Gen Tahir Guinassou:
CEMGA Gen Tahir Wodji
CEMGA Adj UFDD Soumaine Boloki
A hasty retreat by Libyan rebels over the past two days adds to growing doubts about whether they can fight all the way to Tripoli without the arms and other military supplies they now request with increasing urgency.
Rebels lost about 300 kilometres of a key desert highway on Tuesday and Wednesday, falling back under a rain of missiles and artillery from Colonel Moammar Gadhafi’s forces. The rebel leadership blamed the arrival of fresh reinforcements, saying that Chad’s military supplied about 3,200 to 3,600 well-equipped troops now threatening rebel towns. Other loyalists are now advancing along with the Chadian military, the colonel said, blasting lightly armed rebels with 155-millimetre howitzers and Grad multiple-rocket launchers.
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Barack Obama has already authorized covert U.S. action in Libya, and coalition allies are considering arming the rebels. But doing so, or actively co-ordinating air strikes with rebel offensives, would further invite the possibility of foreign countries becoming involved in a protracted military effort that isn’t certain to succeed.
“This is kind of a stalemate back and forth,” James Clapper, the top U.S. intelligence official, told senators earlier this month, before the United Nations authorized the air strikes, “but I think over the longer term that the [Gadhafi] regime will prevail.”
Back at the Libyan rebel headquarters in Benghazi, there was something theatrical about the way a rebel military spokesman stood under the glare of television lights in his neatly pressed uniform and kicked off the announcement Wednesday of his forces’ withdrawal.
Colonel Ahmed Omar Bani fiddled with a microphone that popped and squealed, then waited for a moment of quiet. “Even if it leaves a bad taste in your mouth, the truth must be told,” he said, facing journalists from around the world in a Benghazi hotel. “Regarding the disintegration of our forces at the front, they dissolved much like snow in the sand.”
For the moment, rebels appear to have resorted to a strategy that worked for them in recent days: pull back and wait for air strikes. When asked how the rebels would tackle Col. Gadhafi's forces, Col. Bani referred to last week’s defence of Benghazi as a “glorious” model of resistance.
That battle saw a ragtag mob of volunteers, some of them armed with nothing but knives or Molotov cocktails, swarming Col. Gadhafi’s tanks as they rolled into the outskirts of eastern Libya’s biggest city.
The rebel version of history holds that these brave warriors repelled the regime’s forces several hours before the arrival of French warplanes on March 19. Whatever the timing, the charred ruins of military vehicles at the edge of the city suggest that air power decided the battle.
That pattern repeated again several days later, after rebels chased Col. Gadhafi’s men to the outskirts of Ajdabiya. Amateur fighters in pickup trucks, jury-rigged into rolling gun platforms with 14.5mm machine guns, found themselves no match for professional soldiers with heavy weapons. They did not advance into Ajdabiya until foreign jets pounded their enemies from the sky.
But as the rebels chased Col. Gadhafi's men further along the coast toward the regime stronghold of Sirte, they learned that air support would not suffice. Not only did they risk house-to-house fighting in a place where foreign jets would be reluctant to drop bombs; politically, they risked being viewed as aggressors if they were not welcomed by tribal factions that remain, for now, loyal to Col. Gadhafi.
The rebel leadership has refused to say whether their withdrawal was intended to draw out their opponent, luring Col. Gadhafi's men into a fight in the broad expanses of open desert where they would be vulnerable to bombings. The military spokesman in Benghazi would only describe the retreat as “tactical,” and fighters streaming back from the front have talked about a chaotic pullback without any hallmarks of an organized manoeuvre.
Whether the rebels planned it or not, however, the new alignment of forces leaves Col. Gadhafi once again stretching his troops across a barren landscape with almost no place to hide.
Foreign jets took advantage of that vulnerability on Wednesday night, as air strikes reportedly sent up plumes of smoke in the desert west of Ajdabiya.
The rebels appear to understand that air power will not be enough to get them all the way to Tripoli, however, and their calls for armaments and logistical support have becoming increasingly vocal.
They are trying to train new forces to improve their ground strength, especially because Col. Gadhafi has started fielding newly configured units – referred to as “battle wagons,” civilian vehicles filled with soldiers – that will be difficult for NATO aircraft to spot.
The rebels also remain concerned about Col. Gadhafi’s tanks, about 200 of which are modernized variants of the Russian T-72, because they lack weapons to punch through their armour.
“We are facing tanks, artillery, Grad rocket launchers,” Col. Bani said. “What types of weapons are used to destroy such things? This is what we need.”
