@ChangeInLibyaIsmael Zmirli
Libya: the battle for Sirte continues - live updates gu.com/p/32gg6/twvia @guardian #libya #feb17 End of battle for Sirte very near
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Libya: the battle for Sirte continues - live updates
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A fighter mans a machine-gun in the streets of Sirte. Photograph: Ahmad Al-Rubaye/AFP/Getty Images
Here's an update on some of the latest developments in Syriatoday.
• The activist group, the Local Coordination Committee of Syria, say six people were killed today, including four in Homs where it says gunfire has been heard for the last 36 hours.
Videos circulating today, include this clip of men coming under fire as they fled a mosque in Homs on Friday.
In speech on Sunday Grand Mufti Ahmad Badreddine Hassoun, said:
I say to all of Europe, I say to America, we will set up suicide bombers who are now in your countries, if you bomb Syria or Lebanon. From now on, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.
• Syria's main international allies China and Russia have both urged Bashar al-Assad to speed up the pace of reform. China foreign ministry spokesman Liu Weimin said: "We believe the Syrian government should more rapidly implement their promises of reform, begin and advance as soon as possible a process that is more lenient and inclusive to all parties... and through dialogue appropriately resolve issues." On Friday Russia's president, Dmitry Medvedev, told Assad to reform or leave office.
But the the verdict was hailed by the Al Wasat newspaper because no jail time was ordered.
Mosa'ab Elshamy says he has been having nightmares about the horrific scenes he saw at the march of Coptic Christians in Cairo on Sunday.
I joined the march as a Muslim who went in support of the Christians who were peacefully protesting against the recent destruction of a church in Aswan, which wasn't the first time in Egypt [that this had happened].It was a very friendly and peaceful march and I went there along with a lot of Muslims to be in support of the march and what I saw was [the] army lose control and dispersing the march with horrific brutality. I saw the army shoot at people and chase them and run over them [with] APCs [armoured personnel carriers] and their vehicles and turn a really beautifully peaceful march into a horrific massacre ...
What I saw was, all of a sudden, people running away and I heard loud gunshots in the air with the army and police chasing them [protesters] in the alleyways and side streets. Then, when we came back to the scene, they were lying on the ground and blood had been spilled and people were trying to defend themselves by throwing rocks back [at the police and army] ...The [only] violence [by protesters] was just like ...normal ...just a couple ...of troublemakers. But no-one - as the army claimed - had machine guns or started shooting as they claimed and no-one shot at the police as the state TV claimed ...It was absolutely horrific. It was something I have never seen in my life in Egypt and, to be honest, I never thought I would see such things.
"It is in the centre that the advance seems to be taking place at the moment," Peter Beaumont reports from central Sirte after visiting four locations on the front line.
I'm about a kilometre north of the hospital now, close to the new frontline. It is an area of dense housing in the middle of the city. On the east and the west the advance seems to have slowed down a bit.I'm on a crossroads with about dozen apartment houses in front of me. It is mainly foot fighters going across. There's an awful lot of fire going backwards and forwards. But they seem to be very confident now. There's a real swagger about these guys as as they are moving forward into the city. I can see one of the new Libyan flags flying from an apartment house. Yesterday I was stuck for a couple of hours about 300m or 400m from here, because they [the fighters] couldn't move. Now, if my impression is right, they seem to be swarming through these buildings at the moment.
Asked why Sirte is taking so long to fall, compared to Tripoli, Peter said:
This is a completely different order of urban fighting. That [Tripoli] collapsed very quickly indeed. This is some of the heaviest urban fighting I've seen in covering a dozen wars. Both sides now are pretty evenly matched ...Just on the corner I am on, there has been sniper fire. The previous corner I've just come from, there were two large pools of blood where a couple of the guys got hit earlier today. It relatively close quarters urban conflict.
Peter confirms that Mutassim Gaddafi is thought to be holed up in the "Dollar" district of Sirte. "It's where all the rich people live. It's a nickname the people of Sirte gave to it. They know of three or four high value assets in there [Mutassim Gaddafi; Abdullah Senussi, Gaddafi's head of intelligence; Mansour Dhao, head of Gaddafi's security brigades, and one other known as "the asset"]."
Peter could not confirm whether the police and security building had been captured by the new government forces.
