Moises Saman for The New York TimesResidents of Mizhda stood inside a burned-out home that Libyan government officials claimed was evidence of civilian areas being targeted by Western airstrikes in late March. The government claims were impossible to verify independently.TRIPOLI, Libya – In March 2003, the Pentagon described its airborne onslaught on Baghdad at the outset of the campaign to topple Saddam Hussein as one intended to provoke “shock and awe.”
NATO, less inclined to the macho in its pronouncements, has chosen the code name Operation Unified Protector for its airstrikes on Tripoli and other Libyan cities still controlled by Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. The term refers to the United Nations Security Council’s Resolution 1973, approved in mid-March, which NATO’s 28 member states have cited as the legal basis for strikes the alliance says are aimed at protecting Libyan civilians.
But for reporters living for the second time in eight years under a nightly fusillade of bombs and missiles, it is a case, in many respects, of back to the future. Once more, we live in a city under bombardment by nations that many of us call home. Once more, we spend many of our late nights on the roof of a city-center hotel, listening for the roar of jet engines from unseen aircraft and missiles somewhere in the skies above.
Then comes the same back-to-front sequence, learned in high school science classes years ago: First, traveling at the speed of light, the gigantic orange-red bursts of flame on the horizon; second, carried at the speed of sound, the earsplitting blasts of the explosive impacts. Next, the gray-black plumes of smoke curling into the sky, followed, after a delay, by the sound of sirens from emergency vehicles hastening to the scene.
There is, too, the ground fire; in Baghdad more than in Tripoli, volleys of automatic rifle and antiaircraft fire, mostly unthreatening to the attacking aircraft because of the prior destruction of command centers and air-defense radars that sit, twisted and blackened, on heights around the two capitals. Beyond this, in Tripoli, sometimes only minutes after the bombs and missiles have exploded, comes a fresh staccato of automatic-rifle and machine-gun fire from districts across the city.
These clattering exchanges, one fusillade prompting another, suggest that the anti-Qaddafi underground may be profiting from the confusion caused by the bombing to attack checkpoints and watchtowers guarding key intersections and buildings. Government officials are evasive when asked. But local people, emboldened to speak when no minders are present, say the underground, pervasive in some of the more restive districts, organizes hit-and-run attacks in the wake of the airstrikes, before melting back into the alleyways of neighborhoods like Tajoura, Feshloom and Souk al-Juma.
Moises Saman for The New York TimesA Libyan girl stood near the pockmarked wall of a home on the outskirts of Tripoli.These are districts that rose up in protest against Colonel Qaddafi in the revolt’s early stages in February, only to fall back into a sullen vigil, with thousands of men and youths imprisoned, or press-ganged into service with pro-Qaddafi militias, according to accounts from some who live in the districts. Like much else in Tripoli, where official eyes and ears are never far away, and reporters know that they can put Libyans at risk simply by talking to them with no minders present, these accounts are beyond corroboration. But they are powerful nonetheless for what they convey of a seemingly widespread anti-Qaddafi feeling in a city whose 2.5 million residents represent more than 40 percent of the Libyan population.
To live under the airstrikes, for weeks at a time, is a through-the-looking-glass experience. In the era of smart weapons, of course, it is nothing like the Blitz that British cities experienced in World War II, or the area-bombing by Britain and the United States that killed a million or more Germans. Those are embedded in my consciousness as the son of a Royal Air Force night-fighter pilot who crisscrossed the murky winter skies over Britain in the winter of 1940-41 looking for German Junkers and Dornier bombers, and later served as a NATO officer in the 1950’s at bases near the Ruhr cities flattened by British bombs.
That terror, with tens of thousands of casualties in a single night, was of a magnitude that caused one of the most celebrated reporters and editors in the history of The New York Times, James Reston, to tell me of his own experience of nighttime bombing as a young reporter in London. Scotty, as he was known, was recovering in a Beijing hospital from an emergency operation in 1971 when he told me of the writer’s block he endured after his first, mind-numbing night as a reporter under the Luftwaffe Blitz in that winter of 1940-41.
He told me his problem was solved when the London bureau chief at the time suggested that he sit down and write a letter to his wife telling of the horrors he had seen, the inferno and the rubble and mass deaths, then pulled the first sentences from the Reston typewriter, blue-penciled the endearments and returned the typescript, saying – in words to that effect, as I recall them now — “There’s your story.”
Nothing under the bombs in Tripoli is remotely comparable. For a start, it is not mass bombing. In Brussels, the NATO count of “strike sorties” since the attacks began 10 weeks ago stood on Wednesday at 3,521, a count of the total number of missions, though not of strikes, since an undisclosed number of missions, NATO officials say, are aborted before the bombs or missiles are launched. Of these, perhaps a third to a half have been aimed at targets around Tripoli, which has been subjected to intensifying attacks in the past month as part of NATO’s strategy of trying to force Colonel Qaddafi into exile.
