Libya Crisis Map

Libya TV- English

Libya

Friday, April 29, 2011

Libya regime launches tanks on port, warns ships

Libyan government tanks launched an assault on rebel-held Misrata as the regime of Moamer Kadhafi threatened to hit any ships entering the lifeline port.
The sea port is a crucial conduit for humanitarian aid to the western city of half a million people about 215 kilometres (130 miles) east of Tripoli, which Kadhafi forces have been trying to capture for more than seven weeks.
"Four tanks attacked the city and one has been destroyed so far," said rebel fighter Ibrahim Ahmed Boushagha on Friday.
"They took up positions during the night on the airport road, and tried to enter the city. We've stopped them at the outer limits, at least for now."
He said his group had come under mortar and rocket-propelled grenade fire, and three or four of them were wounded.
AFP journalists reported hearing whistling sounds followed by a volley of detonations from the direction of the airport, with an enormous plume of grey smoke rising over the area.
A constant stream of casualties flowed into the main hospital in Misrata, where fighting has intensified 10 weeks after Kadhafi's forces launched a deadly crackdown on protests inspired by regime-changing movements in Tunisia and Egypt.
The Libyan leader's regime said later it would attack "with force" any ship that enters the port of Misrata, saying all aid should now be sent by road and under the supervision of the Libyan army.
State television also said the military had "put the port out of service," and that delivery of humanitarian aid to Misrata should now be carried out "overland and under the supervision of the armed forces."
NATO said three mines were found in the port early Friday and were being disarmed.
"The mining of a civilian port by pro-Kadhafi forces is clearly designed to disrupt the lawful flow of humanitarian aid to the innocent civilian people of Libya," said Italian Navy Vice Admiral Rinaldo Veri, calling it another "deliberate violation" of UN security Council resolutions.
In Washington, the State Department said Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would attend a Libya Contact Group May 4-6 meeting in Rome to discuss how to help the rebels and protect civilians caught in the cross-fire.
The group composed of Western countries, Turkey, Arab states, the United Nations, the Arab League and NATO, was set up in London on March 29.
Earlier, fierce clashes and continuous explosions were heard in Misrata's suburbs, an AFP journalist said. The hospital reported a toll of two dead and 16 wounded.
Dr Khalid Abu Falra of the city's medical committee said a small clinic in the western suburbs also reported at least three deaths.
"All of our operating theatres are full," he said. "NATO must quickly intervene, as in previous days."
The airport battle, just southwest of the Misrata city limits, followed overnight barrages of rocket and mortar fire by Kadhafi's forces on the city, about 215 kilometres (130 miles), east of Tripoli.
Western Misrata also came under seemingly indiscriminate mortar and rocket fire on Friday as a NATO warplane flew overhead, witnesses and medics said.
Forces loyal to Kadhafi, who has been in power for more than four decades, were pushed back from Misrata by the rebels and a series of NATO air strikes on Monday, but had remained within rocket range of the city.
The rebels said earlier in the week they had secured the port and that their next objective was to seize control of the airport from government troops.
"Attack is the best form of defence," said Ibrahim Bet-Almal, who heads the rebel military forces in the area. "Kadhafi is sending reinforcements to the region every day."
British Brigadier Rob Weighill, director of NATO operations in Libya, said NATO warships stopped pro-Kadhafi forces on Friday from laying water mines in Misrata's harbour.
"Our ships intercepted the small boats that were laying them and we are disposing the mines that we found," Weighill told reporters via videoconference from his headquarters in Naples, Italy.
"It again shows his complete disregard for international law and his willingness to attack humanitarian delivery efforts," he said.
In western Libya, the alliance said meanwhile its warplanes would focus on Kadhafi forces threatening the towns of Zintan and Yefren, scenes of heavy fighting between regime and rebel forces.
"We can see that there's a lot of offensive operations being conducted by pro-Kadhafi forces in the areas of Zintan and Yefren and clearly that's going to be a focus for us," Weighill said.
Fierce fighting which had raged for days for control of the Dehiba border crossing into Tunisia, meanwhile, hit a lull on Friday, but armed rebels were on guard in expectation of a new offensive, witnesses said.
They said the post was firmly in the hands of the rebels, who retook it late Thursday in clashes that killed eight loyalist soldiers only hours after Kadhafi forces had overrun it.
A Tunisian police source said 5,150 people had crossed from Libya into Tunisia at Dehiba within 48 hours as the fighting raged.
EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, meanwhile, condemned the regime's reported use of banned cluster bombs against civilians, and called for an immediate ceasefire as well as full humanitarian access.

