Libyan Officials Threaten to Use ‘Human Shields’

 

The warning came a day after Britain’s top general was quoted as saying that NATO would have to broaden its bombing campaign to include infrastructure targets in Libya to prevent Colonel Qaddafi from “clinging to power.”

Barely 36 hours after The Sunday Telegraph in London published its interview with Gen. Sir David Richards, Britain’s chief of the defense staff, foreign reporters in Tripoli were summoned to a news conference at which Libyan telecommunication officials announced that they would deploy human shields.

The use of human shields was a major feature of Iraq’s response to Western threats of military force after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Mr. Hussein had Western businessmen taken to oil installations and other potential targets around Baghdad, but most were released under diplomatic pressure before the brief war that ousted the Iraqis from Kuwait in 1991.

The most explicit warning that human shields could be used in Libya came from Mohammed Almaremi, the chief of one of Libya’s two cellphone companies, both controlled by Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, Colonel Qaddafi’s son and, until the rebel uprising, his expected political heir.

Mr. Almaremi said that 20,000 employees of Libyana, one of the companies, would disperse to telecommunications sites along with 20,000 members of their families, to remain there as long as the bombing continued.

“We will be human shields to face any aggression,” he said.

Mohammed ben Ayad, head of the Libyan telecommunications authority, said NATO attacks had already destroyed large parts of the country’s telecommunications network, disrupting hospitals, schools and other civilian enterprises.

Mr. Ayad said the network, one of the most advanced in the Arab world, had already suffered more than $1 billion in damage from NATO raids. In a PowerPoint display, he pinpointed areas that had taken the heaviest hits, including several in and near Surt, Colonel Qaddafi’s hometown, on the Mediterranean coast.

“From now on, employees and their families will act as human armor to protect these locations,” one slide said in English.

Some of the anger that Qaddafi loyalists have directed at the West since NATO began its airstrikes in March has drawn on a belief that Colonel Qaddafi made major efforts to prove himself a friend of the West in the past decade. He abandoned Libya’s programs to develop nuclear and chemical weapons, and opened the country to a rush of Western investment in oil, telecommunications and other sectors.

That turning toward the West came after the Libyan leader saw how quickly the American-led invasion force toppled Mr. Hussein in 2003. But now, with the United States, Britain, France and other NATO countries backing Libya’s rebels and demanding that Colonel Qaddafi quit, officials say the leader feels that his turn to the West has been rewarded by Western betrayal.

The threat to use human shields comes after a week of some of the heaviest airstrikes of the campaign. One attack was aimed at an underground command complex in Colonel Qaddafi’s compound in south-central Tripoli, with a volley of bombs aimed at the warren of tunnels and bunkers. Colonel Qaddafi surfaced a day later with an audio message broadcast on Libyan state television defying NATO and saying that he was “in a place where you can’t get me.”

Shortly before dusk on Monday, a new round of airstrikes hit the compound, but Libyan officials, often keen to take reporters to bombing sites, gave no details of what had been struck, or of any casualties.

Along with public statements of outrage about the airstrikes, there have been growing signs that they are wearing down the government’s ability to fight the war. With no air defenses, it has resorted to a propaganda campaign aimed at establishing that NATO has killed thousands of innocent people and destroyed or damaged civilian targets, including hospitals, schools, libraries, homes and guesthouses.

The campaign has faltered, with the government’s tours of the sites of airstrikes in Tripoli failing to show convincingly that there have been any significant numbers of civilian casualties. That failure has fed a growing sense of frustration among officials, who have seemed determined to convey that NATO is engaged, not in a campaign to degrade the Qaddafi government’s fighting ability, but in willful brutality against ordinary Libyans.

 

The Lede: Libyan Woman Describes Rape by Qaddafi Forces

 

Eman al-Obeidy, a Libyan woman who burst into a Tripoli hotel packed with foreign journalists in March to say that she had been raped by members of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s security forces, described her ordeal in an interview with Britain’s Channel 4 News conducted in Doha, the capital of Qatar, where she has found refuge.

Ms. Obeidy spoke to Jonathan Miller, one of the reporters who had tried to protect her from Libyan government agents in the Rixos Hotel in March.

Here is video of the interview broadcast by Channel 4 News on Monday night:

In the interview, Ms. Obeidy told Mr. Miller that she had been kidnapped and then raped by a dozen or more men, in part because they could tell from her accent and her identity card that she came from the rebellious east of the country. She said:

During the attack they insulted people from the east. I was asking them, What did I do wrong? I didn’t do anything, all I did wrong was being from the east. That was clearly stated in my I.D.

They told me, ‘Where are the men from the east? Let them come and see what we do to their women. Let them see how we rape their women, and humiliate them.’

They used weapons while having sex with me. Everything they did was bad, and they kept saying, ‘We are the Qaddafis, we will stay in power.’

 

Libyan Immigrants Becoming Italian Immigrants

Others never reached here. More than 600 died last week when their unstable boat broke apart off the Libyan coast, and three unidentified African men died off the coast of Lampedusa on Sunday during a night landing in rough waters.

Earlier this year, about 24,000 Tunisians traveled through Lampedusa, most seeking work in Europe. But now the situation has changed. More than 9,000 people have arrived from Libya since its unrest began, most of them sub-Saharan Africans and South Asians who had been working there, including more than 2,000 in the past week. Almost all are deemed refugees, and most are seeking asylum.

Italian officials and human rights workers say the sharp uptick since the end of March, when NATO took over military operations in Libya, and the fact that most of the boats, including unseaworthy ones, have left from ports in or near Tripoli, Libya’s capital, is a sign that the government of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi is turning a blind eye to — or possibly even aiding — their departure as a form of protest against the NATO bombing raids.

In an interview on Friday, Italy’s foreign minister, Franco Frattini, said that the Qaddafi government had long used immigration as a form of “retaliation toward Europe and Italy.”

“This is not an immigration to us just out of desperation, which is a constant for these people who are refugees and deserve refugee status in 95 percent of cases, but a criminal tool used by the Qaddafi regime,” Mr. Frattini told Corriere della Sera’s Web television, adding that the strategy could be used as evidence against Colonel Qaddafi in the International Criminal Court.

The surge comes at a time when Europe is increasingly divided over immigration, with right-wing parties gaining traction. On Thursday, Denmark provoked criticism and possible legal proceedings when it said it would reintroduce controls at its borders with Germany and Sweden, warning of crime spilling across.

Here in Italy, the concern is that the Libyan unrest has unraveled a 2008 bilateral treaty in which Italy pledged $5 billion over 20 years in exchange for Libya’s preventing immigrants from leaving — which it has done by means that have been criticized by human rights groups.

Some immigrants who arrived here on Sunday said that after they saw last week’s shipwreck off the Tripoli coast, they did not want to board a ship leaving Tripoli but had been forced to do so by armed men, according to Laura Boldrini, the spokeswoman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Italy.

The size of the ships arriving in Lampedusa from ports near Tripoli — some carrying as many as 800 passengers — is taken by Italian officials as another sign of Libyan complicity, or at least permission.

“It’s not that they’re put on boats, but you have to remember that ports are officially controlled by Libyan police,” Alfredo Mantica, an Italian under secretary of state responsible for relations with Europe, the Balkans and Turkey, said in a telephone interview.

“First they slept on the beach and tried to hide, and authorities pretended to check,” Mr. Mantica added. “Now there’s not even the theater of pretending there are checks.”

This week, Prime Minister Baghdadi Mahmudi of Libya said that NATO’s military intervention had prevented Libya from patrolling its coasts, as it had done under the 2008 treaty with Italy.

“We say to Europe that we can no longer do what we used to do,” The Guardian newspaper reported Mr. Mahmudi as saying. “And that’s because NATO has ruined our coastal defenses.”

But the situation appears more complicated. This week, a well-respected Italian immigration researcher wrote in the Italian newspaper L’Unità that a senior officer in the Libyan Navy, Zuhair Adam, was now helping to organize boatloads of immigrants to Italy from a military port near Tripoli. The newspaper said he had been trained by the Italian authorities in coastal patrols under the treaty.

 

Captive Soldiers Tell of Discord in Libyan Army

In interviews this week in a rebel-run detention center where more than 100 prisoners from the Libyan military are housed, the prisoners consistently described hardships in the field and officers who deceived or failed them. They spoke bitterly of their lot.

While some showed signs of mistreatment or of making statements to ingratiate themselves with their captors, the accounts of their logistical and tactical problems portrayed a Libyan force suffering from growing problems in a war that began as a mismatch, settled into stalemate and has recently shown signs of rebel advance.

On one hand, Libyan military units and militias went to war with clear material and organizational advantages, equipped with tanks, armored personnel carriers, artillery, rockets and vast stores of munitions. They arrived to battle with trained snipers and mortar, rocket and artillery crews.

On the other, the Libyan Defense Ministry thickened the ranks with veterans recalled to duty in poor physical condition and cadets with almost no combat training or experience.

