Libya Strikes Fuel Supply in City Held by Rebels

The barrage struck shortly after midnight, when rockets began landing and exploding in several areas of the terminal, officials there said.

At least one rocket hit a set of three mammoth tanks, which ruptured and burst into a fireball. The fire settled into a leaping blaze that towered overheard, visible for miles. Its glow illuminated the eastern section of the city throughout the night. Residents woke to a thick, drifting cloud of black smoke.

The attack on the terminal was another escalation against the besieged city, and the second pinpoint attack by Colonel Qaddafi’s forces in two nights.

Residents woke Friday to the news that Misurata’s port, its only lifeline to the outside world, had been peppered with antitank land mines.

At the fuel terminal, a small contingent of firefighters worked throughout the night and the day trying to contain the fire, which had destroyed all three storage tanks in one section of the terminal, but had not spread.

“We want to protect the other tanks from exploding,” said Mufta Youssef, one of the firefighters, after backing away from the containers’ blackened remains for a break from the heat.

No one was wounded in the attack or the firefighting effort, officials said.

The tanks contained diesel fuel and gasoline — each roughly 6,000 cubic meters, or 1.5 million gallons — said Muftah Bazina, the terminal’s director.

The effect on the city’s energy supply was not immediately apparent. Misurata has been cut off from new sources of fuel since the uprising against the Qaddafi government began in February. But it began the siege with large reservoirs of diesel fuel and gasoline, and so far there have not been shortages.

Several other fuel tanks remained intact, and terminal officials said the rebels’ de facto government would not disclose which tanks were full and which were not, nor would they make any public statements about how much fuel remained in the city.

“The exact information is a secret,” Mr. Bazina said.

He was willing to characterize the situation only in general terms. “We do have fuel,” he said. “But we do not have enough.”

For weeks, the lines at the few gas stations in the city have often stretched to hundreds of cars. But residents and officials have said the lines are caused in part by the small number of stations, which are often closed — not to any shortage of gasoline. Gas prices have remained low, indicating sufficient supply.

Supplies of pressurized cooking fuel, however, recently ran out.

The Qaddafi government has tried striking the terminal with rocket barrages at least three times in the past three weeks, officials said, and in previous attacks had destroyed an administrative building and a warehouse. The attack early Saturday was the first time a fuel storage tank had been hit.

Mr. Bazina and other officials at the port said at least one of the tanks was struck by at least one rocket, and the resulting explosion and heat ignited the others.

The impact craters and twisted remains of other ground-to-ground rockets were visible around the remaining tanks.

The tail section of one variant of a Grad rocket — a cold war-era munitions made in the 1980s in what is now Slovakia, and one of the most common fired on this city — was visibly stuck in the soil near the fire.

Workers at the terminal had also collected two others of the same variant of rocket, including one that had sailed just over another tank and struck the ground beside it without exploding.

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Bomb Strikes Moroccan Cafe, Killing Mostly Foreigners

The bombing was timed to maximize fatalities in one of North Africa’s most popular tourist destinations, striking the city of Marrakesh as crowds sat down for lunch. The attack appeared to be the work of a suicide bomber, though there was no immediate claim of responsibility, according to a senior intelligence official who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

News agencies reported that at least 3 Moroccans and 10 foreigners, including several French citizens, were among the dead.

The explosion blew out the front and the roof of the Argana restaurant, in Djemma el Fna square, a public space in the heart of Morocco’s cultural capital that is regularly packed with vendors and tourists. The crowds filling the square on Thursday as the tourist season began were knocked back, then frozen in shock from the blast and then the scene as ambulances and the police rushed in.

“There was a huge bang,” one tourist in the square, Andy Birnie of London, told The Associated Press. “There was debris raining down from the sky. Hundreds of people were running in panic, some towards the cafe, some away from the square.”

Images from the square showed the devastation of the attack: the cafe floor splattered with blood, a body beneath a blanket, rubble blown out into the plaza, which was packed with people surveying the destruction.

The bombing was as deadly as it was perplexing. Although it bore the hallmarks of radical Islamists, Marwan Shehadeh, an expert in such movements, said he would not have expected Islamists to attack because the government recently gave in to some of their demands and released some militant leaders. But he also said that the attack on civilians was inconsistent with the work of a separatist movement, Polisario, in Western Sahara, which has focused over the years on government targets.

However, Mansouria Mokhefi, who heads the Middle East and Maghreb program at the French Institute for International Relations, said it was possible that Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, the network’s North African affiliate, might have felt compelled to attack “as a way of reminding people that they still exist” at a time when secular protesters are dominating the world news. The official Moroccan news agency said that King Mohammed VI sent his condolences to the families of the dead and offered to pay for burials. President Nicolas Sarkozy of France issued a statement condemning the bombing, which he called a terrorist attack.

