, said that Nato aircraft had bombed government positions around the town on Tuesday, forcing regime troops back.
Nato jets also destroyed at least two helicopters being carried on the backs of trucks on Thursday, the spokesman said, as they headed towards the Tunisian border. There have been no reports of regime helicopters being used in the offensive so far.
Like many mountain-dwellers, the people of Zintan are both independent and martially-minded.
Children learn to shoot from the age of eight, and the area is famous for its skilled huntsmen. The landscape, with its ravines, lookouts and caves, is ideal insurgent territory. Western observers said the rebels in this part of Libya also appeared more organised than their eastern counterparts around Benghazi, with better supply lines and discipline.
But beyond the protection of their mountains, they will struggle to extend the area they control, or to link up with the main rebel-held territory. And the rebels' transitional national council in Benghazi appears, so far, to have had little contact of any kind with them: a spokesman said that a representative of the Nafusa mountains would be appointed to the council next week.
Pleading for more intervention, the Zintan resident, Mustafa Haider, said: "The (international) organisations don't know about us. The help and food we have received is not enough. We don't have any heavy weapons. We need help."
More than 8,000 refugees crossed the Dehiba border last weekend alone, according to the UN, and a total of 44,000 from the mountain area have left since the beginning of the uprising.
A humanitarian crisis has been averted only by the extraordinary generosity of the local people, who have taken the vast majority of the new arrivals into their own homes. Only a relatively small refugee camp has been needed near the border itself.
Massoud Chaben, from Yafran, one of those in that camp, described the situation in his home town as "miserable," saying there was not even any drinking water. Fatma Douri, 35, another Yafran refugee, said she had fled to save her children's lives.
"If I had stayed there, my two little children would have been among the dead," she said. "Just imagine, they were without milk or food for weeks. The siege of the town absolutely has to be lifted, otherwise thousands of children are going to be among the dead in the next few weeks."
Additional reporting by Ruth Sherlock in Benghazi and Harriet Alexander