Then, after facing weeks of airstrikes and a growing rebel force, some of these units were cut off, prisoners said, and officers betrayed the rank and file.

“The commanders told us, ‘Stay here and we will be back with more ammunition,’?” said a cadet who claimed to have been pressed into service as an untrained infantryman last month, and was assigned to the fight for this city’s center. “But they did not come back, and the rebels surrounded us and we had to put down our weapons and quit.”

The prisoners’ identities, which were provided by the interviewees, have been withheld to protect them and their families from retaliation.

The cadet, who had a shaved head and slender hands protruding from a long black robe, described many forms of disappointment in the Qaddafi military. At the start of the war, he said, he was a second-year cadet, and was told by his instructors that he must go serve.

His and his classmates’ first mission, he said, was to search vehicles and check identification cards at one of the country’s myriad checkpoints. There were 11 cadets at the gate of the town where he was assigned, he said.

“After a while they came and said 11 at the gate is too much,” he said. “And they took six of us and gave us Kalashnikovs and took us into Misurata.”

That was in April, when Misurata was the center of Libya’s most pitched fight, a block-by-block contest that cost the lives of hundreds of men on both sides.

Inside the city, he said, he found he was in an unknown neighborhood, hidden with others in an apartment building as rebel fighters pressed near and the Libyan Army’s lines of logistics were slowly but persistently severed behind them.

Other prisoners described constant deception by their officers.

One prisoner, a member of the 32 Reinforced Brigade of Armed People, a unit often called elite and which is led by Khamis Qaddafi, one of Colonel Qaddafi’s sons, said he was the third contingent of the brigade to be sent from Tripoli to Misurata.

The third group was sent, he said, after the first two suffered heavy casualties.

He was assigned to the insurance building, a tall office complex that gained notoriety among rebels for the snipers who watched over the streets from its many windows.

The captured soldier, scarred on the hand and wearing jeans and a gray T-shirt that read “King of the Town,” said his officers lied to him throughout, telling him he had been sent to put down a foreign-inspired jihad.

“When we came here we heard the fighters shouting all the time, ‘Allahu akbar!’?” he said. “The officers told us the enemy was Al Qaeda and other terror groups from Syria and Tunisia. But we saw that they were Libyans.”

The soldier said that he had not put on the uniform to kill Libyans, and, after listening to Qaddafi mortar crews shell the city with cluster munitions, he slipped out of the building and hid in a shop. There he waited, he said, until he heard rebels nearby. Then he surrendered, turning over his rifle and two grenades.

Other prisoners described being summoned back to duty after leaving the army two years ago, and finding once they went to battle that there were delays in evacuating the army’s wounded.

 

With Help From NATO, Libyan Rebels Gain Ground

  Bryan Denton for The New York TimesLibyan rebels in Qaryat az Zurayq fanned out in response to small-arms fire. Their force has pushed west from Misurata in the wake of NATO airstrikes. More Photos ?

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.

Land Mines Descend on Misurata’s Port, Endangering Libyan City’s Supply Route

 

The land mines were delivered by a Chinese-made variant of a Grad rocket that opens in flight and drops mines to the ground below, each slowed slightly and oriented for arming by a small green parachute, according to an identification of the sub-munitions by specialists who were provided photographs and dimensions of the weapons.

The mines hit the port at 9 or 10 p.m. Thursday, after rockets were heard being fired on the city from the southeast. A short while later, a truck driven by rebels who were patrolling the harbor struck two of them. Both men inside were wounded, according to a port supervisor and one of the victims, Faisal el-Mahrougi, the driver.

Officials and guards said more than 20 mines were distributed in the attack, and remains of at least 13 were observed firsthand. It was not possible to verify an exact number, as many had been destroyed by rebels who, to clear the mines, shot them with rifles, causing them to explode. By nightfall on Friday, the port appeared to have been cleared.

The use of mine-distributing rockets echoed the documented use of cluster bombs here, and underscored anew the Qaddafi government’s efforts to deny the use of the port to the rebels and to international aid organizations. Regarded as highly indiscriminate weapons, land mines are widely banned by the international community, though several nations, including the United States and Libya, have not signed the international convention prohibiting their production and use, and they retain land mines in their arsenals. The convention covers antipersonnel land mines, not land mines designed to destroy vehicles. However, the mine used in this attack, a Chinese Type 84 Model A, shares many of the indiscriminate characteristics of many banned mines.

The use of such mines also introduces a new menace to the city. The Type 84 Model A is fired by a mobile multiple-rocket launcher system that can carry up to 24 rockets containing 8 mines each. The system’s range is slightly more than four miles, according to a publication of Jane’s Information Group.

For months the port in Misurata, on the Mediterranean Sea at the city’s eastern edge, has been essential to the survival of the city. It has been the sole means of resupply and the only point of evacuation for migrant workers and hospital patients, who have been carried to safety by ships, tugs and fishing vessels that have dared enter its channel, at risk of facing a gantlet of fire.

The introduction of what are known as scatterable land mines also marked a fresh escalation of the munitions used by the Qaddafi forces in this siege.

Last month, during the ferocious urban battle for one the city’s main boulevards, the loyalists repeatedly struck the city with Spanish-made cluster munitions. And the city has been pounded by mortar shells, artillery and ground-to-ground rockets throughout.

Rebels have repeatedly spoken of their fears that through shelling or ground attack the loyalists will seize the harbor and try to strangle the city.

This newest threat from Chinese-made mines had not been seen before in this war.

After being released from a cargo canister while the rocket carrying them is in flight, these mines, each weighing roughly seven pounds, fall from the air with legs that extend and join underneath each mine’s body like a spike. This is designed to drive the mine into the soil and stand it roughly vertically — with a shaped charge facing upright.

Each mine has a magnetic proximity fuse set to blast the charge upward into the bottom of any metallic vehicle that passes over it. Each also has an anti-handling device, to prevent removal, and time fuse that causes the mine to self-destruct up to three days after being armed.

The identification was made using a photograph of one of the unexploded mines, along with images of parts of the remnants of several others that were destroyed either by detonating against the truck or by being struck by the rebels’ bullets.

These images were shared with several private organizations, including Human Rights Watch, and with a private-sector ordnance specialist who distributed the photographs to a network of colleagues, who confirmed the munitions’ identification.

The rebels who discovered them said they initially did not know what they were, and they said the mines had been hard to see at night, with their dark green paint. Mr. Mahrougi, the driver whose truck passed over two mines that had settled onto one of the port’s roads, does not remember seeing them as they exploded in rapid succession.

He emerged in stable condition from surgery Friday night for treatment of third-degree burns, a broken left foot and extensive fragmentation wounds to his left arm, leg, abdomen, chest and face.

Mr. Mahrougi had been examining the port’s warehouses and roads after an odd-sounding rocket strike, and amid reports that Qaddafi helicopters had been heard over the city.

“We saw some rockets, and our guards where checking,” a port supervisor said. “And then one of our trucks hit them.”

The official asked not to be identified to protect his relatives in Tripoli from retaliation from the Qaddafi government. According to the lot number stenciled in black paint on one of the mines, the munitions were manufactured in 2009.

Arms sales between China and Libya are not transparent. How and when the weapons were obtained was not immediately clear.

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U.S. Seeks to Aid Libyan Rebels With Seized Assets

And for the first time, Qatar put the question of supplying arms to the rebels on the table, but no agreement was reached.

The developments came at a meeting in Rome that appeared to bolster the NATO-led military intervention. Hosted by Italy and Qatar, it brought together officials representing two dozen NATO nations, Arab countries and international organizations.

The meeting was aimed at intensifying diplomatic and financial pressure on Colonel Qaddafi’s government. The military operation, which to critics seems stalled, has largely succeeded in its stated mission of stopping the advance of his forces but has not done enough to stop indiscriminate shelling in cities like Misurata and Zintan or to force Colonel Qaddafi to step down.

“We shall not leave a divided and insecure Libya as a playground for Qaddafi’s mercenaries,” said Italy’s foreign minister, Franco Frattini. “Our message must be that we shall keep up the pressure, using all legitimate means and with the aim also of convincing Qaddafi’s entourage to join the many who have already defected.”

Above all, the international officials said they would create a special fund of hundreds of millions of dollars to allow humanitarian and other financial assistance to flow into rebel-controlled parts of Libya despite United Nations sanctions that apply to Colonel Qaddafi’s government.

Libya’s opposition has asked for billions of dollars’ worth of help, including cash to pay salaries and provide services in the parts of the country under the control of the rebels, led by a group called the Transitional National Council.

On Thursday, Qatar’s prime minister, Sheik Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani, said that the country would put $400 million to $500 million into the fund, and that Kuwait had put in $180 million. “I don’t think we have shortage of money, we had shortage of mechanism,” Mr. Thani said. “Now, we agreed on the mechanism, that’s what was important.”

Mr. Frattini and Mr. Thani said the fund would be managed by a five-member steering board composed of three Libyans chosen by the Transitional National Council; a representative of Qatar; and a representative from either Italy or France on a six-month rotating basis.