Though Morocco has remained relatively calm, especially when compared with the civil war racking Libya, it, too, has festering domestic conflicts. It has struggled in recent years against the spreading reach of the Qaeda-aligned terrorists operating in North Africa. In 2003, 33 people were killed in five simultaneous bombings attributed to radical Islamists.

And the separatist movement in Western Sahara to the south, which has been aided by Algeria and Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya, is decades-old.

Like other North African nations, Morocco has been concerned about the possible spillover from the violence and chaos in Libya, worrying that militants could get hold of weapons more easily.

And in recent months, like much of the region, the country has seen increased calls for democratic reform.

The king is relatively popular, having pushed for some political and economic liberalization and increased women’s rights since taking power 11 years ago when his father died. Still, the king continues to wield absolute authority on all political matters.

As the Arab Spring rolled out, he responded to protests in Morocco with promises to meet many of demonstrators’ core demands for change, including allowing for a more representative Parliament and an elected prime minister. But he has yet to deliver.

Now Thursday’s attack threatens to stress the nation’s already troubled economy and its roughly $8 billion tourism industry. More than nine million people visited the country last year, according to statistics from the state news agency.

Mr. Shehadeh, the expert in Islamic extremism, raised the prospect that the government would point to the violence as a reason to delay its promised reforms — a move that officials have not themselves raised.

Ma?a de la Baume contributed reporting from Paris, and J. David Goodman from New York.

 

NATO Strikes Qaddafi Compound

The attack on the compound was the third since air raids began in mid-March, but the strike at the television complex was the most significant broadening yet of the NATO air campaign, suggesting that nonmilitary targets would be hit in an effort to break down the instruments of Colonel Qaddafi’s broader control.

A senior Libyan government official said that the strike knocked state television off the air for about a half hour.

In the port of Misurata, 130 miles east of Tripoli, the capital, rebels reported that a widely publicized government pullback had given way to renewed shelling by Colonel Qaddafi’s forces from outside the city. The initial withdrawal over the weekend after a nearly two-month siege had bewildered some rebels.

Also on Monday, Italy, after weeks of declining to participate in direct bombing raids, said for the first time that it would begin striking select military targets in Libya.

In Tripoli, at least two large bomb blasts thundered in the city just after midnight, and journalists escorted to the compound by government officials saw firefighters hosing down the smoldering remains of an office complex where Colonel Qaddafi works and meets visitors. The explosions sent cement and debris flying more than 50 yards. There were no signs of armaments, and Libyan officials said that no one was killed, although they said that as many as 45 people were slightly injured.

A government spokesman, Moussa Ibrahim, said later that three people had been killed and 45 were injured, 15 of them seriously, by the airstrikes. He did not elaborate and turned down a request to arrange for interviews with the wounded.

Mr. Ibrahim declined comment on whether Colonel Qaddafi was in the compound at the time of the attack, but he said the Libyan government considered the attack “an attempt to assassinate the leader and unifying figure of this country.”

“He is well,” Mr. Ibrahim said of Colonel Qaddafi. “He is healthy. He is in high spirits.” Colonel Qaddafi, who has made infrequent appearances in Tripoli since the uprising began, was conducting business as usual on Monday, meeting with government officials and tribal elders, Mr. Ibrahim told reporters at the scene.

Appearing on state television, Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, one of the Libyan leader’s sons, asserted that the attack would not shake the Libyan people. It would scare only children, he said, according to the official news agency. At the compound, a small crowd of young Qaddafi supporters gathered a few hundred yards from the site of the attack. The so-called voluntary human shields chanted and rallied before state television cameras and the visiting journalists. But elsewhere government officials appeared more anxious than usual about the stepped-up pace of the bombing attacks, accusing the NATO allies of seeking to terrorize the Libyan people.

One official, speaking on condition of anonymity moments after the attack, said in exasperation that the strikes had gone too far and would justify terrorist counterattacks by Libyan forces in the cities of NATO countries. Other officials were already worrying aloud about the safety of their families in places like Surt, a center of support for Colonel Qaddafi that has also come under attack by NATO planes.

Of the two previous attacks at or near Colonel Qaddafi’s compound, the first came soon after the airstrikes began in mid-March, with an air raid mangling a building described by NATO officials as a command and control center. The second took place a few nights ago, when two NATO missiles slammed into some kind of underground concrete bunker just outside the compound’s walls.

In Misurata, pro-Qaddafi officials said in recent days that their forces had pulled back to permit a group of neighboring tribes to broker a cease-fire with the rebels in the city or to continue the fight.

But rebels, speaking over Internet connections on Monday, said that neither a military pullback nor a tribal intervention had materialized.