New government forces continue to bombard Gaddafi loyalists in Sirte, but not all the fighters are optimistic, Javier Espinosa from the Spanish newspaper El Mundo reports on Twitter.
1 NTC fighter "I don't think we can take #Sirtebefore 1 week it's full of snipers 1 Gaddafi soldier told us they have 400" #LibyaInside #Sirte heavy shelling just now from NTC troops against city center dozens of pick-up advancing the house shaking #Libya
Here's a summary of events so far today.
Libya
• A National Transitional Council commander claims Mutassim Gaddafi is among those surrounded in the besieged city of Sirte.Gaddafi loyalists are confined to just two neighbourhoods of the city - Dollar and al-Shabiya.
• Gaddafi loyalists are putting up less resistance and the city appears on the brink of falling, according to our correspondent in the city. Most of key buildings in the city have been seized by forces loyal to the new government, Peter Beaumont reports.
• Nato continues to play a minimal role in the role in the siege of Sirte. The organisation has not confirmed that its jets hit targets controlled by Gaddafi loyalist overnight. It has only confirmed one strike against Sirte in the last week. Nato jets have continue to target Gaddafi's only other stronghold of Bani Walid.
• Moussa Koussa, Gaddafi's former foreign minister, intelligence chief and high-level defector, could move to Jordan after being spurned by Libya's rebel government. He has been granted a Jordanian passport according to al-Arab al-Youm.
Egypt
• Egypt's deputy prime minster and finance minister, Hazem el-Beblawi, has resigned over Sunday's violence. It is unclear whether the resignation will be accepted.
• Coptics Christians have begun three days of mourning for those killed in the unrest. Harrowing eyewitness testimony continues to blame the security forces for the violence. Human Rights Watch called for an independent judicial review into the role of the security services.
Egypt's deputy prime minster and finance minister Hazem el-Beblawi, has resigned, al-Jazeera television is reporting. Al-Jazeera correspondent Rawya Rageh says he has quit over the violence on Sunday. She said the resignation has not been accepted yet.
Beblawi was appointed by the ruling military council after popular protests in July. He has been negotiating with Gulf Arab states for financial assistance to support a state budget that has ballooned as a result of Egypt's political turmoil. Reuters said Beblawi could not immediately be reached for comment.
Gaddafi's son Mutassim is among those holed up in two districts of Sirte, a NTC commander told Reuters.
Colonel Mohammed Ajhseer, told the agency:
There are a few (Gaddafi-held) pockets, mainly concentrated in the 'Dollar' neighbourhood. According to the information we have, this is where Mutassim is, with another group.
Reuters has also spoken to more civilians fleeing the city:
NTC fighters surrounded their vehicles and searched them for weapons - a mark of the deep mistrust in Sirte, where many people belong to Gaddafi's tribe and opposed his overthrow."There are explosions all the time," said one woman, who was in a white van with seven children. "There is no water. There is nothing," she said, then started crying.
One man said he and his family had tried to leave the city twice before but had to turn back because they had no fuel for their car and the fighting was too heavy."We didn't know how to sleep because of the explosions. We couldn't even leave the house. There is no food. We just had flour and salt and bread," he said, as his wife, who was weeping, sat in their vehicle with their three children.On the western outskirts of Sirte, a flat-bed truck drove out carrying about 30 people, including children clutching dolls and blankets. It was raining, and they were wet and shivering.
They said they originally came from Morocco and Sudan, and had been trapped in Sirte because Gaddafi militias would not let them leave.One of them, Abdul Menem Ahmed, from Ondurman in Sudan, said he had been working as an accountant in Libya for 14 years.Local commanders say Gaddafi loyalists are holed up in a neighbourhood known as "Dollar" and another called al-Shabiya, their forces weakened after nearly two months under siege and near-constant bombardment by Nato-backed NTC forces."(I have seen) a lot of Gaddafi fighters dead and injured in the past few days," said Karim Hassan, a migrant worker from Morocco who fled the city on Tuesday.
Sherief Gaber, who was at the march of Coptic Christians in the Egyptian capital on Sunday, said that any claims the protesters started the violence was a "complete fabrication".
He provided a detailed and harrowing account of what happened:
We hadn't even reached the [state TV] building before screaming began and soldiers just came rushing at us with riot shields and batons. It was completely unprovoked from what I saw.
