But the Nafusah Mountain range, which rises out of the desert at the Tunisian border as a sudden, hazy shadow and runs several hundred miles east in a narrow chain, is hardly a rebel stronghold. Rebel fighters in the region estimate their ranks at just a few hundred ill-equipped and untrained young men.
It came as a shock, then, when they captured a border crossing near Wazen last week, a strategic victory for the beleaguered rebel forces that thrust the desert region under the world’s gaze. Colonel Qaddafi has also turned his attention to the region, escalating a low-grade war of attrition into what may prove an important battlefront.
Having put down more serious challenges to his rule in Zawiyah and Zawarah, on the northern coast between Tripoli and Tunisia, and pulled troops out of Misurata, the second largest western city, on Saturday, Colonel Qaddafi has massed troops along the mountains and launched missiles on its towns, according to residents and rebel fighters.
The fighting has driven about 30,000 Libyans into Tunisia, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Libyans there said they had been under siege weeks before the recent escalation. Government troops have held the desert plains below the mountains since mid-March, they said, cutting off supplies of food, gasoline and medicine, and, several witnesses said, poisoning the wells of at least one town.
“He has been trying to starve us,” said Jamal Maharouk, 47, a gaunt, weathered former soldier of Colonel Qaddafi’s army, now a rebel fighter. He had driven to a Tunisian hospital in Tataouine, about 50 miles northwest of the Libyan border, to visit a young cousin wounded in battle outside the town of Zintan and secreted across the border for treatment.
Like other fighters, Mr. Maharouk insisted that rebel actions in the area were purely defensive. “By my god, these are peaceful people fighting against an evil regime,” he said.
The government denies that it has cut off food and utilities, poisoned wells or even that the refugees in Tunisia are really refugees.
Moussa Ibrahim, a spokesman for the Qaddafi government, said the refugees were lying in order to win support from NATO. He said the government had intercepted and recorded phone calls among rebels planning to stage a bogus refugee crisis by forcing members of their families to cross the border into Tunisia and report atrocities.
“They are fake refugee camps,” he said. “Qatar is paying for them.”
Before the rebels captured the border crossing at Wazen, the region seemed to hold little strategic value, raising questions about why the government would divert resources from more pressing battles elsewhere. The border crossing, which now gives the rebels a supply route in the west, may be part of the explanation.
But Colonel Qaddafi has long harbored antagonism toward the Berbers, a non-Arab ethnic group of mostly Ibadi Muslims in a country that is majority Sunni. He has accused them of being Zionists and agents of the C.I.A., said Mansouria Mokhefi, the director of the Middle East and Maghreb program at the French Institute of International Relations in Paris.
Berbers and the region in general have been largely excluded from the distribution of oil revenues, she said, and residents complain of little government investment in schools or infrastructure. “Development never came all the way to them,” she said. “They have truly lived in a sort of exclusion.”
Beyond neglect, Colonel Qaddafi has forbidden citizens from giving their children Berber names, disallowed the teaching of the Berber language in schools and banned Berber festivals and holidays. Protests in the 1990s demanding the right to practice their culture openly were put down forcibly by the police and followed by a series of public hangings, instilling a profound animosity toward the government.
Shortly after the uprising began in mid-February, Colonel Qaddafi offered the families of Zintan and other towns across the Nafusah range a bribe, residents said, a onetime payment of about $1,200 in exchange for their allegiance. Most declined.
The missile strikes began soon after.
Salim Issa, 50, an electrician, fled the town of Nalut on Friday after what he called heavy missile strikes the night before. He arrived in Medenine, Tunisia, with his wife, sister and nine of his children. Fearing for the two sons he left behind, he declined to give his full name.
He said there were rumors that loyalist forces had orders to kill everyone in the city, and that soldiers had been given Viagra and explicit orders to rape.
David D. Kirkpatrick contributed reporting from Tripoli, Libya.
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