A senior opposition official, Mahmoud Jibril, also attended the meeting in Rome and met with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. “We are more than content and satisfied with the results,” he said after the meeting.

The meeting appeared to represent a turning point in the debate over arming the rebels, which hinges on the interpretation of a United Nations resolution allowing for the self-defense of the Libyan people.

“A few weeks ago, nobody was talking about defending the Libyans or giving the means to defend themselves, but now I think that it’s more accepted,” Mr. Thani said. “Some of the countries already started this, and we support this idea that we let the Libyan people defend themselves on the ground because we cannot help them from the air.”

It is widely believed that Qatar has already supplied the rebels in eastern Libya with rifles and other light weapons.

The difficulty in providing concrete support outside of NATO air power reflects the diplomatic and legal complications and confusion that have dogged the international intervention in Libya since it began with a barrage of missile strikes on March 18.

“Clearly on our agenda is looking for the most effective way to deliver financial assets and other means of supporting and helping” the opposition’s loosely organized political and military forces, Mrs. Clinton said.

When the United Nations Security Council first imposed sanctions on Colonel Qaddafi in February, the Treasury Department seized $33 billion in assets belonging to him, his family or his aides from American financial institutions. It was the largest American seizure of foreign assets in history.

American laws, like those in Europe, prohibit simply unfreezing such assets. Mrs. Clinton said that the administration was asking Congress for legislation that would allow some of the frozen assets to help the Libyan people.

The Libyan government dismissed as illegal any American effort to give the frozen assets to the rebels, Reuters reported. “Any use of the frozen assets is like piracy on the high seas,” said Deputy Foreign Minister Khaled Kaim. The rebels are not a legal entity, he said, adding, “They are not a country.”

Several countries have pledged humanitarian aid to the provisional rebel leaders, but only France, Italy and Qatar have officially recognized them as Libya’s legitimate government. That complicates financial support to a country that remains under the United Nations sanctions, which are intended to restrict the flow of money, oil and weapons to Colonel Qaddafi.

The new fund announced here in Rome was intended to circumvent the sanctions, but the officials who gathered did not specify exactly how the fund would work. Mrs. Clinton noted that the United States had authorized $25 million in nonlethal military surplus, including uniforms, binoculars and boots, and $66 million more in humanitarian aid.

There is also the possibility that Libya will need far more aid in the near future. The World Food Program said Thursday that the country could run out of food in six to eight weeks, as the government-run distribution system crumbles. The situation could be particularly acute in the rebel-held east, the group’s executive director, Josette Sheeran, told Reuters.

Last week, a NATO strike on a military compound in Tripoli killed one of Colonel Qaddafi’s sons. Asked Thursday whether the United States would consider an operation against Colonel Qaddafi, along the lines of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, Mrs. Clinton said no.

“The best way to protect civilians is for Qaddafi to cease his ruthless, brutal attacks on the cities, to withdraw from the cities that he is attacking and leave power,” she said.

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U.S. Seeks to Aid Libyan Rebels With Seized Assets

And for the first time, Qatar put the question of supplying arms to the rebels on the table, but no agreement was reached.

The developments came at a meeting in Rome that appeared to bolster the NATO-led military intervention. Hosted by Italy and Qatar, it brought together officials representing two dozen NATO nations, Arab countries and international organizations.

The meeting was aimed at intensifying diplomatic and financial pressure on Colonel Qaddafi’s government. The military operation, which to critics seems stalled, has largely succeeded in its stated mission of stopping the advance of his forces but has not done enough to stop indiscriminate shelling in cities like Misurata and Zintan or to force Colonel Qaddafi to step down.

“We shall not leave a divided and insecure Libya as a playground for Qaddafi’s mercenaries,” said Italy’s foreign minister, Franco Frattini. “Our message must be that we shall keep up the pressure, using all legitimate means and with the aim also of convincing Qaddafi’s entourage to join the many who have already defected.”

Above all, the international officials said they would create a special fund of hundreds of millions of dollars to allow humanitarian and other financial assistance to flow into rebel-controlled parts of Libya despite United Nations sanctions that apply to Colonel Qaddafi’s government.

Libya’s opposition has asked for billions of dollars’ worth of help, including cash to pay salaries and provide services in the parts of the country under the control of the rebels, led by a group called the Transitional National Council.

On Thursday, Qatar’s prime minister, Sheik Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani, said that the country would put $400 million to $500 million into the fund, and that Kuwait had put in $180 million. “I don’t think we have shortage of money, we had shortage of mechanism,” Mr. Thani said. “Now, we agreed on the mechanism, that’s what was important.”

Mr. Frattini and Mr. Thani said the fund would be managed by a five-member steering board composed of three Libyans chosen by the Transitional National Council; a representative of Qatar; and a representative from either Italy or France on a six-month rotating basis.

A senior opposition official, Mahmoud Jibril, also attended the meeting in Rome and met with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. “We are more than content and satisfied with the results,” he said after the meeting.

The meeting appeared to represent a turning point in the debate over arming the rebels, which hinges on the interpretation of a United Nations resolution allowing for the self-defense of the Libyan people.

“A few weeks ago, nobody was talking about defending the Libyans or giving the means to defend themselves, but now I think that it’s more accepted,” Mr. Thani said. “Some of the countries already started this, and we support this idea that we let the Libyan people defend themselves on the ground because we cannot help them from the air.”

It is widely believed that Qatar has already supplied the rebels in eastern Libya with rifles and other light weapons.

The difficulty in providing concrete support outside of NATO air power reflects the diplomatic and legal complications and confusion that have dogged the international intervention in Libya since it began with a barrage of missile strikes on March 18.

“Clearly on our agenda is looking for the most effective way to deliver financial assets and other means of supporting and helping” the opposition’s loosely organized political and military forces, Mrs. Clinton said.

When the United Nations Security Council first imposed sanctions on Colonel Qaddafi in February, the Treasury Department seized $33 billion in assets belonging to him, his family or his aides from American financial institutions. It was the largest American seizure of foreign assets in history.

American laws, like those in Europe, prohibit simply unfreezing such assets. Mrs. Clinton said that the administration was asking Congress for legislation that would allow some of the frozen assets to help the Libyan people.

The Libyan government dismissed as illegal any American effort to give the frozen assets to the rebels, Reuters reported. “Any use of the frozen assets is like piracy on the high seas,” said Deputy Foreign Minister Khaled Kaim. The rebels are not a legal entity, he said, adding, “They are not a country.”

Several countries have pledged humanitarian aid to the provisional rebel leaders, but only France, Italy and Qatar have officially recognized them as Libya’s legitimate government. That complicates financial support to a country that remains under the United Nations sanctions, which are intended to restrict the flow of money, oil and weapons to Colonel Qaddafi.

The new fund announced here in Rome was intended to circumvent the sanctions, but the officials who gathered did not specify exactly how the fund would work. Mrs. Clinton noted that the United States had authorized $25 million in nonlethal military surplus, including uniforms, binoculars and boots, and $66 million more in humanitarian aid.

There is also the possibility that Libya will need far more aid in the near future. The World Food Program said Thursday that the country could run out of food in six to eight weeks, as the government-run distribution system crumbles. The situation could be particularly acute in the rebel-held east, the group’s executive director, Josette Sheeran, told Reuters.

Last week, a NATO strike on a military compound in Tripoli killed one of Colonel Qaddafi’s sons. Asked Thursday whether the United States would consider an operation against Colonel Qaddafi, along the lines of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, Mrs. Clinton said no.

“The best way to protect civilians is for Qaddafi to cease his ruthless, brutal attacks on the cities, to withdraw from the cities that he is attacking and leave power,” she said.

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Hague Court Seeks Warrants for Libyan Officials

Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the prosecutor, appeared in a briefing before the United Nations Security Council, which had unanimously called for a criminal investigation of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s use of force against civilians. Mr. Moreno-Ocampo said the evidence supporting charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity included the shooting of peaceful protesters, followed by weeks of systematic persecution, including murder, imprisonment and torture.

“War crimes are apparently committed as a matter of policy,” the prosecutor said. He went on: “The evidence shows that events in neighboring Egypt and Tunisia prompted Libyan security forces to begin preparations for the possibility of demonstrations in Libya. As early as January, mercenaries were being hired and brought into Libya.” Other violations, Mr. Moreno-Ocampo said, included preventing the wounded from receiving medical care; arresting, torturing and raping perceived opponents of the Qaddafi government; and the use of cluster bombs, mortars and other heavy weapons in crowded urban areas.

The prosecutor said that “efforts to cover up the crimes” — removing bodies from hospitals and preventing doctors from documenting the dead and wounded — had made it difficult to establish the number of victims. But he said 500 to 700 died from shootings in February, before full-fledged fighting broke out between the government and hastily assembled rebel forces.

“Shooting at protesters was systematic,” he said.

