QARYAT AZ ZURAYQ, Libya — Rebel fighters made significant gains Monday against forces loyal to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in both the western and eastern areas of the country, in the first faint signs that NATO airstrikes may be starting to strain the government forces.
A rebel has his ammunition-laden backpack secured before moving toward the battle near Ad Dafniyah, in western Libya. More Photos ?In the besieged western city of Misurata hundreds of rebels broke through one of the front lines late on Sunday, and by Monday afternoon were consolidating their position on the ground a few miles to the city’s west.
The breakout of what had been nearly static lines came after NATO aircraft spent days striking positions and military equipment held by the Qaddafi forces, weakening them to the point that a ground attack was possible, the rebels said.
While not in itself a decisive shift for a city that remained besieged, the swift advance, made with few rebel casualties, carried both signs of rebel optimism and hints of the weakness of at least one frontline loyalist unit.
Early Tuesday morning, NATO aircraft flew low and fast across Tripoli, the capital, the roar of their passage followed by several loud explosions and the rattle of antiaircraft fire. Libyan officials took foreign journalists to two bombings sites, one near the Parliament building and the other a hospital that sustained minor damage from the bombing of a government building, identified by a man in the street outside the hospital as a stronghold of the country’s intelligence service.
The bombing near the Parliament was the second at the complex in the past week and struck the same building as the previous attack. It blasted what remained of the building’s interior into a cavernous pile of crumpled concrete and steel, without any apparent casualties. Libyan officials identified the principal office there as the Center for the Study of the Green Book, a compendium of Colonel Qaddafi’s idiosyncratic political ideas. But more potential signs of loyalist weakness emerged in a battle near the eastern oil town of Brega, where rebel fighters killed more than 36 Qaddafi soldiers and destroyed more than 10 vehicles, according to a senior rebel military official, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about military operations. Six rebel fighters died in the battle, the official said, adding that the rebel troops retreated east from Brega after the attack on orders from NATO, presumably in advance of airstrikes.
While the rebels’ tally of the dead could not be independently verified, if accurate it would seem to represent — after the protracted battle for Tripoli Street in Misurata last month — one of the largest tolls of Qaddafi soldiers killed in a single battle since February. The battlefield success, if confirmed, might also signal a change in tactics — or at least fortunes — for the reorganized Free Libya Forces, as the eastern fighters now prefer to be called.
In an effort to prove their reach is nationwide, and not limited to eastern Libya, rebel leaders arranged a meeting Monday of 25 local council leaders, representing areas of central, western and southern Libya. The leaders, meeting in Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates, expressed their support for the uprising and their recognition of the rebel National Transitional Council and its leader, Mustafa Abdel-Jalil, Libya’s former justice minister.
Signs of an enemy in disarray were evident in Misurata as the rebels moved west — abandoned green uniforms, abandoned food and houses along the road with interiors full of human waste, as if the Qaddafi soldiers, under threat of air attack, had been afraid to venture outside.
Inside the shattered ruins of one compound, a petting zoo and poultry-breeding center, the unburied body of a Qaddafi soldier, at least several days old, was sprawled face down on the ground not far from a rotting ostrich, still in its cage.
The rebels had stopped in the afternoon just short of the town of Ad Dafniyah, where they took up positions with rifles and machine-gun trucks against a Qaddafi position that blocked their way.
The Qaddafi soldiers raked the air over the rebels’ heads with machine-gun fire and dropped mortar rounds, grenades from automatic launchers and rockets in the field and stands of trees around the rebels, to little effect. The rebels said they had surrounded a few holdout Qaddafi positions and would soon push on, to Ad Dafniyah.
In recent weeks, the siege of Misurata has been fought on four principal fronts — the one here is to the city’s west. The others include a wide and winding front line around the airport, which the Qaddafi soldiers still occupy, and two to the east and southeast, from where Qaddafi forces have been firing ground-to-ground rockets on the seaport, the city’s lifeline to the world.
John F. Burns contributed reporting from Tripoli, Libya, and Kareem Fahim contributed reporting from Benghazi, Libya.
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