There were dozens of families there. There were women, children, grandparents. These were families coming out [to protest] so it was just bedlam at the beginning. Many people were screaming, women were crying and running almost immediately and add to that the fact once the beating started of sticks, within a few minutes we started hearing gunfire which it seems like - from some of the causalities I saw - were not blank rounds. They were live rounds being used very very quickly. It was an incredibly violent show of force ...it was chaos for a while.
It was absolutely enraging. Within a few more minutes people had moved backwards towards the Ramses Hilton, the large street in front of it and were setting up some barricades there to stay there. But all of a sudden several of those sort of armoured personnel carriers, driven by military personnel, started running up and down the streets through the crowds, deliberately zig-zagging and aiming at the people which was probably one of the most horrific things I've seen, if not the most horrific thing I have seen, in this revolution so far.At one point I saw some young kids running behind a car to avoid the armoured car which then ploughed over the private automobile to hit these people. It was barbaric. It was really really disgusting.It lasted for hours and hours. What brought it to and end was just [a] complete crackdown on the entire downtown area. The state TV, in addition to spreading their normal lies and propaganda was actually calling on citizens to come down and defend the army so at one point we had a mix of army and central security forces and these 'citizens', so to speak, coming and attacking us with stones, weapons, teargas. This lasted until attrition took over and people couldn't do it anymore, until everyone had been beaten out of the area.
New Reuters video shows suspected pro-Gaddafi fighters being captured in Sirte.
In the same film a local hospital surgeon describes the lack of resources and the struggle to cope with the numbers of injured people.
Photograph: Zohra Bensemra/Reuters Moussa Koussa, Muammar Gaddafi's former foreign minister, intelligence chief and high-level defector, is about to move to Jordan after being spurned by Libya's rebel government, according to reports, writes Ian Black.
According to al-Arab al-Youm, Koussa has been given a Jordanian passport. He had been living in a hotel in the Qatari capital Doha after fleeing Libya for Britain in March.Koussa's close links with British intelligence came to light in documents discovered in Tripoli after Gaddafi's fall in August.It is said that he tried to explore prospects for a role with the national transitional council but was rebuffed as being too tainted by years of loyal service to Gaddafi. Qatar, the Libyan rebels' principal Arab supporter, is also thought to have wanted him to leave Doha.
Gaddafi fighters are trying to hold their positions with very little resources, Peter Beaumont reports from Sirte.
In the second part of an interrupted call, Peter lists the gains made by forces loyal to the new government. "They have captured the Ougadougou complex, they have captured the hospital, they have captured the entire university district which I have just driven through," he says.
Gaddafi loyalists, who turned themselves in, appeared to be in a "pretty sorry state", Peter says. "They were emaciated, exhausted, defeated looking guys being driven out of the city," he says.
The fall of Sirte is inevitable now, Peter adds.
It could be tomorrow, it could be the end of the week, but I can't see it being much more long drawn than that.The residential districts are ghost towns. They are absolutely deserted.I've heard so many estimates [about the number of Gaddafi loyalists still fighting]. The top estimate I've heard is about 2,000 [fighters]. There are people saying it could be between 200 and 400.
On possible Nato air strikes, Peter says:
We heard some booms during the night which sounded louder than the usual booms. So there was some speculation that there could have been some Nato strikes last night.We hear the jets overhead, but I haven't seen a Nato strike since I've been here. I think there has been a decision made that the new Libyan government needs to do this on its own ... There is concern about the danger of civilian casualties. There is a feeling that this has to be done by Libyans for Libya.
Peter Beaumont in Sirte disputes reports that Gaddafi forces control more of the city than previously thought.
In the first part of an interrupted Satellite phone call he says Gaddafi forces are being pushed west.
"It looks as though they are squeezing them into an ever smaller pocket," Peter says.
"At the moment they [Gaddafi forces] seem to have less and less ammunition. The counter attacks when they come, I was caught in one yesterday, seem to be increasingly small affairs."
Peter said theNew York Times had overestimated the strength of Gaddafi's forces. "Most of the big buildings and big complexes have been taken, and what's left is essentially a couple of large residential neighbourhoods," he said before the phone connection was lost.
The key locations and moving battles lines in Sirte are shown on an new interactive map, put together by my colleague Paddy Allen.
