youths from around Tripoli, Zawiyah and Gharyan have trekked long distances to support FFs in Nafusa

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Libyan youths from Gaddafi towns join Freedom Fightersshabablibya.org/?p=3892 #Libya

The youths from around Tripoli, Zawiyah and Gharyan have trekked long distances to deliver information and moral support to rebel fighters in Libya’s western mountains. The majority of the recruits have never held a gun and have scant military training but say they have acquired a taste for freedom and the will to fight. 

Shenber, a 27-year-old computer scientist from Tripoli, braved the desert for a whole day to reach a port, take a boat, enter Tunisia without papers and return to the front line southwest of the capital. “I had to leave the county illegally to avoid loyalist forces catching me. There are channels to help youths from Kadhafi-controlled towns to join the combatants,” he said. Once in Zintan, the nerve centre in western Libya of the rebellion, he received 10 days of training before being snatched by the military and sent to the battle of Gualish. “They gave me a gun, which I had never used. I am not a good shot. I am only an engineer. I was afraid but I felt free. I am never turning back,” said Shenber. 

 Originally from Gharyan, 50 kilometres (30 miles) from the front, the young man withheld his last name to avoid reprisals against his family, like others who have trickled in alone or in groups. Many of them are from the Nafusa mountains where they have friends and families, and are welcomed with open arms despite their  experience. “They lack professional instincts. But they give us moral support because they add to our numbers and have better information on the villages we plan to attack. They will help us,” said Wael Brashen, 21, an engineer turned rebel commander.

Once they reach the mountains, rebels put the newcomers through an interrogation to make sure they are not spies. “We have our ways. We know the tribes,” said a commander on condition of anonymity. Then the debriefing begins. Roads, houses, military bases, everything is sifted and crosschecked against the maps and strategic information files compiled by rebels, Brashen said. “They know where Kadhafi’s forces are stationed so they will be able to tell us where to go,” he said. One hundred and twenty of the new recruits hail from Garyan, a strategic gateway to Tripoli that rebels are battling to capture. Among the latest arrivals is Ahmed, 25, a construction worker who was arrested at the outset of anti-Kadhafi demonstrations in February and released only recently. “From day one, I wanted to join the revolution. I thought I would never get out alive of prison. They tortured and beat us,” he said. 

Once free, he left immediately, without a word of warning to his mother. “She had begged me not to join the rebel fighters, had I told her she would have cried.” The new recruits, mostly used as scouts, were on Sunday busy on the front line — their first taste of real-life battle training — shooting chaotically in a show of bravado. But the posturing stops with the first rain of Grad rockets fired by loyalist forces aiming to recapture Gualish. “This is the first time I’m going to use a weapon. But I’m brave, I am fighting for a free Libya,” Ahmad said, breaking into a sweat, before running off under a hail of lead.