Lawyers familiar with the investigation said that the first arrest warrants were likely to focus on the initial violent clampdown on protesters. Mr. Moreno-Ocampo would not comment on whether the indictments involved Colonel Qaddafi or any of his sons, at least three of whom hold military positions.

The prosecutor said the Libyans had raised the issue of the killing of civilians by NATO air strikes since NATO began bombing in March. But he said he was still waiting for more information, including the results of a fact-finding mission by the Human Rights Council, before deciding whether to include NATO actions in the scope of his inquiry.

Mr. Moreno-Ocampo said his office was also looking into violence on the insurgent side, including the killing of prisoners. He cited violence by mobs in Benghazi and other rebel-held cities against sub-Saharan Africans, seen as pro-Qaddafi mercenaries, who had been “unlawfully arrested, mistreated and killed.” Some of them, he said, were said to have been arrested by “the new authorities in Benghazi,” and their fates were unclear.

Fearful of being attacked, many migrants from nations like Chad, Niger and Sudan made a panicked exodus toward the Egyptian border. Angry crowds attacked housing complexes where sub-Saharan Africans lived, though other Libyans stepped in to shield the migrants from abuse.

At the Security Council on Wednesday, the Russian ambassador, Vitaly Churkin, said Moscow was concerned by the mounting toll of civilians, which he described as the responsibility of all parties involved, including NATO. “Actions by NATO-led coalition forces also lead to civilian casualties,” he said. “It is clear that violence can only be halted through an immediate cease-fire and political settlement.”

Other ambassadors said prosecuting war crimes in Libya would send a message to the rest of the region, particularly Syria, that attacks on civilians were unacceptable. Western diplomats have said it could lead to defections of Qaddafi officials and military personnel.

In Misurata, Libya, the coastal city besieged by Qaddafi forces, an international aid ship risked attack by entering the port and evacuating migrant workers who had been trying to leave Libya. Colonel Qaddafi’s military has vowed to prevent ships from entering the port, and tried mining the harbor and shelling the port with artillery and ground-to-ground rocket barrages.

As the ship arrived, more rockets struck near the port, hitting migrant workers waiting to board. The barrage killed a man, a woman, a small boy and a girl.

Dr. Hassan Malitan, who worked at a clinic, vented his anger. The neighborhood has been struck repeatedly by rocket fire, and civilians have been killed. “This is the real Qaddafi,” he said.

The ship departed quickly, taking hundreds of frightened workers out of the city on the beginning of the passage to the rebel capital, Benghazi.

A chief opposition spokesman there, Abdul Hafidh Ghoga, said a large explosion on Wednesday night near the courthouse had been an accident, not a deliberate act, as previously suspected.?Mr. Ghoga said a car owner had left a gelatin explosive in the vehicle, which detonated.?

The explosive is widely used for fishing and, increasingly, for the city’s frequent parades and celebrations.?Ten people were wounded in the blast.?

Marlise Simons reported from Paris, and Neil MacFarquhar from the United Nations. C. J. Chivers contributed reporting from Misurata, Libya, and Kareem Fahim from Benghazi, Libya.

 

Hidden Workshops Add to Libyan Rebels’ Arsenal

Now they roam the streets as a paramilitary force built around hastily armored trucks that have been fitted with captured machine guns set on crude turrets and mounts.

The transformation, evident in an offensive late last month that chased many of Colonel Qaddafi’s forces from Misurata’s center to its outskirts, is in part the result of a hidden side of this lopsided ground war: a clandestine network of rebel workshops, where these makeshift weapons have been designed, assembled and pushed out.

The workshops are officially a rebel secret. But for three days journalists for The New York Times were granted access to two of them, on the condition that their exact locations not be disclosed and that no photographs be taken of their entrances.

On display inside were both the logistics and the mentality of the seesaw fight for Libya’s third-largest city. In Misurata, an almost spontaneously assembled civilian force has managed, alone along Libya’s central and western stretch of Mediterranean coast, to withstand a sustained conventional attack from an army with all the arms and munitions an oil state can buy.

In these places — the fledgling war industry for a force that regards itself as a democratic insurgency — weapons manufactured in cold war-era factories to be operated remotely on aircraft and tanks have been modified for manual use.

Four-door civilian pickup trucks have been converted to sinister-appearing armored vehicles. And conventional munitions designed for one thing — land mines and tank shells, for which the rebels have little use — have been converted to other types of lethal arms.

The rebels remain ill equipped and materially outmatched. Some of their production is of questionable value. But they have acquired a collective sense that, to drive back the Qaddafi troops, any contribution matters.

And there is no question that their fighting power has grown. For the beleaguered residents, just as war can be fought with rifles, it can be waged with hammers, grinders and lathes.

“If we had enough weapons, I would not be here,” said Ahmed Shirksy, a welder fitting an armored plate to a pickup truck’s bed on Monday morning, as shells fell in neighborhoods nearby. “I would be fighting at the front lines, with two of my sons.”

Around Mr. Shirksy were the assignments of the day — four civilian pickup trucks in various states of conversion to fighting machines. There was also a pair of long sawhorses serving as a workstation for modifying heavy machine guns.

Here Omar el-Saghier, 30, puzzled over a .50-caliber machine gun that had no manual trigger. Asked what kind of machine gun he was working on (it appeared to be an FN Herstal M3M, designed for aircraft), he allowed himself a smile and answered in English.

“I don’t know, exactly,” he said.

But Mr. Saghier had figured out how to make it work. And by using a set of machinist’s tools and scraps and sheets of steel, he was midway through designing and creating a custom trigger, so that this weapon might be fired by a man standing at a turret in the back of a pickup truck.

Another team beside him was making a rotating pedestal mount for the weapon. A third team was fitting a set of metal plates to the truck that would, before the day’s end, become part of the rebels’ fleet.

These armor-clad gun trucks, typically painted black and often with their taillights and turn signals removed or painted over so they are more difficult to spot, are the signature weapon of the Misurata rebels.

The exact quantity that have been made is not known, said Bashir el-Zargani, who supervises the workshops.

“We have been too busy to count them,” he said.

But judging from the number seen racing through the city each day, and at Misurata’s many fronts, the total easily exceeds 100, and might be more than twice that.

The pickup trucks are only one of the workshops’ products.

 

Fighting Flares on 2 Fronts in Libyan City

Government forces attacked a convoy of rebel fighters and supply trucks at the checkpoint at Wazen in midmorning, said Tarek Bodrani, the fighter, who was reached by telephone. Mr. Bodrani said a pro-Qaddafi force with about 30 vehicles struck from the north and south, and seven pickup trucks carrying antiaircraft machine guns followed rebels toward the Tunisian town, Dhiba, roughly three miles away.

One government pickup truck crashed and the others were stopped, and the pro-Qaddafi soldiers were detained after being confronted by a roadblock operated by the Tunisian military and local residents. Col. Ahmed Omar Bani, a rebel spokesman, said Colonel Qaddafi’s forces fired mortar shells onto Tunisian soil during the chase.

Outraged Tunisian officials summoned a Libyan envoy to complain about the incursion, Al Jazeera reported. Libyan ordnance reportedly fell in Tunisian territory on Thursday as well, when fighting for control of the Wazen post began, wounding some civilians and potentially further imperiling the Libyan government, which is already fighting on multiple fronts and facing a NATO air campaign.

The rebels had captured the post with hopes of opening a supply route for opposition fighters battling Colonel Qaddafi’s troops in Libya’s western mountains. The fate of that ambition is now unclear, as was the status of the captured Libyan soldiers.

In Libya’s most violent area, in the besieged coastal city of Misurata, fighting erupted across a broad front along the city’s south and west, as rebel fighters pressed toward the city’s airport and faced a fresh ground attack on their western flank.

The fighting in Misurata began early in the morning and raged throughout the day. The city’s edge became a cacophony of machine-gun and mortar fire, punctuated by the rolling explosions of ground-to-ground rocket strikes in neighborhoods behind the front lines.

As the two sides fought, Misurata’s troubles appeared to deepen further as NATO said that pro-Qaddafi forces had been caught Friday mining the waters around the harbor to harass traffic from the sea, which has been the sole lifeline for a city otherwise cut off by loyalist ground troops.

Three mines were discovered and were being disposed of, NATO said in a statement, adding that the devices were being laid two to three kilometers offshore when the inflatable boats on which they were being carried were deliberately sunk.

At least one vessel with humanitarian aid scheduled to enter the port on Friday delayed its arrival and waited off the coast for an all-clear sign from NATO, medical officials in the city said.

Supplies from the sea have been integral to the city’s survival during the two-month siege, as internationally chartered aid ships have delivered food, water, medicine and ambulances, and evacuated thousands of migrant workers and many wounded Libyans in need of treatment not available in the city.

A flotilla of rebel fishing vessels and tugboats have also smuggled in weapons, ammunition and other military equipment, allowing the sparsely supplied rebels to push forward against Colonel Qaddafi’s conventionally equipped troops.

