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Muammar Gaddafi’s troops sent to save his home city as David Cameron praises British pilots carrying out air strikes Rebel Libyan forces were halted about 50 miles from Sirte on Monday as reinforcements loyal to Muammar Gaddafi were seen moving towards the strategically vital city. Revolutionary forces had advanced more than 150 miles in two days, helped by coalition air strikes, breaking the stalemate at Ajdabiya and paving the way for hundreds of men to stream forward along Libya’s coastal road. But despite a Libyan rebel claim that Sirte had been captured, there was no sign on Monday that the opposition was in control of the city, which marks the boundary between the east and west of Libya and has great symbolic importance as Gaddafi’s home city. Instead, pro-Gaddafi troops in Sirte were being rallied by forces travelling east from Tripoli and other strongholds in 4×4 vehicles with light weaponry mounted on the rear, a break from the heavier artillery used so far by Gaddafi’s forces, which has been picked off with relative ease by coalition air strikes. After another wave of air strikes targeted Sirte on Sunday night and Monday morning, David Cameron revealed RAF pilots had flown more than 120 sorties and completed more than 250 hours of flight as part of the action in the country. However, the US military warned that the rebels’ advance could be quickly reversed without continued coalition bombing. “The regime still vastly overmatches opposition forces militarily,” General Carter F Ham, the highest-ranking American in the coalition operation, told the New York Times via email. “The regime possesses the capability to roll them back very quickly. Coalition air power is the major reason that has not happened.” His warning came as coalition forces appeared to ratchet up the number of air strikes against Gaddafi forces. Defence officials say the higher tempo is the result of more intelligence surveillance and assessments from reconnaissance aircraft but they warn aerial bombardment is getting more problematic because priority targets are increasingly in urban areas. “Obviously it is more difficult in an urban environment,” officials said. British defence officials said they believed the rules of engagement may be made much more restrictive when Nato takes responsibility for the coalition’s military operations, probably by Thursday. The attacks have been criticised by Russia as “intervention in a civil war” on the side of the rebels. On the ground, the area around Sirte was quiet after heavy bombardment from before dawn and there was no sign it had been taken by the Benghazi-based rebels advancing from the east. It is rumoured that the outskirts have been planted with landmines. Rebels retook the important oil towns of Brega, Ras Lanuf and Ben Jawad, and continued on the open desert road towards Sirte, about 95 miles away. A doctor treating wounded government soldiers described hundreds of deaths, terrible injuries and collapsing morale. The Guardian advanced to the outskirts of Sirte with the rebels from Benghazi who were able to move with no opposition, simply driving along Libya’s coastal road as Gaddafi’s forces pulled back. In a statement to the House of Commons, Cameron paid tribute to the “skilful and dangerous work” performed by pilots, who he said had destroyed 22 of Gaddafi’s tanks, armoured vehicles and heavy guns over the weekend and flown into the desert on Monday morning to target ammunition bunkers. The prime minister said the allied operations to protect civilians in Libya had had a “significant and beneficial effect” over the last 10 days, stopping the assault on Benghazi and helping “to create conditions in which a number of towns have been liberated from Gaddafi’s onslaught”. In Sabha, in south Libya, one Libyan witness said there was a first air strike at about 2.30am followed, about two hours later, by a bigger attack on an ammunitions bunker about seven miles away from the centre. “It hit the ammunitions storage and it kept exploding because it activated all the other bombs. I’ve never seen anything like that except in the movies. There was no fighting here – it was a very quiet city,” he said. “I looked out of my window and it looked like a mushroom with fire. It was a shock. There was a strike before but it was just noise and vibration. This one was worse and it kept going for more than three hours. People were running out of their houses because the windows were shattered and doors cleared out.” On Monday morning, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, criticised the attacks on loyalist forces by coalition aircraft. “We consider that intervention by the coalition in what is essentially an internal civil war is not sanctioned by the UN security council resolution,” Lavrov said. In Tripoli, the parents of a Libyan woman who claimed she was detained and raped by Gaddafi’s forces said their daughter was being held at the Libyan leader’s compound. Iman al-Obeidi entered a hotel where many foreign journalists were staying in the Libyan capital on Saturday, saying she had been raped by 15 men over two days. She was bundled into a car by Libyan officials and driven off. The Libyan government later said she had been released, but her parents told al-Jazeera TV that their daughter was still being detained. Libya Middle East Arab and Middle East unrest Muammar Gaddafi Ian Black Chris McGreal Adam Gabbatt Richard Norton-Taylor guardian.co.uk