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Fall of Ajdabiya is first significant victory for rebels since coalition strikes began a week ago Khalif Ameen leaped on the blackened tank, its innards hollowed out by the blast of a missile from an unseen plane, and waved his Kalashnikov as he declared the war all but won. “Now Gaddafi is finished. We have won Ajdabiya. We will not stop. Next Brega, Ras Lanuf, Sirte, Tripoli. Gaddafi will go quick,” said the young man who a few weeks ago was an engineering student. But the burned-out remnants of the Libyan dictator’s armour abandoned on the outskirts of Ajdabiya after the strategic town finally fell to rebel forces told a different story that does not bode well for Ameen’s dream of marching all the way to Tripoli. The fall of Ajdabiya after days of artillery duels and air bombardment delivered the Libyan revolutionaries their first significant victory over Muammar Gaddafi’s forces since the coalition air strikes began a week ago. The Libyan army sat outside town, astride the main coastal highway, blocking the rebels’ attempts to advance west toward the capital and recapture territory lost as Gaddafi found his footing after the initial shock of the uprising. On Friday, the insurgents moved rocket launchers and other weapons down the road from Benghazi, then said they fought through the night with the dug-in enemy. “We hit them with our rockets and RPGs,” said Mohammed Rahim, a former regular soldier wearing a makeshift uniform of blue camouflage jacket and green trousers who went over to the rebels at the beginning of the uprising last month. “The fighting went on all night. It was a big battle. All the fighters came from Benghazi for it.” However, the destruction of tanks on the edge of the town suggested it was air strikes by coalition forces, ostensibly to protect civilians, that had finally broken the back of strong resistance by army forces before the rebels moved in. The length of time it took the insurgents to overcome the army, and the rebels’ reliance on air strikes to destroy the bulk of its armour before finally taking Ajdabiya, confirmed how dependent the poorly armed and inexperienced revolutionaries are on foreign air forces to fight their war for them. Libya’s deputy foreign minister, Khaled Kaim, acknowledged the defeat, which he blamed on the “heavy involvement” of Western forces. “This is the objective of the coalition now, it is not to protect civilians, because now they are directly fighting against the armed forces,” he said. “They are trying to push the country to the brink of a civil war.” Six wrecked tanks marked the road into the town alongside artillery guns and rocket launchers mangled by the missiles from beyond the clouds. Ammunition littered the ground. Other guns were left intact and were hauled away by the rebels for the next battle. On the other side of Ajdabiya, where the road heads west out of town, squatted more destroyed tanks and armoured vehicles. Others sat by the roadside unscathed. Abandoned piles of weapons and ammunition, including Russian-made tank shells and rocket-propelled grenades, suggested Gaddafi’s forces had left in a hurry. The rebels swiftly arrived with transporters to remove the armour to add to an expanding revolutionary tank force that has yet to see action. Corpses of Gaddafi fighters lay among some of the clusters of armour, but around others there was no sign of bodies, perhaps further evidence that they had fled from their tanks in fear of the air strikes. At least 20 tanks were destroyed or abandoned along with artillery guns and rocket launchers. The strikes also appeared to have destroyed a military barracks. One of the fighters, Mansour Mahdy, acknowledged that the battle would not have been won without foreign planes. “We are very grateful to the West. Everyone wants to thank France. Was it France this time? Or America? We thank them all,” he said. Days of air strikes were carried out by both countries, plus British aircraft. The rebels took control of a mostly empty town, raising the revolutionary flag – the pre-Gaddafi-era ensign – and firing off more bullets in celebration. As word spread that the fighting was over, residents began to pour back in hundreds of cars . The few of the town’s 130,000 people who endured the siege were relieved but stunned. Some gave accounts of Gaddafi security men hunting down rebel sympathisers when they occupied the town. One man said he was looking for his brother and feared he had been executed or taken to prison in Tripoli. Other residents said they had not been badly treated and that, after the initial street battles and occasional shelling, the hardest part had been to endure a town with no