The fighting on two fronts in the Misurata area on Friday appeared to signal simultaneous thrusts, in different places — one by the rebels and the other by loyalist troops.

The loyalists, backed by at least three tanks, struck first, trying to push into and through the village of Zawit al-Mahjoub early in the morning, fighters and medical officials said. The rebels repelled the attack, but not before three tanks entered the village, six rebel fighters were killed and at least 10 more were wounded, a doctor treating them said.

As the battle in the village continued, rebel groups were pushing southward toward the airport, which is still held by the loyalists, and meeting stiff resistance from Colonel Qaddafi’s troops dug in around the airfield or garrisoned within.

By midmorning, a large battle had been joined, and mortar fire was landing, in explosion after explosion, near rebels clustered and hiding in buildings and behind walls.

C. J. Chivers reported from Misurata, and Scott Sayare from Tunis. Stephen Castle contributed reporting from Brussels, and Kareem Fahim from Benghazi, Libya.

 

THE GUANTÁNAMO FILES: Libyan, Once a Detainee, Is Now a U.S. Ally of Sorts

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DARNAH, Libya — For more than five years, Abu Sufian Ibrahim Ahmed Hamuda bin Qumu was a prisoner at the Guantánamo Bay prison, judged “a probable member of Al Qaeda” by the analysts there. They concluded in a newly disclosed 2005 assessment that his release would represent a “medium to high risk, as he is likely to pose a threat to the U.S., its interests and allies.”

Abdul-Hakim al-Hasadi is a rebel fighter in Libya.

These articles are based on a huge trove of secret documents leaked last year to the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks and made available to The New York Times by another source on the condition of anonymity.

Editors and reporters who worked on these articles will be answering select questions about the coverage of the material.

In order to view this feature, you must download the latest version of flash player here.

Today, Mr. Qumu, 51, is a notable figure in the Libyan rebels’ fight to oust Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, reportedly a leader of a ragtag band of fighters known as the Darnah Brigade for his birthplace, this shabby port town of 100,000 people in northeast Libya. The former enemy and prisoner of the United States is now an ally of sorts, a remarkable turnabout resulting from shifting American policies rather than any obvious change in Mr. Qumu.

He was a tank driver in the Libyan Army in the 1980s, when the Central Intelligence Agency was spending billions to support religious militants trying to drive Soviet troops out of Afghanistan. Mr. Qumu moved to Afghanistan in the early 1990s, just as Osama bin Laden and other former mujahedeen were violently turning against their former benefactor, the United States.

He was captured in Pakistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, accused of being a member of the militant Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, and sent to Guantánamo — in part because of information provided by Colonel Qaddafi’s government.

“The Libyan Government considers detainee a ‘dangerous man with no qualms about committing terrorist acts,’?” says the classified 2005 assessment, evidently quoting Libyan intelligence findings, which was obtained by The New York Times. “?‘He was known as one of the extremist commanders of the Afghan Arabs,’?” the Libyan information continues, referring to Arab fighters who remained in Afghanistan after the anti-Soviet jihad.

When that Guantánamo assessment was written, the United States was working closely with Colonel Qaddafi’s intelligence service against terrorism. Now, the United States is a leader of the international coalition trying to oust Colonel Qaddafi — and is backing with air power the rebels, including Mr. Qumu.

The classified Guantánamo assessment of Mr. Qumu claims that he suffered from “a non-specific personality disorder” and recounted — again citing the Libyan government as its source — a history of drug addiction and drug dealing and accusations of murder and armed assault.

In 1993, the document asserts, Mr. Qumu escaped from a Libyan prison, fled to Egypt and went on to Afghanistan, training at a camp run by Mr. bin Laden. At Guantánamo, Mr. Qumu denied knowledge of terrorist activities. He said he feared being returned to Libya, where he faced criminal charges, and asked to go to some other country where “You (the United States) can watch me,” according to a hearing summary.

Nonetheless, in 2007, he was sent from Guantánamo to Libya and released the next year in an amnesty for militants.

Colonel Qaddafi has cited claims about Mr. Qumu’s past in statements blaming Al Qaeda for the entire Libyan uprising. American officials have nervously noted the presence of at least a few former militants in the rebels’ ranks.

The walls of buildings along the road into Darnah are decorated with the usual anti-Qaddafi and pro-Western slogans, in English and Arabic, found all over eastern Libya. But there are notable additions: “No Qaeda” and “No to Extremism.”

Darnah has reason to be touchy. The town has a long history of Islamic militancy, including a revolt against Colonel Qaddafi’s rule led by Islamists in the mid-1990s that resulted in a vicious crackdown. Activists from here are credited with starting the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which later announced that it was affiliating with Al Qaeda, and which sent militants like Mr. Qumu to fight in Afghanistan.

Most famously, though, Darnah has a claim to being the world’s most productive recruiting ground for suicide bombers. An analysis of 600 suicide bombers in Iraq by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point found that of 440 who listed their hometowns in a recruiting roster, 52 were from Darnah, the most of any city, with Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, 40 times as populous, as the next biggest source, sending 51.

In addition to Mr. Qumu, local residents say the Darnah Brigade is led by Abdul-Hakim al-Hasadi, another Libyan thought to be a militant who was in Afghanistan during the Taliban’s rule, when Al Qaeda had training camps there.

Mr. Qumu did not turn up for a promised interview last week, but Mr. Hasadi did, in crumpled fatigues with a light beard and a lazy left eye, perpetually half-closed. He denied that Mr. Qumu was in his group, recently renamed the Martyrs of Abu Salim Brigade, after a prison in Tripoli where 1,200 inmates were slaughtered in 1996. Two of Mr. Qumu’s sons are in his brigade, he said.

“I don’t know how to convince everyone that we are not Al Qaeda here,” Mr. Hasadi said. “Our aim is to topple Qaddafi,” he added. “I know that you will never believe me, but it is true.”

For now, Western observers in Benghazi, the temporary rebel capital 180 miles from here, seem content to accept those assurances. “We’re more worried about Al Qaeda infiltration from outside than the indigenous ones” one said. “Most of them have a local agenda so they don’t present as much as a threat to the West.”

Rod Nordland reported from Darnah, and Scott Shane from Washington. Kareem Fahim contributed reporting from Benghazi, Libya.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: April 26, 2011

A picture caption on Monday with an article about Abu Sufian Ibrahim Ahmed Hamuda bin Qumu, a former inmate at the Guantánamo Bay prison who is now a notable figure in the Libyan rebels’ fight to oust Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, misidentified the subject of the picture. It was Abdul-Hakim al-Hasadi, whom local residents identified as another leader of the rebel group known as the Darnah Brigage — not Mr. Qumu. (Mr. Hasadi, in an interview, denied that Mr. Qumu was in the group.)

 

Libyan Rebels Say They Have Control of Misurata

 

Government spokesmen asserted that Libyan forces had withdrawn from the city voluntarily on Saturday to allow for a 48-hour cease-fire, during which tribal leaders could negotiate the rebels’ surrender.

There was no sign of a cease-fire, however, or negotiations.

The shelling diminished Sunday, but it still killed eight people and wounded 38, according to a rebel spokesman in Misurata, reached by Internet telephone and identified only as Mohammed for his security. On Saturday, as government forces withdrew, he said, 36 people were killed and more than 100 were wounded.

Mohammed said that among those killed Saturday night was his father, Ali. He said his father died along with a cousin who was trying to rescue him when their neighborhood came under heavy shelling.

“The shelling was unprecedented yesterday, both in the intensity and the size of the shells,” he said Sunday, describing the bombardment as using heavy artillery, Grad missiles and Katyusha rockets.

Mohammed said he continued to work as a spokesman after burying his father on Sunday. “It is very tough, but we are in a war and it’s my duty, it’s my way of taking revenge for my father,” he said.

Rebel leaders disputed claims that forces loyal to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi had withdrawn voluntarily, insisting that they had been defeated in battle.

Besieged by government forces for the past two months, Misurata is the third largest city in Libya and the only major rebel stronghold in the west. Mohammed said the rebels had captured 180 government soldiers in the past week of fighting and were treating them as prisoners of war.

“They even left their wounded behind,” said Jalil el-Gallal, spokesman for the rebels’ de facto governing body, the Transitional National Council. “They were fleeing, not withdrawing.”

Mr. Gallal and Mohammed said rebel forces had taken complete control of the city, and accounts from journalists there generally confirmed that account. “There are none and absolutely none of them in the city now,” Mohammed said of Colonel Qaddafi’s troops.

A reporter for the British newspaper The Guardian reported seeing six destroyed tanks in the vegetable market, the scene of particularly heavy fighting last week. The market was where the first American Predator strike in Libya took place on Saturday.

The Guardian also confirmed that the last two buildings held by Qaddafi forces in the city on Saturday had been cleared, and that green Libyan military uniforms had been found that were discarded by retreating troops.

A ship chartered by the International Organization for Migration arrived in Benghazi on Sunday from Misurata, carrying 995 more stranded migrant workers, most of them from Niger, as well as 17 wounded civilians.

