After seizing Qawalish last week, the rebels maintained only a small force in the town. Their checkpoints and positions were barely dug in; their equipment was minimal, and it often appeared that few people were alert to the dangers from the Qaddafi forces just down the road.
When those forces struck back, late in the morning on Wednesday, they routed the rebels’ holding force.
Rebel radios throughout the region crackled with traffic saying that several of their fighters and perhaps two of their trucks had been captured. The Qaddafi forces, meanwhile, proceeded a few miles farther west down the road into rebel territory, moving all but unchecked.
Several towns back, however, the rebels were mobilizing. Their forces swarmed the road in the midafternoon, driving toward the fighting in pickup trucks and cars. Some men hitchhiked with rifles to get to the new front lines, where the rebels’ makeshift ground-to-ground rocket launchers had settled into a duel with the Qaddafi forces. Truckloads of men with rifles and machine guns pressed forward.
One group of men jogged off the highway and up a hill just outside of town as rockets and mortar rounds exploded intermittently in the fields and hills nearby. “Welcome to my free country,” one of the men said. He gave the name Isam, but he shielded his face and asked that his last name not be published because he feared reprisals against his family in Tripoli, the capital.
The group stayed on the hill briefly but backed off as incoming rockets struck the side facing Qawalish. They were a few dozen in number, and as the rockets exploded and the men ducked to the ground, they shouted “God is Great!” repeatedly to steel one another’s nerves.
Some of the men, including one who gave the name Yusef, had no weapons. “I am from Tripoli,” he said a few minutes later, crouching as rockets flew overhead from behind the rebel lines, returning fire into Qawalish.
“I left my wife and children there to come here and fight,” Yusef added. “It is dangerous, because I have no gun. But I can help — I can bring food, I can bring water. And maybe I will find a rifle today from one of Qaddafi’s soldiers.”
A short while later, the group climbed down the hill, returned to the trucks and drove into Qawalish, where the Qaddafi forces were pulling back as rebel strength grew. The town was back, at least for the moment, in rebel hands.
The losses to the Qaddafi soldiers were impossible to determine, as was the rationale for the counterattack.
Though the attacking loyalists had entered the town with enough troops to scatter the few rebels there, they were not bolstered with enough forces to hold what they had won.
Many more men were wounded. Several were dead. And the lines at the end of the day were almost exactly where they had been at dawn.
