It is unclear what resources Colonel Qaddafi still commands.
In an interview, a leader of the rebel underground visiting here in the mountains said that the rebels had been smuggling in a growing number of guns as well as C4 plastic explosives, while borrowing a tactic from their mountain allies by making their own crude (and often unsafe) handguns.
In an interview, a leader of the rebel underground visiting here in the mountains said that the rebels had been smuggling in a growing number of guns as well as C4 plastic explosives, while borrowing a tactic from their mountain allies by making their own crude (and often unsafe) handguns.
In addition to nightly attacks on Qaddafi checkpoints around the capital, he said, the rebels have been plotting more ambitious actions, including an aborted plan to assault the Rixos Hotel in the hope of capturing Colonel Qaddafi's influential son, Saif al-Islam Qaddafi, who keeps a suite there. That plan was called off in part because of the risk it posed to foreign journalists, who are housed in the hotel.
Already, the rebels say, they are in contact with apolitical or disaffected officials in the Tripoli police force, the Interior Ministry and other government departments to make plans to secure the city in the days after a potential ouster of Colonel Qaddafi. "In every ministry of the government we have people who will be going to their offices in the days after Qaddafi falls, so the government will not collapse," Mr. Fekini said.
Many of the intellectuals and professionals involved in leading the revolt, he said, were worried about the possibility of mobs seeking revenge on anyone implicated in the Qaddafi government -- a prospect that he acknowledged may be helping to hold the Libyan leader's loyalists together. "We don't want revenge, but it is the problem of popular justice," he said.
It is unclear what resources Colonel Qaddafi still commands. He is believed to have started the conflict with billions of dollars in foreign currency stashed away. But the rebels say they are counting on his inability to replenish his coffers because of international sanctions and asset freezes, and in interviews last week Tripoli residents said the strains on his resources were already beginning to show.
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