AFP/Tripoli
Libya’s new regime forces were on the verge of claiming full control of Muammar Gaddafi’s hometown Sirte after seizing its showpiece conference centre and university from his diehards yesterday.
A National Transitional Council fighter waves the new Libyan flag in Sirte yesterday
In their advance, fighters of the National Transitional Council (NTC) also seized control of the Mediterranean town’s hospital and university campus.
The fortress-like Ouagadougou conference centre, constructed to host pan-African summits, has been a major objective of the NTC forces since they launched a September 15 offensive on the city.
“We control 100% of the Ouagadougou centre,” said Mohamed al-Fayad, an NTC military chief, adding the capture “opens the way” for his forces to overrun the city centre.
“We are ready to take the centre” of Sirte “within a matter of hours,” said Fayad.
“It is only a question of co-ordination between (Misrata fighters on) the western front and (Benghazi fighters on) the eastern front. We just need time.”
As he spoke, NTC fighters spread throughout the sprawling complex, tearing down portraits of the fugitive Gaddafi and the green flags of his fallen 42-year regime.
They later advanced another kilometre north along streets littered with debris and lined by pock-marked buildings towards the heart of the city.
At the war-ravaged centre, giant windows were all blasted in and its metal roof had caved in under the artillery barrage.
“All this was built with the money of Libyans. It’s our money and yet no resident of Sirte was allowed to come here,” said one fighter, sitting back on a sofa.
NTC fighters also took control of the town’s Ibn Sina hospital, whose upper floors were all blasted.
A massive firefight broke out near the hospital late yesterday, with intense machinegun and rocket fire.
Osama Swehli Muttawa, an NTC field commander, said: “We took 50 prisoners. They were mostly mercenaries. They were lying in beds pretending to be wounded. Some were wounded. We found Kalashnikov and other weapons under their beds.”
He pulled a hand grenade out of his pocket and said: “I found this under one of their beds.”
A day after taking a four-lane avenue into the centre, the NTC forces also took control of Sirte’s university and its new campus, a huge site where Gaddafi snipers had been picking them off from unfinished buildings.
“We have taken the university... We have liberated the area from Gaddafi’s dogs,” NTC commander Nasser Zamud said, as hundreds of his fighters roamed the campus.
“The fighting has been difficult; there were a lot of snipers,” Zamud said of the assault on the university in the city’s southeast.
At a Gaddafi palace about 500m from Ibn Sina, partly destroyed by Nato air raids according to the NTC fighters, a group of men jumped up and down on a four-poster bed.
Despite the celebrations, the NTC’s battle for Sirte has come at a heavy cost.
The ferocity of the Gaddafi forces’ resistance in Sirte and their other main bastion, Bani Walid, has surprised the new regime, with NTC chief Mustafa Abdel Jalil admitting the battle was “very vicious.”
There were no immediate figures for casualties yesterday.
Medics say that 23 NTC fighters have been killed and almost 330 wounded since Friday, when they launched what they have been calling their final assault on Sirte.
Blasted hospital crammed with the dazed and the dead
Triumphant fighters bearing Kalashnikovs marched up and down shouting “Allahu Akbar” yesterday as dazed and frightened patients in Sirte’s main hospital lay crammed into a ground floor corridor.
“It was a holocaust, not a hospital,” said Dr Nabil Lamine as he fought his way through the crowd. Lamine headed upstairs to check on the only two patients left on the upper floors. “We have to bring them all down because of the days of shelling” that preceded the capture of the Ibn Sina hospital by National Transitional Council (NTC) fighters, he said.
He picked his way through shattered glass and turned right into the intensive care unit, where two semi-naked men lay amid the stench of excrement in a room strewn with rubbish and broken medical equipment. One needed brain surgery and the other had to have a leg amputated, said Lamine as artillery fire rocked the building from the fighting nearby as NTC forces tried to push Gaddafi loyalists back towards the city centre.
“We can’t help them. We don’t have the proper doctors. They may die,” said Lamine as he rushed back downstairs, leaving the men alone in the unit where a torn poster of Gaddafi lay on the filthy floor. One of the two tried feebly to sit up, before falling back again onto stinking bedsheets.
On the ground floor most of the patients in the corridor were frightened-looking young men, some with horrific burns to their faces. “Say ‘Libya Hurra’ (Free Libya),” one young fighter ordered a patient, who meekly obeyed. Three gun-toting fighters gathered around another young man, shouting at him and accusing him of being a Gaddafi loyalist. An older combatant tired to calm them down.
“Some are civilians, but most of these are Gaddafi men,” said Hesham Ali Harba, an NTC fighter who said he was a doctor.
