In Libya, More Novice Soldiers in Defense of Qaddafi

Now Refat, who was not fully identified because of the fear of retribution from Libyan security forces, is patrolling the rebellious neighborhood of Souq al-Juma wearing a mismatched uniform, riding in a small white government car and worried for his life each night because of the growing number of rebel attacks within the capital on soldiers like him.

Just last Thursday, he said, four armed rebels ambushed a group of his fellow soldiers at a checkpoint, killing another amateur soldier named Walid, a 20-year-old student, and leaving another in the hospital.

“We are afraid,” Refat said. “We are standing under the light and they come from the darkness.”

Novice soldiers like Refat, whose account provided the first confirmation of widespread rebel reports of their nocturnal guerrilla attacks, appear to be an increasingly important part of the Qaddafi government’s defense against potential insurrection in Tripoli, the Libyan capital. The professional soldiers of the Qaddafi militias who once cruised the streets of neighborhoods like Souq al-Juma in their white Toyota pickup trucks, he said, have all been called away to fight on the front lines near Misurata, the Nafusa Mountains or the eastern oil city of Brega.

As anxiety hung over the capital Friday on the four-month anniversary of the start of the Libyan uprising, Refat was patrolling the streets with another amateur soldier, a petroleum engineer in civilian life, under the supervision of an older, nonuniformed leader who made his living as a teacher.

“No one has a gun or a Kalashnikov,” Refat said, to prove the degree of calm in the neighborhood as he gave a tour to a pair of foreign journalists picked up for roaming the city without an official minder.

With rumors of a planned rebel attack or demonstration, though, security was tight. Foreign journalists were almost completely barred from leaving their hotel until after 4:30 p.m., and two who did slip out briefly in the morning reported seeing truckloads of riot police officers. To counter any potential opposition, the government organized a rally by thousands of Qaddafi supporters for much of the day in the city’s central Green Square — the largest such demonstration here in several weeks.

Loudspeakers and state television broadcast a defiant recorded message from Colonel Qaddafi. “NATO will be defeated,” he predicted, calling the rebels challenging his rule “sons of dogs.” (On Thursday, he delivered a radio address in the city of Bani Walid, urging residents to march together against the rebels based in Misurata.)

A few hours earlier, NATO jets had again buzzed the city and dropped bombs in broad daylight, increasing the tension. One large explosion south of the city sent a thick cloud of black smoke snaking over the skyline.

About 100 miles to the east, Qaddafi forces remained locked in battle with rebels attempting to advance from Misurata toward the barracks town of Zlitan. The Associated Press reported that rebel fighters and a woman living nearby had been killed when the Qaddafi forces fired Grad rockets and artillery at the rebels’ front lines.

In Tripoli, the streets of Souq al-Juma were full of what appeared to be plainclothes police officers and security agents — several ultimately came forward to confer with the soldiers — and some residents said they were afraid to be seen talking to reporters.

For a while, a group of young men smoking shisha pipes under a tree at a roadside cafe whispered of their nightly battles with Qaddafi forces, their gratitude for the NATO bombing and their hopes that rebel fighters would eventually reach the capital. When a reporter mimicked a popular Qaddafi slogan, a young man replied with a stony look, saying, “Don’t say that here! You are in Souq al-Juma!” And he insisted that even beyond the neighborhood, “90 percent” of Tripoli residents want Colonel Qaddafi to go.

Then another group of men pulled up chairs. The first group turned anxious and silent. And then the newcomers explained that all of Souq al-Juma, like all of Tripoli, supported Colonel Qaddafi.

A few blocks away, two young men in plainclothes, who had been sitting by a wall, stood up to introduce themselves as deputy police officers. Then they summoned the soldiers to escort the journalists away.

Touring the neighborhood, Refat noted the hollow shell of the police stations that rebels had burned down during the initial uprising four months ago. And he pointed out where each night the rebels had painted anti-Qaddafi graffiti on the walls of schools, mosques and other buildings, forcing Refat and his fellow soldiers to cover it up with pro-Qaddafi graffiti the next morning. As a civilian, he said, he had been “addicted to the Internet,” and he missed it badly since the Qaddafi government had shut it down (with the exception of the hotel housing foreign journalists) at the start of the uprising. Still, he said, he understood the reasons, “because people were putting up bad things about Libya, like ‘Qaddafi kills people,’ and, on the other side, to cut the communication between these people.”

By nightfall, the rumored rebel attack in the capital had failed to materialize. Some said they still expected local rebels to mark the day with some actions after the final evening prayer, at 10 p.m. But by then, the foreign journalists were sealed in their hotel, its phone lines were down and the Internet was no longer working there either.

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Israeli Soldiers Shoot at Protesters on Syrian Border

 

Wave after wave of protesters, mainly Palestinians from refugee camps in Syria, approached the frontier with the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights. Israeli soldiers opened fire on those who crossed a new trench and tried to attack the border fence near the towns of Majdal Shams in the Golan Heights and Quneitra in Syria.

