Libyan rebels said they expected to receive heavy weapons in their battle to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi as forces loyal to him shelled the coastal city of Misrata.
Rebels have struggled for weeks to take and hold cities in central Libya, which have been the focus of most of the fighting since the uprising began in February. Opposition forces yesterday advanced once again on the oil town of Brega after four days of airstrikes by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato), al-Jazeera television reported.
The attacks on Zintan and Misrata, the main rebel-held city in the west, have made Libya’s third-largest city a symbol of the limitations of Nato’s air campaign to protect civilians. Gaddafi’s forces have fired ground-to-ground Grad rockets and cluster bombs, a type of anti-personnel munition that scatters small bomblets over a wide area, into residential areas, the New York Times and Human Rights Watch reported.
“God willing, heavy weapons will be received soon and we will take you to see them,” a spokesman for the rebels’ National Transitional Council, Abdul Hafiz Ghoga, said yesterday, declining to name any source of supply.
Ali al-Tarhouni, head of economic and oil affairs for the Libyan rebels’ National Transitional Council, said his country will be rid of Muammar Gaddafi “in a matter of weeks”.
Al-Tarhouni said in an interview in Doha that he is in Qatar seeking funding and that the rebels’ council is in preliminary talks with various unidentified parties.
Misrata shelling
Ghoga, speaking in an interview in Benghazi last night, urged Nato forced to “concentrate its strikes on the forces besieging Zintan.”
Rebels in the eastern stronghold of Benghazi are shipping food, medical supplies and weapons, including anti-tank rounds seized from Libyan army depots, to their fellow fighters in Misrata, McClatchy Newspapers reported from Benghazi.
The Obama administration is seeking a place of exile for Gaddafi, possibly in an African state that hasn’t signed a treaty that might allow Gaddafi to be turned over to the International Criminal Court in the Hague, the New York Times reported yesterday, citing three administration officials who weren’t identified by name.