Earlier this week, the Qaddafi government offered, for the first time, its own tally of civilian casualties. Moussa Ibrahim, the government spokesman, said 718 civilians had been killed and 4,067 injured, 433 of them seriously, between the first strikes on March 19 and May 26. He offered no count of military casualties, saying the Libyan Army had declined to provide them because of “intelligence and security concerns.” He attributed the civilian casualty count to a hospital-by-hospital tally, but said the Health Ministry official responsible for compiling the figures was unavailable because he was away from Tripoli “on business.”
Bryan Denton for The New York TimesIn rebel-held Misurata, a gravedigger laid out boxes for dead government soldiers near some that had already been filled.Watching the airstrikes, nobody could be unsympathetic to the Libyan soldiers in the cross hairs of the missiles and bombs, some of them 2,000-pound “paveway” bunker-busters that sound like the orchestration of Judgment Day as they make impact. Leaflets dropped by NATO over military targets warn the soldiers — many of them conscripts — of what awaits them if they don’t defect. Copies of the leaflets posted on the NATO Web site, in English, include one that shows a Libyan tank caught in the cross hairs of a bomb, alongside a missile-carrying Predator drone. “You are no match for NATO’s superior weapons systems and air power,” the leaflet says. “Continuing to man your posts and equipment will result in your death.”
But NATO and the Qaddafi government have identified the fate of civilians as the crucial issue, one that could determine how long NATO can continue the bombing, and even the outcome of the war. NATO has justified the strikes as a means of “providing protection to the civilian population” against the Qaddafi government’s “brutal and indiscriminate” use of heavy weapons, as a NATO spokesman, Wing Commander Mike Bracken, put it a briefing on Tuesday for reporters in Naples, Italy. Calling that a lie, the Qaddafi government has repeatedly said, as Mr. Ibrahim did on Tuesday, that NATO, with its overwhelming military power and its “evil” intent to control Libya’s oil, is making civilians targets to spread panic and undermine a government that has held power for 40 years.
Tripoli officials have also accused the Benghazi-based rebels of killing “thousands and thousands” of civilians in battles for cities like Benghazi, Brega and Misurata. But it has only rarely given a breakdown of the casualties. Likewise, it has repeatedly denied rebel claims — and Western media reports — that the Qaddafi forces have caused widespread casualties and destruction, especially in the protracted battle for the port city of Misurata, where rebel advances last month turned the city into the westernmost stronghold of the rebel forces, only 130 miles from Tripoli.
Rodrigo Abd/Associated PressRebels on the front line aimed their machine guns toward Colonel Qaddafi’s forces in Misurata.Calling its attacks “precision strikes,” NATO has said it takes exhaustive measures to avoid hitting civilians, to the extent of calling off attacks when aircraft approach targets with civilians in the area; alliance spokesmen have also challenged the Qaddafi government to provide proof, not just propaganda, to support its claims of civilian deaths and injuries. In its own daily tally, NATO specifies targets’ military significance, as it did in a Wednesday briefing in Naples that listed the sites hit overnight as a “vehicle storage facility” and “surface-to-air missile launcher” in Tripoli, an “ammunition storage facility” near the town of Mizdah and an “ammunition storage facility” and “fire control radar” near the town of Hun.
For foreign reporters in Tripoli, sorting truth from fiction is a challenge. The propaganda value of the airstrikes is evident in the haste with which Libyan officials summon us to board a bus for the sites of strikes, sometimes within 15 minutes of an attack. Once or twice, the bus has stopped short of the impact point, reporters still aboard, before returning after half an hour or so to the hotel, causing some to question whether the purpose was to deter a second-wave attack by having a civilian presence in the area visible to an overhead surveillance aircraft or drone.
The suggestion that reporters could be serving as “human shields” has been vehemently denied by Libyan officials, who note that they commonly board the bus themselves, sharing whatever risk there might be. Their indignation is part of a broader tone set for the trips, captured by the deeply impassioned response of organized bands of Qaddafi supporters who materialize quickly at the site of the strikes, even in the predawn hours, waving green Libyan flags and portraits of Colonel Qaddafi, rhythmically chanting their fealty — “God, Muammar, Libya, Only!” — and reaching crescendos of anger, hysteria even, that are focused on Western reporters.
The trips to the bombing sites form the core of Colonel Qaddafi’s propaganda message, along with lengthy news conferences featuring Libyan tribal leaders and groups of incensed Qaddafi loyalists from abroad, most often left-wingers from the United States, Britain and France, the nations leading the NATO effort. Officials present these visitors as “fact finders” who can carry back to the West the truths about Colonel Qaddafi’s popularity with Libyans and the barbarity of NATO that they say the mainstream Western media, with its reporters in Tripoli, have willfully failed to transmit.
