GCC seeks no-fly zone as Libya battle rages

08/03/2011| IslamWeb

Gulf states called on Monday for a no-fly zone to be imposed on Libya, and for an urgent Arab League meeting to discuss the situation in Libya, according to a statement released by their foreign ministers, according to Reuters.

“(The foreign ministers)...called on the ... (UN) Security Council to protect Libyan civilians, including through a no-fly zone,” said a statement issued after the ministers’ meeting, read by Abdulrahman Al-Attiyah, secretary-general of the Gulf Cooperation Council which groups regional countries.

The ministers also called for an urgent Arab League meeting to discuss Libya.

Meanwhile, Qaddafi’s forces fought opposition forces for control of a key eastern oil port on Monday and an opposition official said Muammar Qaddafi could attack oil fields like a “wounded wolf” if the West did not stop him with airstrikes.

The opposition forces had punched through Qaddafi’s forces in the oil towns of Brega and Ras Lanouf, then Bin Jawad and Al-Nawfaliyeh on their way west to Sirte, a Qaddafi stronghold, but made the mistake of leaving Bin Jawad, west of Ras Lanouf, undefended.

Qaddafi’s forces then counter-attacked by land and air, advancing eastward before digging in tanks to defend Bin Jawad, 525 km east of Tripoli. Opposition said there were only 5 km between the two forces.

“We heard our positions would be bombed, so we took our weapons away,” an opposition soldier said on the windswept highway outside Ras Lanouf, where camel herders occasionally appear from desert scrub. Another said: “We took them out into the desert.” The eastern fighting zone is the scene of attack and counter-attack by the loose-knit group of young opposition volunteers and defectors and the armed forces in a barren landscape between west and east Libya. A Libyan opposition spokesman based across the border in Tunisia said that he and his colleagues had “lost contact with our people in Zawiyah”.

Misrata was quiet yesterday according to local residents. They reported that Sunday had seen intense fighting in which they had managed to repulse Qaddafi’s forces who used tanks. Twenty-one people died and 92 were injured, they said.

“The situation is quiet now but a fresh attack is expected,” one resident said. “Qaddafi’s people are planning an attack from both the east and west of the city. We are afraid. But we are preparing.”

Radio Misrata, he said, was still in opposition hands and broadcasting. The hospital was ready to receive fresh casualties but there were shortages of medicines and supplies.

People wounded in fighting over the city are being treated on hospital floors because of a catastrophic shortage of medical facilities in the besieged city, a resident said on Monday. The largely inexperienced opposition lack their enemy’s firepower. But their agility, often fairly chaotic at the front, has given them a degree of protection from Qaddafi’s forces, who have proved more effective at quashing the uprising in the west around the Libyan leader’s Tripoli power base.

“The West needs to move or this crazy guy (Qaddafi) will do something to the oil fields. He is like a wounded wolf,” Mustafa Gheriani, a media officer for the opposition in Benghazi, said, referring to opposition appeals for a no-fly zone. “If the West does not intervene with tactical airstrikes he could put the oil fields out of commission for a long time.”

President Barack Obama said the US and its NATO allies are still considering a military response to violence in Libya, according to AP.

British Foreign Secretary William Hague said on Monday Britain and some other countries are working “on a contingency basis” on a UN Security Council resolution allowing for a no-fly zone over Libya.

Hague told the British Parliament there were “credible reports” that Libyan government forces had used helicopter gunships against civilians.

PHOTO CAPTION

A Libyan fighter fires his rifle at a military aircraft loyal to Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi at a checkpoint in Ras Lanuf March 7, 2011.

Agencies