Qaddafi Forces Give Ground in Surt

By KAREEM FAHIM

Published: October 11, 2011

SURT, Libya — Through boulevards and narrow streets, fighters allied with Libya’s transitional government pushed boldly into a residential district here on Tuesday, capturing Qaddafi loyalists, war loot and territory as the battle moved from the city’s edges to its center.

The advance, by eastern brigades of anti-Qaddafi fighters, seemed to indicate that momentum was finally shifting to the former rebels. By nightfall, as gun battles continued, the fighters were sweeping houses and shops in the Shaabiya district, close to the loyalists’ last strongholds deep within the city.

Mustapha Abdul Jalil, the chairman of the Libya’s transitional government, who visited Surt on Tuesday, told Reuters that the fighters needed “two more days” to capture the city.

But a grisly scene in a single apartment captured by the former rebels suggested that the Qaddafi loyalists — for love of their leader or fear of retribution by their foes — would do most anything to avoid being caught.

For two days, a loyalist fighter, possibly a sniper, had used the apartment as a base. One room was filled with mattresses, covered in a floral patterned-cloth, stacked a few feet high. Across the hallway, in a bathroom, the charred body of a man was on the floor, on his back, still smoldering. A long piece of wire was tied to his right wrist. A stream of water from a ruptured pipe sprayed the bathroom walls.

A group of former rebels said the man had been firing at their comrades during the battle for the neighborhood early Tuesday, which centered on a nearby thoroughfare called Omar el-Mukhtar. A fighter from the eastern city of Ajdabiya, Abdulwahab Mohamed, said he had been among the group that tried to capture the man, bursting into the third-floor apartment on Tuesday afternoon.

“He was wounded. He was crying. He was crying, a lot.” Mr. Mohamed said. It was not clear why his hand was tied to the wire: the former rebels said they thought it meant he was prepared to fight until death. As the group approached him, the man, armed with a Kalashnikov, started firing and threw a grenade.

Then he threw two more, on the ground near his feet. A former rebel fighter was killed, and two were badly injured. Mr. Mohamed said: “He loved Muammar.”

Over the course of the fighting on Tuesday, at least two dozen men, suspected of being Qaddafi loyalists, were taken alive.

Late in the afternoon, the rebels ferried five of them on the back of a pickup truck from Omar el-Mukhtar street, towards the former rebel lines. The truck stopped at an intersection, and angry men gathered around. Two anti-Qaddafi fighters started attacking the men with the butts of their rifles, knocking one of the prisoners unconscious.

A man intervened, pushing one of the assailants away. “We’re better than these dogs,” he told the fighter
.