Libyan Rebels Close In On Gaddafi

Although foreign mercenaries and Libyan militiamen loyal to Moammar Gadhafi tried to roll back the uprising against his rule last night, they could not roll back the advancing rebels, who made new gains, capturing more cities in the country, including a military air base.

Gadhafi’s forces attacked the positions of the rebels in two cities near Tripoli, in battles that killed at least 17 people. The worse bloodshed was in Zawiya, 50 kilometers west of the capital Tripoli. An army unit loyal to Gadhafi opened fire with automatic weapons on a mosque where residents — some armed with hunting rifles for protection — have been holding a sit-in to support protesters in the capital, a witness said.

The troops blasted the mosque’s minaret with an anti-aircraft gun. A doctor at a field clinic set up at the mosque said he saw the bodies of 10 dead, shot in the head and chest, as well as around 150 wounded. A Libyan news website, Qureyna, put the death toll at 23 and said many of the wounded could not reach hospitals because of shooting by “security forces and mercenaries.”

A day earlier, an envoy from Gadhafi had come to the city from Tripoli and warned the protesters: “Either leave or you will see a massacre,” the witness said. On Tuesday night, Gadhafi himself called on his supporters to hunt down opponents in their homes.

Zawiya, a key city close to an oil port and refineries, is the nearest population center to Tripoli to fall into the hands of the anti-Gadhafi rebellion that began Feb. 15. Hundreds have died in the unrest, with one estimate putting the death toll at 2000.

Most of the eastern half of Libya has already broken away, and diplomats, ministers and even a high-ranking cousin have abandoned Gadhafi, who has ruled Libya for 41 years.

Now Gadhafi is still believed to be firmly in control only of the capital, some towns around it, the far desert south and parts of Libya’s sparsely populated center.

In cities across the east, anti-Gadhafi forces rose up and overwhelmed government buildings and army bases, joined in many cases by local army units that defected. In those cities, tribal leaders, residents and military officers have formed local administrations, passing out weapons looted from the security forces’ arsenals.They now control a swath of territory from the Egyptian border in the east, across nearly half Libya’s 1,000-mile (1,600-kilometer) Mediterranean coast to the key oil port of Breqa, about 440 miles (710 kilometers) east of Tripoli.

Gadhafi’s crackdown has been the harshest by any Arab leader in the wave of protests that has swept the Middle East the past month, toppling the presidents of Libya’s neighbors — Egypt and Tunisia.

The upheaval in the OPEC nation has taken most of Libya’s oil production of 1.6 million barrels a day off the market, and crude prices have jumped 20 percent to two-year highs in just a week — reaching $99.77 per barrel in afternoon trading in New York and $114.20 in London on Thursday. Most of the oil goes to Europe.

Hours after the attack in Zawiya, Gadhafi said in a rambling speech on TV scolded the city’s residents for siding with the uprisin and blamed the revolt on Osama Bin Laden aned teenagers hopped up on hallucinogenic pills given to them “in their coffee with milk, like Nescafe.”

In one of the latest blows to the Libyan leader, a cousin who is one of his closest aides, Ahmed Gadhaf al-Dam, announced that he has defected to Egypt in protest against the regime’s bloody crackdown, denouncing what he called “grave violations to human rights and human and international laws.”

Gadhaf al-Dam is one of the highest level defections to hit the regime so far, after many ambassadors around the world, the justice minister and the interior minister all sided with the protesters. Gadhaf al-Dam belonged to Gadhafi’s inner circle, served as his liaison with Egypt and frequently appeared by his side.

International momentum has been building for action to punish Gadhafi’s regime for the bloodshed.

The Swiss government on Thursday ordered a freeze of any assets in Switzerland belonging to Gadhafi. Britain has similarly given to notice that it will freeze gadhafi’s assets.

The European Union pushed for Libya to be suspended from the U.N.’s top human rights body over possible crimes against humanity and for the U.N. Security Council to approve a probe into “gross and systematic violations of human rights by the Libyan authorities.”

—With agency reports.