Qaddafi’s Forces Strike With Fury as Unrest Grows

By Monday night, witnesses said, the streets of Tripoli were thick with special forces loyal to Colonel Qaddafi as well as mercenaries. Roving the streets in trucks, they shot freely as planes dropped what witnesses described as “small bombs” and helicopters fired on protesters.

Hundreds of Qaddafi supporters took over the central Green Square in the capital after truckloads of militiamen arrived and opened fire on protesters, scattering them. Residents said they now feared even emerging from their houses.

“It was an obscene amount of gunfire,” said one witness. “They were strafing these people. People were running in every direction.”

The police stood by and watched, the witness said, as the militiamen, still shooting, chased after the protesters. The death toll could not be determined.

The escalation of the conflict came after six days of revolt that began in Libya’s second-largest city, Benghazi, where hundreds of people were killed in clashes with security forces, according to witnesses. Human rights activists outside the country said they had confirmed more than 220 deaths. The rebellion is the latest and bloodiest so far of the uprisings that have swept across the Arab world with surprising speed in recent weeks, toppling autocrats in Egypt and Tunisia, and challenging others in Bahrain and Yemen.

The day had begun with growing signs that Colonel Qaddafi’s grip on power might be slipping, with protesters in control of Libya’s second-largest city, his security forces pulled back to key locations in the capital as government buildings smoldered, and a growing number of officials and military personnel defecting to join the revolt.

But the violence Colonel Qaddafi unleashed Monday afternoon on Tripoli demonstrated that he was willing to shed far more blood than the deposed rulers of either neighboring Egypt or Tunisia in his effort to hold on to power.

Two residents said planes had been landing for 10 days ferrying mercenaries from African countries to an air base in Tripoli. The mercenaries had done much of the shooting, which began Sunday night, they said. Some forces were using particularly lethal, hollow-point bullets, they said.

“The shooting is not designed to disperse the protesters,” said one resident, who wanted to be identified only as Waleed, fearing for his security. “It is meant to kill them.”

“This is not Ben Ali or Mubarak,” he added, referring to the deposed leaders of Tunisia and Egypt. “This man has no sense of humanity.”

Colonel Qaddafi, for his part, remained largely out of sight. Around 2 a.m. on Tuesday, after a rainy day, he appeared on state television for about 30 seconds, holding an umbrella up through the open door of a passenger car. He denied rumors that he had fled to Venezuela and called the cable news channels covering Libya “dogs.”

As rioters overwhelmed the streets around 1 a.m. on Monday, Colonel Qaddafi’s son, Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, delivered a rambling but bellicose speech threatening Libyans with the prospect of civil war and “rivers of blood” if they turned away from his father.

Apparently enraged by the speech, protesters converged on Green Square soon after and clashed with heavily armed riot police officers for several hours, witnesses in Tripoli said by telephone.

By dawn in Tripoli, police stations and government buildings — including the Hall of the People, where the legislature meets — were in flames. Debris fires from the rioting the night before burned at many intersections.

Most stores and schools were closed, and long lines were forming for a chance to buy bread or gas. Protesters had torn down or burned the posters of Colonel Qaddafi that were once ubiquitous in the capital, witnesses said.

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Reporting was contributed by Sharon Otterman, Neil MacFarquhar and Kareem Fahim from Cairo; Nada Bakri from Beirut, Lebanon; and Colin Moynihan from New York.

via nytimes.com