Ahmed Jadallah/Reuters
A family leaving its house in Zawiya, Libya, site of the government's last remaining source of fuel. More Photos »
By JOHN F. BURNS
Published: June 12, 2011
TRIPOLI, Libya — With loyalist forces clashing for a second day with rebels around a strategic oil city less than 30 miles west of here, the government of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi on Sunday told the “ugly, evil forces of NATO” to accept that the rebel cause was doomed and that the Libyan leader would not be driven from power by rebel attacks or NATO airstrikes.
The fighting around the oil city, Zawiya, site of the refinery that is the Qaddafi government’s last remaining source of fuel, came as new battles raged over the weekend at three points that are part of the strategic defenses of Tripoli: in the east, near Misurata, 130 miles from the capital; in the south, at Zintan, about 125 miles from the capital; and, potentially most threatening, at Zawiya, which commands the coastal road that carries vital supplies of food and other necessities to Tripoli from Tunisia.
But more than four months after the revolt against Colonel Qaddafi’s 40-year rule began, and nearly three months into the NATO airstrikes that have empowered the rebels, the government’s official response, measured by the mood at a news conference in Tripoli on Sunday, suggested that the Libyan leader and his associates were as deeply dug in as ever. They seemed confident, at least publicly, that they could outlast NATO and the rebels and win their way through to a Libya still under Colonel Qaddafi’s rule.
Moussa Ibrahim, the chief government spokesman, chose the Zawiya fighting as the occasion for a renewed denunciation of NATO and its demand, echoing that of the rebels who control about a third of the country from a base in the eastern city Benghazi, that Colonel Qaddafi quit power and leave the country as a condition for peace talks. NATO’s demand, Mr. Ibrahim said, was “immoral and illegal, and we reject it outright, and any talk of the leader leaving is nonsense.”
Last week, NATO focused its heaviest daylight bombing raids on Colonel Qaddafi’s command compound in Tripoli and attacked his tented retreat in the desert east of the capital, strikes that a senior American official described as having been “psychological” as much as military. But Mr. Ibrahim spoke as if Colonel Qaddafi felt more sure of his position than ever, enjoyed the overwhelming backing of Libya’s six million people and was buttressed by the “hatred” Libyans felt toward NATO and the rebels. “Now, our blood is united,” he said.
As if to underscore Colonel Qaddafi’s confidence, Libyan state television broadcast pictures of him on Sunday meeting with Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, a Russian provincial governor who is president of FIDE, the international chess federation. Russia’s Interfax news agency quoted the Russian official as saying that he had played chess with Colonel Qaddafi, who told him he had no intention of leaving.
As if to emphasize the point, Mr. Ibrahim said plans for a senior Russian official to visit Tripoli for mediation talks on the war were a waste of time unless Russia reversed its decision last month to back the calls for Colonel Qaddafi to quit.
Anybody taking that position, Mr. Ibrahim said, was “not welcome.” The Russian official, Mikhail V. Margelov, met in Benghazi on Friday with rebel leaders and said he was preparing to travel to Tripoli for talks with Colonel Qaddafi’s government.
Accounts of the fighting at Zawiya varied widely. Rebel spokesmen described it as a resumption of battles that erupted there in February and March, when rebels exploited the chaotic first stages of the anti-Qaddafi revolt by seizing much of the city of 250,000 and holding it for three weeks until Qaddafi forces crushed them with tanks and heavy weapons. In Tripoli, government officials described the new fighting as a minor flare-up confined mostly to an area around Al-Mutrad, a small town on the city’s southwestern edge.
Mr. Ibrahim sought to depict the fighting as a snapshot of a wider weakening of the rebel forces, which he described as rolling back under heavy government pressure on all of the approaches to Tripoli. He said the rebel fighters who struck around Zawiya on Saturday were fleeing a government counteroffensive in the Nafusah mountains, a majority Berber area where the rebels have overrun a string of small towns in recent weeks. “They were escaping northward to Zawiya,” he said. “They had nowhere else to go.”
The government narrative was dismissive toward the rebels. Mr. Ibrahim said that the fighters at al-Mutrad numbered barely 100, and that many were “Yemenis, Egyptians and Algerians,” in effect mercenaries. He said some had been killed and others captured, while still others were besieged by government troops, under promises for their safety if they surrendered. Over all, he said, they were typical of the rebel threat, which consisted of “a few pockets of violence” across the country, all “weak and pathetic” and surviving only because of NATO air power.
Rebel accounts offered a different view. Rebel spokesmen at Misurata, a port city considered a linchpin of the wider war, acknowledged that rebel forces had taken new casualties in fighting there, with six rebels dead, but that rebel losses, amounting to several dozen killed in recent days, had resulted from a push to gain ground in a rural area west of the city.
The rebels said the attacks at Zawiya, which led briefly to the closing of the coastal road between Tripoli and the Tunisian border, were the product of a rebel push northward from the Nafusah mountains, with rebel fighters joining elements of the armed underground in Zawiya, and not the result of government advances.
A version of this article appeared in print on June 13, 2011, on page A8 of the New York edition with the headline: Libyan Government Defiant as Battle Rages at Strategic Oil City.
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