Reports from refugee camps for Nafusa Mts Libyans near Dehiba,Tunisia by @libyanmaddog, world media

Qaddafi Says He’ll Stay in Libya as His Forces Step Up Attacks

Qaddafi Says He’ll Stay in Libya as His Forces Step Up Attacks

April 29, 2011, 11:15 PM EDT
By Patrick Donahue and Maram Mazen
(See EXTRA and MET for more on Middle East unrest.)
April 30 (Bloomberg) -- (Bloomberg) -- Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi said he’ll stay in the North African nation where his people want “martyrdom or victory” in the face of a rebel insurgency that began in mid-February.
“I don’t have a post to leave,” Qaddafi said in a speech on Libyan state television broadcast by Al Arabiya television early today. “If I had a post I would have ended like Mubarak or Ben Ali,” he said in a reference to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Tunisia’s President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali who were forced to step down in the face of popular protests earlier this year.
Qaddafi’s forces yesterday fought rebels for control of a key border crossing with Tunisia and mined the harbor of Misrata to block the only outside access to that besieged coastal city.
More than two months of clashes in Libya have killed thousands of people. The Libyan leader, in his speech, blamed terrorists for leading the fight against his regime and said he would agree to a cease-fire if the extremists can be convinced to introduce a truce.
The insurgency has helped push oil prices up more than 30 percent. Crude oil for June delivery rose $1.07 to settle at $113.93 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Futures are up 6.8 percent this month. Qaddafi said no one can force him to leave Libya and said outsiders won’t control the nation’s oil, Africa’s biggest proven crude reserves.
Border Town
Fifteen trucks with Qaddafi’s troops entered Tunisia’s border town of Dehiba early yesterday during a clash with rebels in which “dozens” were killed, state-run Tunis Afrique Presse said. The Libyan soldiers were disarmed and released by Tunisian forces, Al Jazeera television reported. Rebels regained control of the border post on the Libyan side, Al Arabiya said.
“The Tunisian authorities informed the Libyans of their extreme indignation and asked them to take immediate measures to stop these violations,” the Foreign Ministry said in a faxed statement April 28, after cross-border shelling began.
Much of the fighting in Libya has centered on Misrata, where opposition forces this week pushed Qaddafi loyalists out of the city center. Qaddafi’s forces continue to shell civilian areas in the city and attempted to block ships by placing floating mines near the harbor entryway, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization said yesterday.
Laying Mines
“Some vessels, which we assume were pro-Qaddafi, were laying mines in the area of the harbor, indiscriminately,” British Army Brigadier Rob Weighill, an alliance spokesman, told reporters yesterday from NATO’s command center in Naples, Italy.
The port was temporarily closed, delaying the arrival of two ships carrying humanitarian aid, NATO said in a later statement.
While rebels have gained “significant” ground against Qaddafi’s forces, the regime has damaged Misrata’s sewer system and a desalination plant. Suggestions that the opposition is “winning” are “over-optimistic,” Weighill said.
NATO is stepping up its air campaign after hitting ammunition depots and command centers, Weighill said, and “will now shift to hit more pro-Qaddafi troops pressuring civilian centers.”
“You will see the results in the next few days,” he said.
Mountain Region
The alliance also will focus more on the Nafusah Mountains in western Libya near the border clash. NATO has already struck regime forces near the rebel towns of Zintan and Yefren, southwest of Tripoli, Weighill said.
Alliance jets targeted 19 ammunition storage bunkers near Sirte and Mizdah, as well as rocket launchers, artillery vehicles and an armored personnel carrier in strikes carried out on April 27, NATO said in a statement yesterday. So far, NATO’s strikes have destroyed 220 tanks, 70 surface-to-air missile systems, and 200 ammunition facilities, he said, eroding the capabilities of Qaddafi’s forces.
“While these efforts may not always be visible, as they are often far from urban centers, their impact is obvious near the front where the regime’s troops are having a harder time fighting,” he said.
Gene Cretz, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, told reporters at the State Department April 27 that Qaddafi’s forces “have been especially brutal” in the western mountains “where there has always been a suspicion on the part of Qaddafi toward the Berber groups.” Berbers are a non-Arab indigenous minority.
Cretz said officials have seen estimates of as many as 30,000 people killed in the Libyan conflict since mid-February.
Civilians Flee
The United Nations refugee agency is “very concerned that people fleeing Libya could be caught in the crossfire as government and opposition forces battle for control in the border area,” spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said on the website of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
In the past month, more than 30,000 people have fled the fighting in the western mountains and crossed into Tunisia at Dehiba, according to the UNHCR. More than 3,100 people, including many Berbers, crossed the border on April 27 alone, according to UNHCR staff.
The flare-up in violence in the west contrasts with the front in the east, where clashes with loyalists on the coastal road between the dictator’s hometown of Sirte and rebel-held Benghazi have ground to a standstill.
Qaddafi forces seized the town of Al-Kufrah in the country’s southeastern desert region, in a province that’s home to some of Libya’s richest oil fields. About 250 Libyan soldiers in trucks descended on the town April 28 and drove out rebels, Agence France-Presse reported at the time, citing rebels.
--With assistant from Jihen Laghmari in Tunis and Nadeem Hamid in Washington. Editors: Paul Tighe, Jim McDonald
To contact the reporters on this story: Patrick Donahue in Berlin at pdonahue1@bloomberg.net; Maram Mazen in Khartoum at mmazen@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editors responsible for this story: James Hertling at jhertling@bloomberg.net; Paul Tighe at ptighe@bloomberg.net