By nightfall, the Syrian news agency SANA reported that 22 protesters had been killed and more than 350 had been wounded. Israeli officials said that they had no information on casualties but suggested that the Syrian figures were exaggerated.

Even so, it was the worst bloodshed in the Golan Heights since Israel and Syria fought a war there in 1973.

The protest, on the anniversary of the start of the 1967 Middle East war, followed a larger, coordinated assault by demonstrators three weeks ago on four fronts — Syria, Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank — and attempts on two others, Egypt and Jordan, that were thwarted by those governments.

This time, Lebanon and the Hamas government in Gaza kept protesters away from their borders, and the turnout was low in the West Bank.

The focus was on Syria, where thousands of protesters tried to force their way across the border. Syria’s decision to allow the protest appeared to reflect a calculated strategy to divert attention from its own antigovernment uprising.

Still, the protesters said they counted the day a success because they drew Israeli fire on unarmed demonstrators, generating outrage at Israel. At a time when the peace process is already strained, that reaction is likely to increase international pressure on Israel to create the conditions for resumed negotiations with the Palestinians, and to bolster support in the United Nations for the Palestinian appeal for statehood.

The young protesters, disillusioned with the stymied peace talks and continued Israeli settlement building, say they believe they have hit on a new tactic that at least achieves something, if at a cost, and they intend to repeat it.

“The plan is to clash with the soldiers now,” said Muhammad Abu al-Nassar, 25, who was protesting at a West Bank checkpoint. “We believe that unarmed popular resistance is the best form of ending the occupation.”

Israeli officials, who say they tried every nonlethal method of crowd control at their disposal before resorting to live fire, worry about being cast as the villain but admit they are in a bind.

“What would any country do if people from an enemy country were marching on its borders?” asked Dan Gillerman, a former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations. “We tried all other possible means to stop them.”

At the weekly cabinet meeting, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he would not allow “extremist elements” to penetrate Israel’s borders. “I have instructed the security forces to act with determination, with maximum restraint, but with determination to maintain our sovereignty, our borders, our communities and our citizens,” he said.

A military spokeswoman, Lt. Col. Avital Leibovich, said that Israeli forces warned the protesters not to approach the border, in Arabic with megaphones; used nonlethal riot dispersal means like tear gas, which failed to deter them; and then fired warning shots in the air.

When the demonstrators reached the fence, soldiers were “left with no choice,” she said, “but to open fire at the feet of the protesters.”

Syria’s role also creates a quandary for Israel. Although the countries technically remain in a state of war, Syria has kept the border quiet for 37 years.

Protesters there could not have approached the border without government acquiescence, and analysts said the decision to allow the protest was aimed at deflecting attention from the protests sweeping Syria against the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

“I would note that these protests were carried live on Syrian television” an Israeli official said. “They do not carry the protests against their own regime live. They made a decision to try to exploit this for their own purposes.”

The official spoke anonymously because, he said, Israel did not want to allow the protests to stoke tensions with Syria.

But even revived peace talks with the Palestinians would be unlikely to alter Mr. Assad’s calculations.

Rina Castelnuovo contributed reporting from Majdal Shams, Golan Heights, and Fares Akram from Gaza.

 

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.

 

13 Algerian Soldiers Killed by Militants

 VOA News ?April 16, 2011

People listen to the speech of Algeria's President Abdelaziz Bouteflika on a giant television screen in Algiers, April 15, 2011

In Algeria, suspected militants opened fire on an army post east of Algiers, killing at least 13 soldiers.

Security officials and residents said at least one attacker was killed.? The attack took place late Friday, just as President Abdelaziz Bouteflika was announcing a series of constitutional reforms in a speech to the nation.

A news report by The Associated Press quotes officials who said Saturday that security forces searched the attack scene, about 130 kilometers from the capital, and Yakouren, an adjacent forested area, known as a hideout for members of the terror group al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb.

In his televised address, Bouteflika said he intends to change the country's electoral laws, revise the constitution and ensure free and fair elections in the future - all in the interest of strengthening democratic conditions in Algeria.

President Bouteflika has faced growing pressure from a pro-democracy movement that has staged several public protests calling for reform.

On Tuesday, thousands of demonstrators - mostly students - marched toward the presidential palace in Algiers.? News reports said some demanded the resignation of Education Minister Rashid Hawarbia, and others chanted slogans calling for a complete change of government.

As a concession to the opposition two months ago, President Bouteflika lifted the state of emergency in effect in Algeria for 19 years, when the country was in a state of civil war. ?

Bouteflika rose to the presidency in 1999, more than six years after the emergency was declared.? He had strong backing from the military that had ruled the country earlier, and won 94 percent of the vote - a figure that was criticized as false - after all opposition candidates dropped out of the race.

Some information for this report was provided by AP and AFP.

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