But mainly, it is through the airstrikes that the colonel’s message is transmitted. The common pattern has been to take reporters to a site, declare it to have been civilian in nature, and declaim against NATO’s inhumanity. But often, the buildings involved appear to have been empty when hit, with no obvious sign — ambulances, corpses, pools of blood — that there were any casualties at all. This appeared to be the case last month when a NATO strike obliterated a multistory building in the city center that housed the government’s main anticorruption agency.
In the predawn hours, there was no mention of deaths or injuries, and no sign of them. But when reporters were taken back to the building several days later, an official, Othman Baraka, said that the agency had been busy “24/7,” with scores of staff members working through the night on corruption cases involving some of the rebel leaders in the east, and that they had suffered multiple casualties. Initially, he said “more than 25” had been injured, but he adjusted the figure later to 54, with 25 seriously wounded. Curiously, given the government’s emphasis on civilian deaths, he refused to say how many had been killed. “The point is not how many are missing or killed,” he said. “The point is NATO’s evil and unjustified aggression.”
The destruction of the corruption agency — and there seemed little doubt that was what it was, with stacks of dust-covered files and part-burned documents tracing the progress of investigations — appeared to demonstrate another feature of the bombing, and of official Libyan reaction to it. Often, the sites to which reporters have been taken — the corruption agency, a hospital, a school, even a patch of parkland beside a children’s playground — appear to have been hit by shock waves or shrapnel from direct hits on targets nearby, or to have been linked in some way to the principal targets by underground passages and bunkers. The playground, in Colonel Qaddafi’s Bab al-Aziziya command compound, was less than 150 feet away from a water-filled crater blasted by a bomb that appeared to have been successfully aimed at an extensive underground bunker complex. There seemed little doubt, as the Libyans claimed, that the target had been Colonel Qaddafi.
Mr. Baraka conceded at one point that a building across the street from the corruption agency was an intelligence headquarters; it, too, had been destroyed. On a middle-of-the-night visit to the Tripoli Burns and Cosmetic Surgery Hospital, doctors led reporters indignantly to dangling roof tiles and shattered windows caused by the shock wave from a missile or bomb, but shook their heads unknowingly when asked about a blackened building visible through palm trees 150 yards away that appeared to have been the bomb’s target. Eventually, a man standing among others in a silent crowd nearby stepped forward, pointed to the building, and mouthed one word, “mukhabarat,” meaning the secret police.
Mohamed Messara/European Pressphoto AgencySmoke rose above buildings in Tripoli early Tuesday.In the heaviest bombing yet in Tripoli, early last week, 28 bunker-busting bombs struck what NATO described as a “vehicle storage facility” adjacent to the Bab al-Aziziya compound. Libyan officials identified the target as a camp for civilians serving as a sort of home guard, but said the camp was empty. A few days later, on another Bab al-Aziziya visit, the concrete revetments hit by the NATO strikes, blackened and punctured by explosions, were visible behind high walls. Libyan officials showed reporters three male corpses in the Tripoli Central Hospital, all with big shrapnel injuries to their heads, and said they were civilians on guard duty at the time of the strikes. There was, as usual, no way of verifying who the men were, or how they died.
In a previous strike on Bab al-Aziziya, on April 30, Libyan officials took reporters to a building reduced to rubble and said that Seif al-Arab el-Qaddafi, a son of the Libyan leader who spent much of his life in Europe, had been killed, along with three Qaddafi grandchildren. A funeral followed, with the principal mourner the Qaddafi son who was long thought to be his father’s political heir, Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi. NATO officials have questioned whether there was any proof of the identity of the man who died in the strike. But that, too, has enraged Libyan officials, who have accused NATO of lying, and of disrespect for the dead.
Whatever the claims and counterclaims, one certainty is that the bombing has caused widely divergent reactions. Reporters strolling without a government minder through the Medina, the Ottoman heart of Tripoli, with its ancient mosques and winding, whitewashed alleyways, have become accustomed to occasional shouts of Qaddafi loyalists against the bombing. “Down Obama! Down Sarkozy! Down Cameron!” they cry, referring to President Obama, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain. But others, and there appear to be many more of them, speak openly of their support of NATO, and even of the bombing, saying that it will hasten the end of Colonel Qaddafi’s rule.
“Pinpoint! Pinpoint!” one old African man said, using what appeared to be one of his few words in English, after decades living in Tripoli. “Pinpoint good!” A similar point was made by the driver of a battered taxi who drove reporters back to their hotel, offering a running commentary in Arabic that hailed the NATO attacks. Taking both hands off the wheel as he careered through traffic, he pointed first to the sky, making a gesture of bombs falling, then put both hands together beside his head, suggesting a sound night’s sleep uninterrupted by fears of an errant strike. “100 percent!” he said. “100 percent!”
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