Ann Marlowe

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/night-gravel-pit_582027.html

A Night at the Gravel Pit (Updated)
Ann Marlowe
August 4, 2011 3:38 PM

Djerba, Libya—As Saturday night wears on, the young men talk more and more confidently about an offensive they anticipate the next day, the big move 100 km north that will allow them to liberate their city of Sabratha. The mood is exultant, with some speculation that we will move forward at dawn. The men talk of showing me the famous Roman ruins, the beach, the good fish restaurants. I can’t believe my luck: I more or less sneaked into the camp tonight with a British Libyan doctor, Ibrahim, part of a group that took me in from Djerba five days ago. It’s my second visit to the camp in a few days, but my first night there, and it looks as though I’ve lucked onto a major offensive!

“We’ve been hearing that all week,” objects Ahmed, 20, a graphic design student from England who drove in with Dr. Ibrahim and me. The mood shifts for a moment, but the sense of the group is that this time the news is true.

No one will be sorry to leave the camp here in the Jafara Plain, 1,800 feet below the mesa town of Zintan. It’s a former gravel pit that offers almost no shade in the scorching days and little breeze in the barely tolerable nights. No one will be very sorry to leave Zintan, either, a place so conservative that before the February 17 revolution no cigarettes were sold in town. Women don’t walk in the streets usually, and in six days I only see four, three with their faces fully covered.

We’re sitting outside the concrete block building that holds the Urwah Company’s living quarters, kitchen and bathrooms, perched on dirty mattresses on metal beds. Because it’s dark the pieces of metal scrap and the endless empty water bottles aren’t as obvious, but it’s no beauty spot. The young men have chosen this area to sleep because it won’t be hit by the sun until 8 a.m. Libyans aren’t early risers; a former Qaddafi Air Force pilot, Col. Juma Ebrahim, complained to me earlier that day that the revolutionaries don’t want to fight at 7 a.m. But luckily, he added, neither do Qaddafi’s soldiers.

The men of the company are housed four or five to a room, and this group are roommates. They’re one of the less religious groups—one complains that he can’t wear his baggy shorts in Zintan. Several have been raised outside Libya, and most speak at least some English.

There are two short, dapper university student brothers, Abdel and Mohamed Said, from Manchester; skinny, tall Ahmed Sola, 19, from Sabratha, thrown out of high school for anti-Qaddafi talk and one of the most talented fighters in the company, and another Ahmed from Lancashire, a smart, surprisingly mature 20-year-old graphic design student who loves Japanese animation and games. His dad is a dentist and he comes from a prosperous clan. Someone shows me a homemade video of the day’s big news—Ahmed Sola captured seven Qaddafi soldiers bloodlessly.

The video shows the captured soldiers being unloaded from a pickup truck in the camp of the Urwah Company. They have cut off their uniform sleeves at the shoulders to adjust to the crushing heat, though two are colonels. One seems confused, his eyes bloodshot; the brothers say he reeked of alcohol and a couple of them had white pills in their pockets. They look scared, understandably; as one of the fighters here put it, if the shoe were on the other foot, and they were revolutionaries taken by Qaddafi’s forces, they would have already been shot.

The capture of these seven soldiers was accidental, but owed a lot to the quick thinking and confidence of 19-year-old Ahmed. “Natural born killer,” the other Ahmed jokes, and although Ahmed Sola says he wants to be an inventor, he has a lot of skills useful for war. He was a fisherman after being kicked out of school, and escaped Sabratha by stealing a Libyan navy boat and taking it to Tunisia by himself. Because Libyans fish with dynamite, he knows how to make explosives. And he has a preternatural calm.

Ahmed was one of a couple of dozen men on a reconnaissance trip north from the Urwah company base. They stopped for lunch and a swim in a water tank. Ahmed spotted a group of enemy soldiers walking toward them. Though the regular Libyan army uniform is green, apparently enough affiliated groups use camo, or confusion was so great, that the Qaddafi troops thought the freedom fighters were from their own unit. (Or perhaps they couldn’t believe their supposedly furtive enemy would take a swim in the open.) Ahmed greeted the Qaddafi troops calmly, asking how they were, and then informed them that they were surrounded, got them to put down their weapons, and herded them onto a truck. The capture was a great coup not only for the two colonels taken but also for the weapons, ammunition and money obtained.

Ahmed from Lancashire, ribbing Mohamed Said, from Manchester: “This guy brought a Louis Vuitton bag and belt to an army training camp!”

Mohamed Said: “And a Louis Vuitton wallet, too!”

He and his brother Abdul Said are the sons of Hadi Said, a Libyan doctor in England. He was an outspoken opponent of Qaddafi even in the Seventies, getting into a fistfight with a Libyan diplomat when he went to renew his passport. He was cut off from the regime and lived on the streets for four years, but managed to get a certificate as a blood technician. He married and started a Libyan football team in Manchester. In July, he and Mohamed and Abdul drove a well-equipped ambulance paid for by the Libyan community all the way to Genoa, and then took a ferry to Tunis and drove it on from there through the Dehiba crossing point to the Western Mountains.

Around 1, I move inside to the room vacated by my new friends. Since they each have just one mattress, I sleep on the floor, but my air mattress and sleeping bag keep me pretty comfortable. The problem is the heat, even with a fan directly pointed at my feet.