Mohamed, a rebel spokesman whose full name was withheld to protect his family, said that his 92-year-old father and a cousin were killed, along with 32 others, in shelling Saturday night and that 8 more people had been killed on Sunday night.

“It has been a bloody two days,” he said. “There was no pullback.”

“There was defeat and then revenge,” he added, referring to the rebels’ recent success at driving some pro-Qaddafi gunmen out of certain buildings they had?controlled inside Misurata.

“We think the ‘pullback’ was actually a signal to escalate,” Mohamed said.

Italy announced its decision to participate in the air raids after a telephone conversation between President Obama and Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

Italy did not specify what kinds of targets its planes would now hit but said its decision would place it “in line with allied operations.” In recent weeks, Italy irked the United States and other NATO allies by declining to participate in raids over Libya, a former colony with which it has close economic ties. In the statement, Italy said it would continue to provide NATO forces full use of its bases for logistical support.

Rachel Donadio contributed reporting from Rome.

 

Pakistanis, Angered by US Drone Strikes, Block NATO Supply Route

 VOA News ?April 24, 2011

A rally against the U.S. drone strikes in Pakistani tribal areas, Peshawar, April 23, 2011

Pakistanis opposed to U.S. drone strikes on insurgent targets in Pakistan have blocked a road used by the NATO alliance to deliver supplies to neighboring Afghanistan.

Several thousand supporters of a Pakistani party led by former cricket star Imran Khan were staging a sit-in Sunday on the NATO supply route near the northwestern city of Peshawar. They began the protest late Saturday and planned to remain until Sunday evening.

NATO ships much of its non-lethal supplies for forces in landlocked Afghanistan to the Pakistani port of Karachi before delivering them by truck to the Afghan border. Militants often attack the convoys in Pakistan to stop them from reaching U.S.-led NATO forces fighting a Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan.

U.S. drone strikes against Taliban-allied militants in northwest Pakistan have been a source of friction between the two countries. Khan and his supporters at the protest site demanded that the United States stop the missile attacks, saying they say kill innocent Pakistanis.

U.S. officials have never publicly acknowledged the use of drones inside Pakistan, but privately they have confirmed the strikes to various news outlets, saying the operations have killed mostly militants.

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News Analysis: U.S. Relations With Pakistan Falter in Rift Over Drone Strikes

The rupture over Pakistan’s demands that the Americans end drone strikes — which the Obama administration rejected — and scale back their intelligence presence within Pakistan exposed the tentative nature of the alliance forged after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. And it is increasingly apparent that the two countries have differing, even irreconcilable, aims in Afghanistan.

With the Afghan endgame looming, suspicion is overwhelming faint cooperation between the United States and Pakistan, as each side seeks to secure its interests, increase its leverage to obtain them, and even cut out the other if need be, American and Pakistani officials say.

No one in Pakistan or in Washington now speaks of returning to the strategic alliance made by President George W. Bush and Gen. Pervez Musharraf immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks, when the primary goal was to operate joint intelligence efforts to capture operatives of Al Qaeda. Military officials from both sides say that arrangement was never bound to be a longstanding affair.

“There was never a level of trust,” said a former American military official who served in a senior position in Pakistan. “I’m convinced now they don’t want our help.”

The American official did not want to be identified while discussing the delicate nature of a relationship that, whatever its failings, both nations are reluctant to jettison completely.

But politicians on both sides are disappointed with the results of billions of dollars in American military and civilian assistance since 2001, and the Obama administration acknowledged to Congress in a report this month that the results of the spending fell short of expectations.

In any case, the money has done little to pave over the accumulating strategic differences between the two nations.

Broadly, the Americans seek a strong and relatively centralized Afghan government commanding a large army that can control its territory. Almost all those ends are objectionable to Pakistan, which while it calls for a stable Afghanistan, prefers a more loosely governed neighbor where it can influence events, if need be, through Taliban proxies.

The particular differences revolve around which Taliban factions should be included in any settlement; the role of India, an ally of the United States but the enemy of Pakistan; and the size of the new Afghan Army, which the Americans want big and the Pakistanis want small.

The situation is further complicated, American and Pakistani officials said, by discord within the Obama administration over how the United States should withdraw troops from Afghanistan, and what role, if any, Pakistan should play in the exit.

The overall commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David H. Petraeus, is determined to batter the Taliban as much as possible, a policy that the Pakistanis disagree with, both sides say. Pakistan prefers that the State Department tilt toward reconciliation between the Afghan government and the Taliban.

Even within the Pentagon, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, who has met with the Pakistani military chief, Gen. Afshaq Parvez Kayani, on more than two dozen occasions, has more tolerance for the Pakistani point of view than does General Petraeus, a senior American official said. With his position in Washington, Admiral Mullen could still prevail on persevering with Pakistan.

These American nuances are well known at the Pakistani Army headquarters in Rawalpindi, where General Petraeus is referred to as Mr. Petraeus — a calculated omission of his military title as a way to mock his perceived political ambitions, according to a recent visitor to the headquarters.

For months, Pakistan’s diplomats and military officials have complained that they were being kept in the dark by the Obama administration’s maneuvering, no matter how preliminary, for a negotiated solution in Afghanistan.

“There is no transparency; they are not telling us who they are talking to,” a Pakistani government official said. Another official, in Pakistan’s security apparatus, said: “We don’t know what the Americans’ endgame is in Afghanistan.”

As their nervousness about American intentions have increased in recent months, the Pakistanis have sought to improve their leverage — threatening C.I.A. operations in Pakistan, cracking down on Taliban leaders to coerce their cooperation, and trying to befriend President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, who has also felt on the outs with Washington.

In the latest iteration of this new Pakistani-Afghan relationship, General Kayani and the head of Pakistan’s intelligence agency, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, accompanied Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani on a visit to Kabul on Saturday, the most public of a number of visits to Afghanistan by General Kayani in the past year.

American diplomats in Islamabad and Kabul declined to comment on the Pakistani visit to Afghanistan, and appeared to know little about the intention of the Afghanistan-Pakistan Joint Commission unveiled with considerable fanfare by the two sides in Kabul as a vehicle to end the war.

Pir Zubair Shah contributed reporting from Washington, and Ismail Khan from Peshawar, Pakistan.

 

Suicide Bomber Strikes in Eastern Afghanistan, Killing 9

 Phil Ittner | Islamabad ?April 16, 2011

Afghan army forces stand guard as the view of the military base is seen in the background after suicide bomber has blew himself up at the entrance to the military base in eastern province of Laghman, east of Kabul, April 16, 2011

A suicide bomber, reportedly wearing an Afghan Army Uniform,? detonated explosives outside a military base near Jalalabad in Eastern Afghanistan.? Officials say at least five NATO service members and four Afghan soldiers were killed and another eight people , including four translators, were wounded in the attack.

The attack coincides with a number of efforts on the diplomatic front to bring a close to the nearly 10 year old conflict. ?

In what is one of the worst attacks on NATO forces in months a man reportedly wearing an Afghan uniform infiltrated security at the base outside Jalalabad in the early morning hours Saturday. ?

The attack comes just a day after another bomber claimed the life of the Police Chief of Kandahar in Southern Afghanistan.

Afghan Defense Ministry authorities say they are looking into whether or not the bomber was just wearing a uniform or if he had actually been in the military. A Taliban spokesman claims the bomber was a sleeper agent who had been in the army for over a month.

Infiltration into the Afghan military has long been a major concern for authorities? in the war zone.? Vetting of applicants remains a major priority.

Another concern is that uniforms are readily available in markets throughout Afghanistan allowing for a quick disguise for terrorists or Taliban.

Traditionally fighting escalates in Afghanistan as the weather turns warmer. The end of April or beginning of May is often referred to as the beginning of the ‘fighting season’.

But these attacks come also at a time when diplomatic efforts are mounting.; in an effort to capitalize on NATO and Afghan gains in the last year.

For Dr. Mohammed Omar Sharifi of the American Institute for Afghan Studies, it is no coincidence that the attacks come at the same time as Pakistan’s Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani traveled to Kabul.

"It's not the first time actually happening when there is a diplomatic efforts there is always a show of force by the Taliban or their supporters, normally mean both attacks, in a sense, the terrorists and the Taliban are trying to show they are capable of mounting devastating attacks," he said.

Prime Minister Gilani’s trip to Kabul included meetings with Hamid Karzai and Afghan Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak.

Following those meetings Prime Minister Gilani said all parties, including the U.S. and Afghanistan, were of the same mind that there should be some sort of reconciliation with certain elements of the insurgency in order to bring about peace.

With Pakistan and Afghanistan sharing a porous border, the ongoing war effort is also affecting Islamabad’s authority. And Prime Minister Gilani quickly noted that in many ways the fight is a shared one.

"If there is a military action in our area then people go to Afghanistan, and if there is a military action from the NATO forces they come to Pakistan. Therefore we should have more intelligence cooperation and defense cooperation and political cooperation because we are both suffering, we are brothers, we are neighbors, and we should not suffer more," he said.

With the increase in violence and fighting expected in the coming weeks and months however authorities say it will take a concerted effort on all parties, Afghan, Pakistani and NATO to continue to put pressure on the Taliban to bring them to the table.

And, many say, for their part the Taliban will need to show that they are still capable of launching significant attacks so that they can come to the table from a position of strength as well.

And that may be why things appear to have escalated in recent days.

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