Can they take Tripoli?

Into battle with Libya’s middle-class rebel army

Nafusa mountains, Libya

‘My people, did you forget what you got from this tyrant Gaddafi? Only pain, death and humiliation!’ The commander of the Tripoli Brigade was rallying his men at a rebel base not far from the frontline in the western mountains. ‘Stand up, in his face, and say in one voice: No more!’ The Tripoli Brigade is a ‘special unit’ being prepared to storm the capital. Most of its members still have family in Tripoli, so had covered their faces with masks. If I hadn’t known that they were an army of teachers, engineers and accountants, many holding a gun for the first time, I might have thought them a bit sinister.

Some were paunchy despite the training — as if the Rotary Club had gone to war — but even so, they were determined to see the fight through. A fighter called Ismail showed me a bracket attached to the muzzle of his Kalashnikov. It held a single bullet. ‘I’m saving this one for Gaddafi,’ he said. After an off-key rendition of the pre-Gaddafi national anthem, the rebels listened to their commander again: ‘In this lifetime, we will get just one chance. We have to take it.’

And they have to take it soon, while the momentum lasts. Public support in the US, Britain and France for Nato’s bombing campaign is ebbing. And as the Tripoli Brigade prepared to advance, the ‘brother-leader’ replied to a French suggestion that he go peacefully into exile. His response, literally translated, was: ‘Step down? You’re ’aving a laugh aren’t you?’

The rebels’ most promising front is here in the western mountains, the Jebel Nafusa, a 2,600ft-high plateau overlooking a plain running all the way to Tripoli.