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The stories of some of those inside Ibn Sana hospital in Sirte do not add up. Hamad Ashrak Ali from Sudan is lying on a bed in the hospital's basement. He shows us his wound before explaining the circumstances of it. He has been shot through the side. The bullet exited through one buttock – the wound is becoming septic.
He says he came from Abyei in his own country to Sirte to earn money: "I thought I could earn money here by loading trucks."
He does not explain why he chose Gaddafi's hometown in particular and claims at first to have been in the hospital with his wound for 50 days.
But his wound is relatively recent, the muscles still pronounced. He has not spent almost two months in a hospital bed.
"Kids were doing handbrake turns," – doughnuts, he calls them. "Someone fired a gun and I was shot." He is asked again how long he has been in hospital. He changes his story. "Since April," he says.
A bearded fighter from the forces of the NTC suggests quietly that Hamad is lying. Other fighters say they have a list and know who are the mercenaries and pro-Gaddafi fighters in the hospital.
Not far away an emaciated man struggles up from his bed, stick thin.
Other patients in this dreadful place seem comatose, afflicted with wounds long gone rotten, people in desperate need of evacuation.
But for now there is nowhere for them to go.
Not even the Red Cross has been able to evacuate the bombed out hospital. The nearby field hospitals are full, as is the hospital in Misrata. So they are stuck in this shattered shell.
Outside on the street, a three-car convoy drives by towards the Ouagadougou conference centre.
Skinny men with dark-skinned, emaciated faces are packed into two cars, with more sitting slumped in open boots.
Recent deserters from the pro-Gaddafi forces, who have been fighting to defend this city for a fallen and defeated regime, they are guarded by NTC fighters in the final car.
As the new government force push forward from the east and west towards the sea, life in Gaddafi's home town and in his second capital is revealed.
The pro-Gaddafi forces – for so long invisible in their positions, where they have poured down fire on the advancing fighters – have been revealed for what they are. Ordinary men, frightened, who now want only to survive by surrendering, hiding in the hospital or trying to escape with fleeing civilians.
What those civilians have been through has also been revealed as the battle lines move forward.
In one modest home, its bedrooms turned upside down by the advancing fighters now pinned down on a nearby corner, a child's homework on the governance of ancient Greece, lies on a cushion.
There is a little food in the kitchen, although the fridge is empty, suggesting how hard life has been for those forced to live through the siege of Sirte.
But other houses tell a different story.
The large terracotta villa of Naqib Ramadan Nasr is close to the television and radio station not far from Dubai Street, the main road that crosses Sirte from west to east where the frontline was located on Monday.
Ahmed Brasai, an NTC fighter shows off what he has found inside the house, whose large rooms are ornately and expensively furnished.
He holds a sheaf of photographs. The owner of the house with Gaddafi. A picture of Moatissim Gaddafi shaking hands at a military parade, and most strange of all a picture of another of Gaddafi's sons, the feared Khamis in uniform, disembodied and rising against a pearly sky like some kind of saint.
"Look at this piece of paper we found inside the house." He showed a formal document listing names of people, their makes of car and number plates, with the name of a regime official scrawled on the back – Ahmed Ibrahim, the brother of Gaddafi's spokesman Moussa Ibrahim.
Four hundred metres away was the frontline – the television station whose huge white dishes are visible against the trees – now silenced.
Next to it, within a little mosque with a green tipped spire, snipers fire at the advancing gun trucks and the fighters on foot.
Rocket-propelled grenades, fired by pro-Gaddafi fighters, exploded in the air above as men run back. Some ground was gained, only a little lost, the frontline in places less than two miles from the sea.
So the battle for Sirte continues towards its inevitable conclusion.