Situation Report #31 Libya Arab Jamahiriya 4-28

and 2 others
Libyan Arab Jamahiriya: Crisis Situation Report No. 31

This report produced by OCHA Libya in collaboration with humanitarian partners, covering the period of 26 to 28 April. The next report will be issued on or around 1 May.
I. HIGHLIGHTS/KEY PRIORITIES
• Over 11,000 people have been evacuated from Misrata including 435 Libyans.
• Some 634,835 people have now fled Libya since the beginning of the conflict.
• Fighting in the Nafusa Mountains region continues, particularly in Zintan and Nalut. Since 21 April about 18,500 Libyans have crossed into Tunisia at Dibat.
• The US$ 310 million Flash Appeal for the Libyan Crisis is currently funded at 42.6 per cent with $132 million committed and $1.9 million in pledges.

Escalated fighting at the Dehiba border crossing between Libya and Tunisia has stopped the outflow of refugees

Libyan Arab Jamahiriya (the)
and 1 other
Tensions on Libya-Tunisia border stem outflow of refugees
Report

UN High Commissioner for Refugees

Escalated fighting at the Dehiba border crossing between Libya and Tunisia has stopped the outflow of refugees from Libya’s Western Mountains. UNHCR is very concerned that people fleeing Libya could be caught in the cross-fire as government and opposition forces battle for control in the border area.

Before the fighting intensified yesterday (Thursday), there were long lines of vehicles packed with families queuing up at the border crossing to cross into southern Tunisia. There was a renewed exodus of Libyans crossing from the impoverished Western Mountains region in the past three days; over 3,100 people crossed the border on Wednesday alone.

The large number of recent arrivals is straining the limited resources at the Dehiba border region of south-eastern Tunisia. Camps established to shelter the refugees are filled beyond capacity. UNHCR’s camp in Remada with space for 950 people was sheltering some 2,000 people on Thursday evening. UNHCR is reinforcing the camp to a capacity of 5,000 people. Fortunately, the vast majority of people (more than 30,000) are still being hosted by the local community. UNHCR is working with the authorities to expand the capacity of existing camps and to support host families.

In cooperation with Islamic Relief, the World Food Programme and local partners, UNHCR is planning to distribute food and non-food packages to thousands of refugees and to the local communities receiving them, who are clearly feeling the strain. The majority of new arrivals are women, children and families. UNHCR is also moving emergency supplies to the Remada area, including portable warehouses, tents, mattresses and other aid items.

In addition, we received reports from the Somali community in Choucha camp, near the Ras Adjir border crossing to Libya that three more Somali refugees drowned off the coast of Libya yesterday morning after a boat carrying some 280 Africans heading towards Italy capsized in high seas. The three Somalis who died were part of a larger group of 20 people who had left Choucha camp for Libya some 10 days ago in order to board boats to Europe. These deaths add to the hundreds of people who have drowned or are missing in the desperate attempt to reach the safety of Europe from Libya.

For further information on this topic, please contact: On the Egyptian border: Helene Caux on mobile: +201 294 66 378 On the Tunisian border: Firas Kayal on mobile +216 508 561 99 In Geneva: Sybella Wilkes on mobile +41 79 557 91 38

Libya Nepalm being used?