Pro-Gadhafi Forces Step Up Assault On Rebels Who Hold Tunisia Crossing.
By RICHARD BOUDREAUX
A Libyan family shelters Monday in a cave near Zintan, southwest of Tripoli, amid attacks by the government.
Families in Libya's Western Mountains abandon their homes and set up camp in caves that provide better shelter from civil war fighting. Video courtesy of Reuters.
WAZEN, Libya—From the desert plains southwest of Tripoli, Col. Moammar Gadhafi's forces have intensified their shelling of rebellious mountain communities and cut off the electricity, forcing tens of thousands of inhabitants to flee the besieged Libyan region or hide in caves.
The offensive has turned a 125-mile strip of the dun-colored Nafusa Mountains into a major battleground, as government and rebel forces vie for the road linking the region's isolated hilltop cities and villages with this crossing at the Tunisian border.
Fighting has picked up since the rebels, then numbering several hundred ill-equipped and untrained men, captured the border crossing in late April. A stalemate emblematic of the Libyan conflict has since developed: After the mountain rebels lost the largest city they had held, Yefren, they repelled ground assaults elsewhere and were battling Tuesday to control Kikla, a town a few miles east. But they have failed to drive the colonel's army out of rocket range.
"At the start, Gadhafi had the advantage in weapons and troops, but we have gained volunteers and experience and held our ground," said Mohammed Abujedidi, a 53-year-old army special forces defector who commands the rebel border post here at Wazen. But without more aggressive air support by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, "we're stuck," he added. "We can't break the siege."
Clad in desert camouflage and a black Dolce & Gabbana belt, Mr. Abujedidi oversees the rebel lifeline to the outside world. As he spoke, a large truckload of food, fuel and medicine entered from Tunisia, bound for the besieged communities. Sick, wounded and frightened inhabitants lined up to cross the border in the opposite direction.
A rusty Toyota pickup outfitted with the cannon of a captured government tank roared into the desert to scout for mobile artillery crews that target the border post almost daily.
The Nafusa range is populated mainly by Berbers, a non-Arab ethnic group that feels marginalized by the colonel's 41-year-old Arab nationalist rule. When the uprising started in eastern Libya in February, most Berber communities raised the tricolor rebel flag and took up arms.
The rebel governing council, based in the eastern city of Benghazi, has embraced the mountain revolt, a move the council says underscores its tolerance of minorities and broad geographical support. The mountain fighters are a potential threat to the west of Col. Gadhafi's Tripoli stronghold, as it battles rebels on two fronts to the east.
The Gadhafi regime's escalating offensive has driven at least 61,000 mountain people into Tunisia, the United Nations refugee agency says. The offensive has battered and choked off entire communities, according to several dozen inhabitants interviewed in Libya and in Tunisia's refugee camps.
Grad rockets, an inherently indiscriminate weapon in populated areas, land with growing frequency on homes, these inhabitants say. Electricity stations in the government-controlled plains frequently cut power to much of the region, as they have done since last week, disabling water pumps. The most isolated communities are running out of food and water.
The government denies it has turned against the mountain people. It says it is working to restore basic services and battling rebel bands that enjoy scant following. "These people started a war in the middle of our civilian population, so now we are liberating these places," said government spokesman Moussa Ibrahim. "What we have in the western mountains are isolated pockets of violence."
A few mountain villages tied to Col. Gadhafi by tribal loyalty cooperate with his army. But many people from larger communities say they fully support the rebels and suffer collective retaliation.
Hadhoum Yerrou returned from Tunisia last week to her home in Nalut to gather clothing left behind when the family fled in March. As she bowed for midday prayer in her living room, she said, a rocket crashed through the roof and exploded, embedding shrapnel in her legs and back.
A brother-in-law drove her to Nalut's hospital, then back to Tunisia. Ms. Yerrou, 38 years old and seven months pregnant, said doctors told her that her unborn child was unharmed.
In Zintan, headquarters of the rebels' regional command, four Grad rockets landed last week near the hospital, the mosque and central market, according to Lahoucine Boufoullous, head of a Doctors Without Borders aid mission. The group abandoned the city, saying the hospital, far from any military facility, appeared to be a target.
People fleeing Zintan and the twin cities of Yefren and Al-Galaa say daily shelling has sent some of the several thousand remaining families into caves once inhabited by their ancestors. The retreat limits casualties—the hospital has treated 120 wounded since late April—but Mr. Boufoullous said hundreds more are severely traumatized.
A NATO military official said alliance aircraft attacked three government ammunition depots south of Zintan on Monday and Tuesday, part of what he called regular daily strikes on targets considered a threat to civilians. Inhabitants of the region said Col. Gadhafi's forces had recently switched to smaller rocket launchers to avoid NATO's bombs.
Government tanks, artillery guns and snipers occupy the center of Yefren, long a locus of Berber activism. From a base at the hospital, empty of patients, they shell rebel villages to the east, residents said.
Col. Salem Mehrez defected from the regime's civil guard and left his home in one of those villages to live in a cave. Every three nights, he said he led a donkey caravan to smuggle Yefren's wounded to safety over 30 miles of trails and bring back food. That ended when a fall fractured his hip.
Rebel leaders are urging NATO to enforce a "humanitarian corridor" into the region or airdrop relief supplies.
Meanwhile, civilians like Hassan, a 44-year-old insurance salesman, and his wife, Naima, fend for themselves. For 17 days in April, the couple said they moved five times under fire with his octogenarian mother and five children, from one refuge to another near Al-Galaa.
"It was like rain; it fell everywhere and made little puffs of dust," said Naima, speaking in Tunisia about the shelling from anti-aircraft guns. She declined to give the family name, fearing reprisals against relatives in Tripoli, and avoided uttering the name Gadhafi.
—Stephen Fidler in Brussels contributed to this article.
Write to Richard Boudreaux at richard.boudreaux@wsj.com
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