The Libyan oil town of Brega saw heavy fighting yesterday as rebel forces advanced only to fall back again after being ambushed by forces loyal to Muammar Gaddafi, who was hit by another defection.
Former Foreign Minister and UN General Assembly president Ali Treiki became the latest official to abandon Col Gaddafi, after the flight to Britain of Foreign Minister and regime stalwart Mussa Kussa earlier last week.
Mr Treiki, the latest in a string of officials to abandon the Gaddafi regime, met Arab League chief Amr Mussa for talks in Cairo yesterday.
Mr Treiki resigned his official duties as an adviser to Col Gaddafi but did not pledge allegiance to the rebels, Arab League sources said.
He was Tripoli’s envoy to the United Nations until 2009 when he became president of the UN General Assembly. He was also Libya’s ambassador to France, African affairs minister, and foreign minister in the 1970s and 1980s.
A British delegation was also reported to be in the Libyan rebel bastion of Benghazi in the east, nearly a month after a botched bid by special forces to contact the insurgency caused red faces in London when the team was captured.
Rebel spokesman Mustafa Gheriani confirmed the presence of a British group in the country’s second largest city for talks with the Transitional National Council (TNC) yesterday.
A British Foreign Office spokesman also confirmed the trip, saying the team was led by Christopher Prentice, who also visited Libya last week.
The spokesman said the aim of the trip was to “engage with key figures” on the TNC, “build on the work of the previous team and seek to establish further information” about the council and its aims.
On March 7, London called the seizure by rebels of a team – reportedly six elite Special Air Service troopers and two diplomats – in a botched attempt to contact the insurgency the result of a “serious misunderstanding.”
Meanwhile Col Gaddafi’s foreign affairs secretary of state, Abdelati Obeidi, was in Athens to meet Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou yesterday “at the request of the Libyan prime minister,” Al-Baghdadi Ali al-Mahmudi, Papandreou’s office said.
On the front line, rebels who had entered the eastern town of Brega early yesterday said they were staging a tactical withdrawal after being ambushed.
An AFP correspondent saw some 300 to 400 fighters regrouping on the road back into rebel-held territory some 10 kilometres to the east.
Loud explosions could still be heard from Brega’s outskirts as the rebels’ best-trained fighters took on the Gaddafi loyalists.
Most of the rebel volunteers acknowledged they lacked the military training, discipline and knowledge of the terrain to mount a frontal assault on Brega.
They said they were dependent on the rebels’ few trained fighters, mostly defectors from the regular army.
“There is no commander. We are all together,” said Abdul Wahed Aguri, a 28-year-old.
“We are not army. We can’t move closer to Brega because we don’t know where the enemy is. We don’t know the area. We have to wait for the army (defectors),” he said, adding that could take a whole day.
Intermittent explosions rumbled across the desert landscape as the rebel vanguard traded rocket and artillery fire with Gaddafi forces inside the town.
Aircraft from the Nato-led coalition enforcing a no-fly zone were heard overhead. The rebels said they heard air strikes on loyalist positions in the town overnight, although there was no immediate confirmation from the alliance.
Earlier yesterday, the rebels pushed forward to seize the vast university campus on Brega’s outskirts, an AFP correspondent witnessed before the retreat.