The organization said it planned to make at least two more trips into Misurata to rescue 1,500 more migrants, many of whom have been camped near the port in hopes of fleeing. The group said that it expected that other migrants who had been hiding in parts of the city previously controlled by Colonel Qaddafi’s forces might swell that number, now that they could move safely.

In all, the migration group has gotten 4,100 migrant workers from 21 nations out of Misurata.

In Benghazi, the rebel capital, opposition leaders were upbeat about their financial situation. While they have not yet gained access to $30 billion in Libyan money in frozen accounts abroad, as some countries have suggested they should, they have found donors to tide them over.

On Sunday, officials announced that Kuwait had donated about $180 million to the governing council. And Wahid Bugaighis, the interim government’s oil minister, said that while the rebels had not been able to pump any oil from fields in eastern Libya, Qatar had stepped in with an open-ended commitment to finance their fuel and energy needs “with whatever we need during this transition period, with no fees attached.”

 

Libyan Forces Withdraw From a Besieged City, and the Rebels Wonder Why

  Government troops retreated to the outskirts of Misurata under rebel fire? and the opposition claimed victory after officials in Tripoli decided to pull back forces loyal to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.

BENGHAZI, Libya — Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s forces have withdrawn from most of the besieged city of Misurata, rebel spokesmen and independent observers said Saturday, but they continued to fire artillery barrages into the heart of the city, with heavy loss of life.

Captured soldiers loyal to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in a pick-up truck outside Misurata hospital on Saturday.

Rebel leaders were puzzling over whether the move was an abrupt change in their fortunes, a subterfuge by pro-Qaddafi forces who might return in plainclothes under the guise of a tribal conflict, or a redeployment to new fronts in the mountains along the western border with Tunisia.

Rebels in Misurata, speaking over Internet phone, said that Colonel Qaddafi’s soldiers had disappeared from all but two buildings, where they were besieged while rebels demanded their surrender. Captured Libyan soldiers told Reuters that they had been ordered to withdraw, which would correspond to a plan the government announced Friday to turn the fighting there over to tribal supporters.

NATO announced that the first airstrike by a Predator drone had taken place in the Misurata area, and rebels said it destroyed government tanks stationed at the city’s vegetable market, which had been heavily contested just the day before.

Rebels were encouraged by Saturday’s developments and celebrations broke out in the provisional rebel capital of Benghazi, in the east, but there were no celebrations in Misurata, where hundreds have been killed in two months of violence. On Saturday, doctors said 24 had died and 70 were wounded, most of them civilians caught in artillery barrages.

Libya’s deputy foreign minister, Khaled Kaim, announced Friday night that the Libyan army would turn the battle for Misurata over to area tribes, some of which may have historical rivalries with the people of the city. One rebel said they already feared that the Qaddafi government was trying to inflame tribal animosities by telling residents of the nearby cities of Zliten and Bani Walid that their relatives had been killed by Misurata residents.

Many of the Qaddafi soldiers engaged in the Misurata siege came from the tribes centered in Zliten and Bani Walid, which dominate the Qaddafi military, so substituting armed tribe members for uniformed soldiers may amount to little more than discarding the uniforms.

Such a move could also be a tactic to evade NATO attacks by blending in with civilians. A rebel spokesman in Misurata, identified only as Mohammed for his personal safety, said he had seen three government tanks destroyed by the Predator attack. NATO however said the drone had struck a rocket-launching vehicle.

The Qaddafi forces may also be moving away from Misurata to combat an escalating battle on the mountainous Western border with Tunisia, where for three days rebels have held control of the strategic border crossing of Wazen.

Still, a government siege that has pounded the city with rockets, mortar shells and sniper fire for nearly two months, taking hundreds of lives, appeared to have been broken, and the rebels took the news as an important defeat for Colonel Qaddafi’s forces.

“What we are hearing from Misurata is very positive,” said Jalil el-Gallal, a spokesman for the rebels’ Transitional National Council, their de facto government in Benghazi.

Government soldiers captured in Misurata on Saturday said they had been in the process of retreating when they were taken by rebel forces. “We have been told to withdraw,” a wounded Libyan soldier, Khaled Dorman, told Reuters. “We were told to withdraw yesterday.”

Mr. Gallal denounced the move as an attempt by the Qaddafi government to provoke a tribal conflict, which he said was bound to fail. “Qaddafi is trying to project the view they are leaving it to the tribes, which is a great concern to us,” he said. “It is a familiar tactic that he has used for a long time, but I think people understand now that he wants to start a tribal war.”

Mr. Gallal said that much of the long-range artillery used by the Libyan military against rebel forces in Misurata had been based in neighboring towns like Tarhuna and Zliten, where rival tribes are based, in an effort to stir up tribal animosity.

“It won’t work,” he said. “Any city he will withdraw from he won’t be able to control again. It’s suicidal on his part.”

Rod Nordland reported from Benghazi, Libya, and David D. Kirkpatrick from Tripoli. Scott Sayare contributed reporting from the Dhiba Border Crossing, Tunisia, and Thom Shanker from Washington.

 

The Lede: April 15 Updates on Mideast Protests and Libyan War

 

On Friday, The Lede is following the war in Libya and protest movements across the Middle East and North Africa. Updates below mix alerts on breaking news with reports and observations from journalists and bloggers in the region. For a summary of the latest developments in Syria, read the frequently updated main news article from my colleagues Liam Stack and Katherine Zoepf.
Video posted online by Syrian activists is said to show protests continuing in Damascus, the capital, on Friday night.

Despite the fact that Internet use is monitored and limited in Syria, activists again managed to upload dozens of video clips of protests to Facebook and YouTube on Friday.

On Thursday, one of the activists involved in the effort to document the demonstrations told Reuters that a network of citizen journalists in Syria has been using secure connections and satellite telephones to get the video out. The activist, who goes by the name Abu Adnan, explained in an interview from Syria that the work was extremely dangerous: “Four friends of mine died. One was in Douma [a Damascus suburb], filming with me. A sniper on rooftop chose him. He could have chosen me. One was executed after he refused to stop on his motorcycle. One was arrested and released dead and one was shot in Dara’a.”

Still, the activist argued, the work he and his friends are doing is necessary because Syria’s state-controlled media is “fabricating what is happening in Syria.”

While interested observers outside of Syria are paying quite a lot of attention to the video of protests and clashes appearing on YouTube and Facebook, the 80 percent of Syria’s population without Internet access is more likely to be hearing Syrian state television’s very different explanation of what is happening in the country.

On Thursday, the man in charge of Syria’s state media, Adnan Hassan Mahmoud, was named President Bashar al-Assad’s information minister.

Under his guidance, Syria’s state media has continued to insist that the unrest has been entirely generated by a foreign conspiracy.

On Wednesday, as the state news agency’s English-language Web site reported, Syrian state television broadcast what it called confessions from members of a terrorist cell. Three Syrian men featured in the report said that they had been paid to sow unrest in Syria by a Lebanese politician, Jamal al Jarra, who also supplied them with weapons and told to shoot demonstrators in order to frame the Syrian security forces.

Mr. Jarra, who immediately denied the allegations, is a member of the Lebanese Parliament and of a party led by former Prime Minister Saad Hariri, whose anti-Syrian father, Rafik Hariri, was assassinated in 2005.

Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Syrian state television claimed this week that these three men had confessed to receiving weapons and instructions to cause unrest in Syria from a Lebanese politician.

The purported leader of the terror cell claimed that an intermediary for the Lebanese politician had agreed “to provide us with a car resembling that of the security forces, in addition to highly sophisticated telephones. We assigned someone with the task of taking photos [of] the injured and the killed people and sending the photos directly to the so-called al-Thawra Web site (Revolution) on Facebook.” He added that his “armed group” was instructed “to appear as police officers or security members when we will attack … and we must kill people.”

Another member of the group, who said that they had also been tasked with stirring up protests, said that they did so by paying people to attend, insisting that, “most people who are going out for demonstrations are doing so, because they are paid money.”

The Lede is signing off for the evening but will continue to cover the protest movements sweeping the Middle East and North Africa in the days and weeks ahead. In the meantime, please visit the home page of NYTimes.com to read reports from my colleagues in the region. Thanks for your comments and tips.

Video posted online by Syrian activists appears to show protesters fleeing in the coastal city of Latakia on Friday as the security forces opened fire.

This clip, which ends with graphic images of a man who appears to have been shot and killed, begins with marchers suddenly scattering as gunshots are heard:

In this clip, also said to have been filmed in Latakia on Friday, protesters appear to take cover as gunshots are fired:

The daughter of a prominent human rights activist in Bahrain wrote on Friday that she will not stop a hunger strike she began this week.

As The Lede reported on Tuesday, Zainab Alkhawaja, whose father, husband and brother-in-law were all arrested in a predawn raid last week, began a fast on Monday. She reiterated on Friday that she intends to eat nothing until her family members are released from custody.

