Battles in Libya raise specter of insurgency

(Manu Brabo/AP) - A woman suspected of being a Moammar Gaddafi loyalist turns away from the camera as she waits behind bars in a detention facility in Misrata.

TRIPOLI — For months, Libyan rebels and their international supporters insisted that Libya was not going to become another endless conflict in the model of Iraq or Afghanistan. And when Tripoli was taken by rebels a month ago, it seemed to many that the war was over.

By Tara Bahrampour, Updated: Thursday, September

But as Moammar Gaddafi’s loyalists put up a fierce resistance in the besieged towns of Sirte and Bani Walid, and bickering erupts among the revolutionaries, there are growing fears that the ousting of Gaddafi will not mean an end to fighting in the new Libya.

“Gaddafi for now is providing some sort of unified focus for resistance,” said Hugh Roberts, who until July was the North Africa director of the International Crisis Group, a conflict research organization. Without this focus, he said, Libyans who don’t feel represented in the new government might rebel. “It could be more diffuse, but presumably more difficult to cope with,” Roberts said, “and that’s where the situation starts to show some parallels to Iraq and Afghanistan.”

In fact, some say the former leader’s defeat could open the door to a more complicated kind of conflict. For the first six months of the rebellion, there were two clear sides — Gaddafi forces and the rebels, with NATO tipping the scale in favor of the latter. But as that phase of the fighting draws to an end, disgruntled Gaddafi loyalists or others who feel left out of the new government could try todestabilize it, with insurgents striking in cities or using desert or foreign outposts as bases.

There are significant differences between this conflict and the two wars in which the United States and other Western nations have been embroiled for the past decade. Libya’s terrain — a vast open desert — is less conducive to a guerilla insurgency than Afghanistan’s mountains, though it bears similarities to Iraq’s landscape. And Libya’s 6 million people, who subscribe to one sect of Islam, are more homogenous than the ethnically and religiously diverse Iraqis and Afghans.

Perhaps most significantly, the impetus for the conflict was different here than in those countries. Here, the war was sparked by Libyans, who converged from across the country and abroad to create a ragtag army of anti-Gaddafi ground forces and a new government-in-waiting.

Although it is not clear how many Gaddafi fighters and weapons are holed up inside the remaining loyalist towns, including the southern town of Sabha, which rebels say they have partially captured, Libyan fighters and their international supporters say they expect them to eventually run out of food and ammunition, perhaps within weeks.

“They’re weak, they’re unstructured, they’re suffering to get supplies through, they’re being targeted very effectively, and they will run out of arms soon,” a Western diplomat here said on the condition of anonymity in order to speak more candidly. “The freedom fighters have excellent communications chains, and they have the regular support of NATO and other international support. There’s no question that the Gaddafi forces will be defeated, and it’s just a matter of time.”