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Gaddafi's army of mercenaries may face backlash guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep…
Earlier this year, as revolution and siege ground Tripoli to a halt, Mehdi Hassan knew where to look for work. He would drive his taxi to a roundabout in the south-west of the capital and wait for foreigners who had arrived with the name of a destination, but had no idea how to get there. "The cigarette factory," he said. "That's all they had to say."
Hassan drove each of the men – there were around six over a three-week period – to a warehouse behind the giant, government-run tobacco plant in western Tripoli. The site was well known: an industrial plant, protected by military guards, which had become a cash cow for the Gaddafi regime.
"I was always told to go round here," he said as he retraced the route this week, down a long straight road inside the factory's high wall. "There were soldiers along the way and they pointed me towards that white building. Only one of the men I took there told me why he had come. The others couldn't speak Arabic. He said I am here to fight for Gaddafi."
The building, like almost every other government facility in town had been ransacked and abandoned. Three huge sacks of rice sat amid broken glass, an empty weapons crate and strewn green uniforms. A sign on the wall said: "God, Muammar and Libya only."
But there was little else left to prove this place was what many in town believe it to have been – a processing centre for mercenaries, who threw in their lot with a dictator.
Mehdi and other drivers around Tripoli are adamant. "It was very clear what it was," he said of the scene he saw in March. "They weren't even trying to hide it. There were around 100 men there and all of them were African. The Libyan soldiers were trying to speak to them in English."
In the 13 days since Gaddafi's security forces were ousted, finding out how – and by whom - this totalitarian state was held together for so long has become an obsession for Tripoli's brutalised residents as well as the city's new guard, which rode into town seeking vengeance as much as a new beginning.