Ms. Alkhawaja, who has documented the protest movement in Bahrain on her Angry Arabiya Twitter feed, posted a series of updates on the social network on Friday in which she explained that she been feeling “dizzy and weak and having a lot of pain.” She added that, under pressure from her family, she would start “be drinking 1 glass of sugar water a day,” but would continue not to eat until her family members are released by Bahrain’s government.

That Ms. Alkhawaja’s strike has caught the attention of the foreign media – earlier this week she was interviewed by several news organizations, including The Guardian and The Associated Press – has clearly upset some supporters of Bahrain’s monarchy who use the Web to make their case. After The Lede communicated with her via Twitter this week, several users of the social network posted nearly identical messages attacking this blog’s author. Some of the same people posted similar attacks on Robert Booth, a Guardian journalist who has been writing about Ms. Alkhawaja.

Another Bahraini blogger even resorted to the tactic of setting up an “AngryArabyia” Twitter account, which is a parody version of Ms. Alkhawaja’s Twitter feed, using the same cartoon icon as the original and a slight misspelling her user name. That mock feed is a stream of vicious attacks on the hunger striker, mixed with obscene and off-color jokes implying that Ms. Alkhawaja is a phony. It also employs a backdrop of hamburgers to taunt the hunger striker.

As my colleagues Liam Stack and Katherine Zoepf report, protest marches in several parts of Syria on Friday were reportedly met with tear gas, beatings and gunfire.

These video clips are said to have been filmed as the security forces fired shots to prevent protesters from crossing a bridge into Abasseyeen Square in the heart of Damascus:

This video is said to show a large number of protesters heading into Damascus from a suburb earlier in the day:

This video is said to have been filmed in Darayya, another Damascus suburb on Friday:

This video, which Syrian activists said was filmed on Friday in the coastal city of Latakia, appears to show the security forces on the streets, as protesters chant; “Peaceful! Peaceful!”

According to the activist who uploaded this clip, which begins with graphic images of a dead or badly wounded man, it was filmed in Latakia on Friday as protesters were dispersed by gunshots:

At the end of this clip, which is said to show the body of a dead protester being carried from a street in Latakia on Friday, a man in plan clothes who appears to be with the protesters is carrying a rifle:

Video of more peaceful protests was also posted on Facebook and YouTube by Syrian activists on Friday.

This clip appears to show a large protest in the southern city of Dara’a, where dozens of protesters have been killed since the unrest began:

This video is said to show a large rally in the town of Jassem, outside Dara’a:

These clips are said to show a large number of protesters on the streets of Homs, in central Syria:

According to the activist who writes on Twitter as Anonymous Syria, this video shows protesters destroying the country’s biggest statue of Hafez al-Assad, the father of Syria’s current president, in Al Rastan, outside Homs:

These two clips are said to show protesters in the village of Bayda, in northwestern Syria – in the second, they chant: “The people want to topple the regime!”

Don’t miss a new report from Misurata by my colleague C.J. Chivers, which begins:

Military forces loyal to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, who have surrounded this city and vowed to crush its anti-Qaddafi rebellion, have been firing into residential neighborhoods with heavy weapons, including cluster bombs that have been banned by much of the world and ground-to-ground rockets, according to the accounts of witnesses and survivors and physical evidence on the ground.

Such “indiscriminate” weapons, which strike large areas with a dense succession of high-explosive munitions, by their nature cannot be fired precisely, and when fired into populated areas place civilians at grave risk.

Mr. Chivers, a former soldier who has written extensively about weapons, has been posting images of the arms used in Libya on his own Web site, CJChivers.com.

This video, showing some of the physical destruction to Misurata caused by weeks of shelling by government forces, was posted online by Libyan activists this week:

As we noted in our previous update, Tarek Shalaby, an Egyptian activist and blogger, has been documenting a protest by Coptic Christian in Cairo’s Tahrir Square on Bambuser, a video-streaming site.

Mr. Shalaby, who was among the activists who camped in the square during the protests against Hosni Mubarak, explains on Twitter that he is observing the Copts’ protest in good revolutionary company. He is accompanied by his sister, Nora Shalaby, another Egyptian revolutionary, their cousin Muhammed Radwan, an Egyptian-American who was detained in Syria last month while observing a protest there, and a friend, Adel Abdel Ghafar, who drove to Libya to deliver medical supplies to the eastern city of Benghazi in the first days of that uprising.

All four of the activists have been posting updates on the march on their Twitter feeds.

Tarek Shalaby, an activist and blogger, is transmitting live video of a new protest by Egyptian Christians taking place right now in Cairo’s Tahrir Square from his phone using the video streaming service Bambuser:

Other clips of the protest, shot within the past hour, are archived on Mr. Shalaby’s Bambuser channel.

As my colleagues Liam Stack and Katherine Zoepf report, “Protesters gathered again in large numbers in cities across Syria on Friday to demand reforms, defying a nationwide crackdown in which dozens of demonstrators have been killed in regular rounds of gunfire from security forces.”

Although severe restrictions on independent reporting in Syria have limited the number of foreign observers of the unrest there, Syrian activists have become adept at recording and posting video of the protests online. Dozens of clips, all said to have been shot in cities and towns across Syria on Friday, have already been posted on Facebook pages and YouTube channels maintained by opponents of President Bashar al-Assad’s ruling Baath Party.

Given the restraints placed on journalists by Syria’s government, The Times cannot confirm the authenticity of this video, but we invite readers who are familiar with Syria to help us annotate these clips by posting comments in the thread below. If you see a landmark that you can identify, hear a chant that is interesting, or see any detail that might suggest that a clip was not recorded on Friday, please let us know.

According to Wissam Tarif, a Syrian human rights activist, thousands of protesters from suburbs of the capital, Damascus, tried to march to the city center, but were dispersed by the security forces.

This video, posted on the Sham News YouTube channel, is said to show protesters outside a mosque in Damascus, following Friday prayers:

This video is said to show marchers from two suburbs, Harasta and Douma, meeting up:

This clip is said to show protesters in Harasta destroying an image of Syria’s president on a billboard:

This video is said to have been shot during a march in Erbeeen, outside Damascus:

According to the activists who run the Sham News Network YouTube channel, this video was filmed on Friday in Hama, a Syrian city where at least 10,000 people were killed in 1982, during an uprising against the rule of Hafez al-Assad, the current president’s late father:

Another YouTube blogger, who uses the name Abobakersyria, posted this video , described as a protest in the northern city of Aleppo, with a message asking fellow activists to bring it to the attention of journalists:

This video, said to show protesters at a funeral in the northwestern city of Baniyas on Friday, was one of two dozen clips uploaded to the Syrian Free Press YouTube channel:

As The Lede reported on Wednesday, women and children from a village outside Baniyas, Bayda, marched to the main coastal highway outside the city that day to demand the release of hundreds of the town’s men, who had been detained in connection with unrest in Baniyas.

On Thursday, Mr. Tarif, the Syrian rights activists, posted a link on Twitter to this video, said to show the brutal treatment of the men of Bayda by Syrian security forces on Tuesday:

 

The Lede: April 15 Updates on Mideast Protests and Libyan War

 

On Friday, The Lede is following the war in Libya and protest movements across the Middle East and North Africa. Updates below mix alerts on breaking news with reports and observations from journalists and bloggers in the region. For a summary of the latest developments in Syria, read the frequently updated main news article from my colleagues Liam Stack and Katherine Zoepf.
Video posted online by Syrian activists is said to show protests continuing in Damascus, the capital, on Friday night.

Despite the fact that Internet use is monitored and limited in Syria, activists again managed to upload dozens of video clips of protests to Facebook and YouTube on Friday.

On Thursday, one of the activists involved in the effort to document the demonstrations told Reuters that a network of citizen journalists in Syria has been using secure connections and satellite telephones to get the video out. The activist, who goes by the name Abu Adnan, explained in an interview from Syria that the work was extremely dangerous: “Four friends of mine died. One was in Douma [a Damascus suburb], filming with me. A sniper on rooftop chose him. He could have chosen me. One was executed after he refused to stop on his motorcycle. One was arrested and released dead and one was shot in Dara’a.”

Still, the activist argued, the work he and his friends are doing is necessary because Syria’s state-controlled media is “fabricating what is happening in Syria.”

While interested observers outside of Syria are paying quite a lot of attention to the video of protests and clashes appearing on YouTube and Facebook, the 80 percent of Syria’s population without Internet access is more likely to be hearing Syrian state television’s very different explanation of what is happening in the country.

On Thursday, the man in charge of Syria’s state media, Adnan Hassan Mahmoud, was named President Bashar al-Assad’s information minister.

Under his guidance, Syria’s state media has continued to insist that the unrest has been entirely generated by a foreign conspiracy.

On Wednesday, as the state news agency’s English-language Web site reported, Syrian state television broadcast what it called confessions from members of a terrorist cell. Three Syrian men featured in the report said that they had been paid to sow unrest in Syria by a Lebanese politician, Jamal al Jarra, who also supplied them with weapons and told to shoot demonstrators in order to frame the Syrian security forces.

