http://www.juancole.com/2011/04/misrata-reprieved.htmlThe city of Misrata, a port and steel-making city and Libya’s third-largest urban center, was sentenced to death 7 weeks ago by the Qaddafi family, which sent its armored brigades and professional snipers in to punish the entire population for having dared throw off their fascist rule by ‘revolutionary committee.’
For seven weeks, the some 400,000 people of Misrata city (there are nearly 600,000 in the province of that name) were subjected by Qaddafi brigades to tank fire, to artillery fire, to mortar fire, and to sniper fire, in a vicious, indiscriminate manner that constituted serial crimes against humanity. Hundreds have been killed, some say over a thousand, and wounded are probably three times fatalities.
Agence France Press reports that the Qaddafi brigades have been forced to withdraw to the western suburbs of Misrata. On Monday they retained the ability to rain mortar shells onto the city in their wonted indiscriminate way, killing nearly a dozen people. But for the moment, the city has been reprieved from its death sentence. People are no longer pinned down, afraid of the snipers. For the moment the danger has receded, of the city being simply crushed under Qaddafi’s jackboot.
Qaddafi’s hold on the west is precarious. His forces are being actively fought by the Berbers of the Western Mountain region, centered at Zintan. There is reportedly a strong underground resistance against him in Zawiya, which his tanks crushed in March in what was almost certainly a massacre. On Monday, the youth of the Duraibi quarter of Tripoli defied the dictator by releasing flocks of doves to signal their support of the Free Libya government based in Benghazi, according to Facebook and Twitter announcements.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