electricity or water and dwindling food supplies. The local hospital closed after most of the staff fled because they feared they would be targeted by Gaddafi’s forces after some doctors publicly sided with the rebels. One elderly man did not seem to view it as liberation. He said he feared the fighting would return. He did not seem entirely trustful of the rebels either. “We never had this before, all these men with guns. This was a peaceful town. Now everyone has run away. We did not ask for this,” he said. The victory will provide a boost to morale in revolutionary-held territory after a string of defeats that saw the army even invading the de facto rebel capital of Benghazi until Gaddafi’s forces were destroyed by the first air strikes. But for all the celebrations, the rebels’ struggle to overcome the relatively limited defences of Ajdabiya does not bode well for their bellicose threats to march all the way to Tripoli. If Ajdabiya is the example, it offers the prospect of a protracted conflict or military stalemate, largely decided by how far the Western allies are prepared to go in support of the rebels’ advance. Unless the regime cracks under other pressures, such as a sudden collapse of support for Gaddafi from within his own system, there appears little prospect of the rebels marching on Tripoli unless Britain, France and the US are prepared to offer rolling air cover for the revolutionaries that obliterates the regime’s ability to fight. The rebels said enemy forces were in rapid retreat back to the next town of Brega, without the heavy weapons they had used to defend Ajdabiya, and that the insurgents would catch up and crush them. The revolutionaries can probably move swiftly along the coastal road and retake the small towns of Brega and Ras Lanuf, important for their oil facilities, which they held at the beginning of the uprising. But moving on to the larger and more politically important town of Sirte may prove to be a challenge too far. Sirte is Gaddafi’s birthplace and he once proposed making it Libya’s capital. He is likely to reinforce the town because its fall would be a devastating blow. A rebel assault on Sirte would also raise a dilemma for Nato and the coalition leading the air strikes. The UN resolution permits military action in defence of civilians. Until now, it has been Gaddafi’s forces threatening rebel-held cities such as Benghazi, Misrata and Ajdabiya. But a rebel assault on Sirte would present the question of whether the coalition is prepared to launch air strikes to help take a town that has not risen up against Gaddafi. If not, it appears unlikely the rebels will be able to overcome the regime’s defences in Sirte on their own. Alternatively, if Gaddafi’s forces make a stand in the desert, where no civilians are threatened, that would also present the coalition forces with difficulty in justifying air strikes in support of the rebels. The revolutionary leadership had not expected Gaddafi’s forces to hold out for as long as they did at Ajdabiya, a sign that they are not entirely deterred from fighting by the air strikes. The rebels still do not know the size of the enemy force they faced or even who they are for sure. The revolutionary leadership claims Serb mercenaries were among Gaddafi’s fighters at Ajdabiya and that they had been seeking to surrender in return for safe passage to Serbia. But the rebel leadership has made false claims about mercenaries in the past in an attempt to whip up foreign support, even parading innocent migrant workers from Ghana in front of reporters. The revolutionaries acknowledge the shortcomings of their own military, mostly made up of young men with no experience, while continuing to insist they have the ability to defeat Gaddafi’s forces if only they were equipped with the necessary arms, particularly anti-tank weapons, rockets and radios. The rebels’ military spokesman, Colonel Ahmed Omar Bani, has said that promises of weapons had been made by several foreign government that he declined to name, although none had so far delivered any. But given the rebels’ poor combat record on the battlefield, where the civilian volunteers who have joined their ranks have proved to be ill-disciplined and prone to flee in chaos, there may be a reluctance to supply weapons that might fall into the hands of Gaddafi’s military. For all its insistence that it will not accept a divided Libya, the revolutionary council is increasingly adjusting to the reality that it may be facing military stalemate and governing the rump of a country until Gaddafi’s regime implodes. But almost no one is predicting when that will be. Libya Arab and Middle East unrest Muammar Gaddafi Middle East Chris McGreal guardian.co.uk