Mr. Jarra, who immediately denied the allegations, is a member of the Lebanese Parliament and of a party led by former Prime Minister Saad Hariri, whose anti-Syrian father, Rafik Hariri, was assassinated in 2005.

Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Syrian state television claimed this week that these three men had confessed to receiving weapons and instructions to cause unrest in Syria from a Lebanese politician.

The purported leader of the terror cell claimed that an intermediary for the Lebanese politician had agreed “to provide us with a car resembling that of the security forces, in addition to highly sophisticated telephones. We assigned someone with the task of taking photos [of] the injured and the killed people and sending the photos directly to the so-called al-Thawra Web site (Revolution) on Facebook.” He added that his “armed group” was instructed “to appear as police officers or security members when we will attack … and we must kill people.”

Another member of the group, who said that they had also been tasked with stirring up protests, said that they did so by paying people to attend, insisting that, “most people who are going out for demonstrations are doing so, because they are paid money.”

The Lede is signing off for the evening but will continue to cover the protest movements sweeping the Middle East and North Africa in the days and weeks ahead. In the meantime, please visit the home page of NYTimes.com to read reports from my colleagues in the region. Thanks for your comments and tips.

Video posted online by Syrian activists appears to show protesters fleeing in the coastal city of Latakia on Friday as the security forces opened fire.

This clip, which ends with graphic images of a man who appears to have been shot and killed, begins with marchers suddenly scattering as gunshots are heard:

In this clip, also said to have been filmed in Latakia on Friday, protesters appear to take cover as gunshots are fired:

The daughter of a prominent human rights activist in Bahrain wrote on Friday that she will not stop a hunger strike she began this week.

As The Lede reported on Tuesday, Zainab Alkhawaja, whose father, husband and brother-in-law were all arrested in a predawn raid last week, began a fast on Monday. She reiterated on Friday that she intends to eat nothing until her family members are released from custody.

Ms. Alkhawaja, who has documented the protest movement in Bahrain on her Angry Arabiya Twitter feed, posted a series of updates on the social network on Friday in which she explained that she been feeling “dizzy and weak and having a lot of pain.” She added that, under pressure from her family, she would start “be drinking 1 glass of sugar water a day,” but would continue not to eat until her family members are released by Bahrain’s government.

That Ms. Alkhawaja’s strike has caught the attention of the foreign media – earlier this week she was interviewed by several news organizations, including The Guardian and The Associated Press – has clearly upset some supporters of Bahrain’s monarchy who use the Web to make their case. After The Lede communicated with her via Twitter this week, several users of the social network posted nearly identical messages attacking this blog’s author. Some of the same people posted similar attacks on Robert Booth, a Guardian journalist who has been writing about Ms. Alkhawaja.

Another Bahraini blogger even resorted to the tactic of setting up an “AngryArabyia” Twitter account, which is a parody version of Ms. Alkhawaja’s Twitter feed, using the same cartoon icon as the original and a slight misspelling her user name. That mock feed is a stream of vicious attacks on the hunger striker, mixed with obscene and off-color jokes implying that Ms. Alkhawaja is a phony. It also employs a backdrop of hamburgers to taunt the hunger striker.

As my colleagues Liam Stack and Katherine Zoepf report, protest marches in several parts of Syria on Friday were reportedly met with tear gas, beatings and gunfire.

These video clips are said to have been filmed as the security forces fired shots to prevent protesters from crossing a bridge into Abasseyeen Square in the heart of Damascus:

This video is said to show a large number of protesters heading into Damascus from a suburb earlier in the day:

This video is said to have been filmed in Darayya, another Damascus suburb on Friday:

This video, which Syrian activists said was filmed on Friday in the coastal city of Latakia, appears to show the security forces on the streets, as protesters chant; “Peaceful! Peaceful!”

According to the activist who uploaded this clip, which begins with graphic images of a dead or badly wounded man, it was filmed in Latakia on Friday as protesters were dispersed by gunshots:

At the end of this clip, which is said to show the body of a dead protester being carried from a street in Latakia on Friday, a man in plan clothes who appears to be with the protesters is carrying a rifle:

Video of more peaceful protests was also posted on Facebook and YouTube by Syrian activists on Friday.

This clip appears to show a large protest in the southern city of Dara’a, where dozens of protesters have been killed since the unrest began:

This video is said to show a large rally in the town of Jassem, outside Dara’a:

These clips are said to show a large number of protesters on the streets of Homs, in central Syria:

According to the activist who writes on Twitter as Anonymous Syria, this video shows protesters destroying the country’s biggest statue of Hafez al-Assad, the father of Syria’s current president, in Al Rastan, outside Homs:

These two clips are said to show protesters in the village of Bayda, in northwestern Syria – in the second, they chant: “The people want to topple the regime!”

Don’t miss a new report from Misurata by my colleague C.J. Chivers, which begins:

Military forces loyal to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, who have surrounded this city and vowed to crush its anti-Qaddafi rebellion, have been firing into residential neighborhoods with heavy weapons, including cluster bombs that have been banned by much of the world and ground-to-ground rockets, according to the accounts of witnesses and survivors and physical evidence on the ground.

Such “indiscriminate” weapons, which strike large areas with a dense succession of high-explosive munitions, by their nature cannot be fired precisely, and when fired into populated areas place civilians at grave risk.

Mr. Chivers, a former soldier who has written extensively about weapons, has been posting images of the arms used in Libya on his own Web site, CJChivers.com.

This video, showing some of the physical destruction to Misurata caused by weeks of shelling by government forces, was posted online by Libyan activists this week:

As we noted in our previous update, Tarek Shalaby, an Egyptian activist and blogger, has been documenting a protest by Coptic Christian in Cairo’s Tahrir Square on Bambuser, a video-streaming site.

Mr. Shalaby, who was among the activists who camped in the square during the protests against Hosni Mubarak, explains on Twitter that he is observing the Copts’ protest in good revolutionary company. He is accompanied by his sister, Nora Shalaby, another Egyptian revolutionary, their cousin Muhammed Radwan, an Egyptian-American who was detained in Syria last month while observing a protest there, and a friend, Adel Abdel Ghafar, who drove to Libya to deliver medical supplies to the eastern city of Benghazi in the first days of that uprising.

All four of the activists have been posting updates on the march on their Twitter feeds.

Tarek Shalaby, an activist and blogger, is transmitting live video of a new protest by Egyptian Christians taking place right now in Cairo’s Tahrir Square from his phone using the video streaming service Bambuser:

Other clips of the protest, shot within the past hour, are archived on Mr. Shalaby’s Bambuser channel.

As my colleagues Liam Stack and Katherine Zoepf report, “Protesters gathered again in large numbers in cities across Syria on Friday to demand reforms, defying a nationwide crackdown in which dozens of demonstrators have been killed in regular rounds of gunfire from security forces.”

Although severe restrictions on independent reporting in Syria have limited the number of foreign observers of the unrest there, Syrian activists have become adept at recording and posting video of the protests online. Dozens of clips, all said to have been shot in cities and towns across Syria on Friday, have already been posted on Facebook pages and YouTube channels maintained by opponents of President Bashar al-Assad’s ruling Baath Party.

Given the restraints placed on journalists by Syria’s government, The Times cannot confirm the authenticity of this video, but we invite readers who are familiar with Syria to help us annotate these clips by posting comments in the thread below. If you see a landmark that you can identify, hear a chant that is interesting, or see any detail that might suggest that a clip was not recorded on Friday, please let us know.

According to Wissam Tarif, a Syrian human rights activist, thousands of protesters from suburbs of the capital, Damascus, tried to march to the city center, but were dispersed by the security forces.

This video, posted on the Sham News YouTube channel, is said to show protesters outside a mosque in Damascus, following Friday prayers:

This video is said to show marchers from two suburbs, Harasta and Douma, meeting up:

This clip is said to show protesters in Harasta destroying an image of Syria’s president on a billboard:

This video is said to have been shot during a march in Erbeeen, outside Damascus:

According to the activists who run the Sham News Network YouTube channel, this video was filmed on Friday in Hama, a Syrian city where at least 10,000 people were killed in 1982, during an uprising against the rule of Hafez al-Assad, the current president’s late father:

Another YouTube blogger, who uses the name Abobakersyria, posted this video , described as a protest in the northern city of Aleppo, with a message asking fellow activists to bring it to the attention of journalists:

This video, said to show protesters at a funeral in the northwestern city of Baniyas on Friday, was one of two dozen clips uploaded to the Syrian Free Press YouTube channel:

As The Lede reported on Wednesday, women and children from a village outside Baniyas, Bayda, marched to the main coastal highway outside the city that day to demand the release of hundreds of the town’s men, who had been detained in connection with unrest in Baniyas.

On Thursday, Mr. Tarif, the Syrian rights activists, posted a link on Twitter to this video, said to show the brutal treatment of the men of Bayda by Syrian security forces on Tuesday: