Gaddafi’s fury targets Misurata, west Libya
More than 100 people have been killed in 24 hours in Libya’s rebel-held Al-Jabal Al-Gharbi district west of Tripoli after it was pounded by Gaddafi forces, residents said yesterday evening while the entire Libyan city of Misurata is a frontline, with...
More than 100 people have been killed in 24 hours in Libya’s rebel-held Al-Jabal Al-Gharbi district west of Tripoli after it was pounded by Gaddafi forces, residents said yesterday evening while the entire Libyan city of Misurata is a frontline, with every man, woman and child living there at risk of the armed wrath of Colonel Gaddafi.
“Gaddafi battalions have not stopped pounding the region, particularly Yafran and Nalut, with Grad rockets,” one Yafran resident said. “There have been 110 dead (since Sunday), civilians and rebels, in both cities.”
A resident of Nalut, near the border with Tunisia, accused forces loyal to Colonel Gaddafi of “carrying out a massacre” in the mountainous region.
Yafran is 130 kilometres southwest of Tripoli, while Nalut, a town of 66,000 people, is 235 kilometres west of the capital. Meanwhile, yesterday, a ferry rescued almost 1,000 people from Misurata and Britain said it plans to pick up 5,000 more, as UN officials said Gaddafi’s government has guaranteed “safe passage” for foreign aid workers and to let a UN mission into the besieged port city.
The safe passage was part of an accord on humanitarian access to the capital and other Libyan cities secured in Tripoli on Sunday by UN humanitarian chief Valerie Amos, said deputy UN spokesman Farhan Haq.
The Gaddafi government also agreed to let a United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs mission into Misurata, said UN humanitarian spokesman Stephanie Bunker.
With snipers, cluster bombs and intense shelling spreading panic in the city of 400,000, UN envoys in Tripoli demanded an end to attacks there by Gaddafi loyalists. A doctor reported 1,000 people killed in six weeks of fighting in Misurata, as the International Organisation for Migration warned that the vast numbers wanting to flee were threatening to overwhelm the international rescue.
The focus of fighting in Misurata is in the city’s shattered centre, a sinister place of burnt-out tanks and rebels shooting at loyalist positions.
Day and night, heavy artillery shells and rockets arc into the city, some of them carrying cluster munitions, an AFP journalist reported.
Snipers pick off children, civilians and rebel fighters, even those close to their homes. A few armed Gaddafi supporters roam around in cars, sometimes opening fire wildly.
The hospitals are filled to overflowing with proof of these tactics: a 39-year-old woman, Najal Ismael, bandaged and with her shoulder in a brace from wounds when a GRAD rocket fell on her home on Sunday as she was praying.