Mornings are grim at the gravel pit, and no one is in a hurry to begin them. Apparently some of the men rise for the pre-dawn prayer, and some then go on a 15k run through the desert before it becomes too hot to contemplate exercise. But many men are still sleeping past 9:30. There’s Arabic coffee and the peculiar Libyan breakfast of tuna sandwiches, cakes and milk. Then there’s the effort to stay out of the heat.

The mood this morning is particularly down, with the word going out that there is no move north toward Sabratha anytime soon. Worse yet, Ramadan begins at sundown, which means the men won’t be able to eat or drink in daylight hours for four weeks. While the Koran allows fighters to ignore the fast, this apparently applies only to those at the frontlines who are actually firing their weapons.

Libyans are volatile; the same men who talked of showing me Sabratha last night are now discussing going back to Tunisia. Ahmed the graphic designer decides to return to Djerba for the first days of Ramadan; he freely admits to finding the life of the camp killingly dull. Ahmed Sola is going to come along too. I imagine the desert camp is even more painful for him, who loves the sea.

A couple of men in their thirties come over and say that the offensive will begin soon. But why would they let one of the best fighters go on leave if that’s true? Why would Ahmed Sola quit the fight now? In fact, the constant talk of an imminent offensive may be one of the few ways commanders have to retain an impatient all-volunteer force.

I weigh my options for a moment. If there’s no offensive, I should go to Benghazi, which has just erupted in violence. And it’s certainly easier to travel with two Libyan freedom fighters who can get us past the couple of dozen checkpoints on the way to Tunisia. But the dream of Sabratha beckons.

Just then Ahmed comes back with some bad news. Some of the more religious, older men object to the presence of a woman in the camp during Ramadan, when the mind is supposed to be on holy things. I am not welcome to stay longer, “though they thank you for your support and it is nothing personal.” Some of the young men promise that once they get to Sabratha, they’ll drive back to Zintan to pick me up and show me their city’s famous ruins. But Zintan is not much of a place to wait.

Leaving is almost as bad as staying. The two Ahmeds find a taxi that has fuel—no small issue, since the freedom fighters have bought up almost everything available—and after a series of Third World delays we leave Zintan, I hope for the last time.

We take an exhausting nine-hour drive through a dust storm into Tunisia, and arrive in Djerba—location of the Sabratha exile community—at 3 a.m. Just before the turn off to Djerba is a road sign pointing to Tripoli, just 237 km east. We all exchange emails and Tunisian phone numbers, and the next day I call Ahmed from Lancashire. You guys should come to my hotel to go swimming, I tell him. Great beach. “Ahmed went back to Zintan a few hours ago,” Ahmed says. “He got a call early this morning saying that they need him.” I feel for the lanky teenager, on the verge of taking a swim at last, pulled back to the grimy camp. Maybe the offensive is beginning at last.

UPDATE: Dr. Ibrahim writes: “I came back home. I feel I should stay to help the guys. The advance toward the north started yesterday early morning. The guys took the Al-Mahmaya (a Qaddafi military base, between our base and Sabratha). This is good news. But a few are injured, 2 are missing, and one from Zintan was killed. Masood, who was supposed to accompany us to Djerba and see his family, but had been asked by the leader to stay, is one of the missing guys. Very nice man who used to live in Holland before 17th Feb. One of the injuried by land mine is Hasan. He is one of the leaders. Very nice and brave guy, known by the other guys as Sarkozy! I am trying to sort out a few things here so that I can go back soon.”

UPDATE II: Dr. Ibrahim again writes in: “I have got news from the the guys. The missing guys have been found safe this morning. Qaddafi’s troops tried to attack our fighters new position again, but the guys were ready and pushed them back. Yesterday’s fighting left more than 200 hundred soldiers killed (most of them were from Chad and Niger!). News from Sabratha & Surman mentioned that hospitals are full of injuried from Qaddafi forces. I hope that Sabratha will be soon under

Paper targets, Lacoste shirts, and homemade explosives.
Ann Marlowe
August 8, 2011, Vol. 16, No. 44

Qasr el-Haj, Jafara Valley, Libya

Colonel Bashir sits on a mat in the shade of a concrete block building, part of a group cutting out small white circles from copy paper. The men, who are half his forty-something years and wearing a mixture of American sportswear (Tommy Hilfiger, Ralph Lauren, and Lacoste shirts) and dun-colored camouflage, glue the little circles onto paper spray-painted with big black circles. These are targets. Bashir, a compact, self-contained former colonel in Muammar Qaddafi’s army, is giving sniper training to Urwah Company of the Sabratha Brigade here at their base, a sun-baked Jafara Valley gravel company donated by its owner.

Colonel Bashir made a daring escape into Tunisia and back into free Libya at the Dehiba crossing in June to join this group. He now goes back and forth through free-Libyan held areas regularly. This valley lies below the 1,800-foot-high tablelands known as the Western Mountains, about 50 miles from the most important town in the area, Gharyan, still held by Qaddafi’s forces. We are at the eastern terminus of free Libyan territory here, about 60 miles from Dehiba.

The 40 to 50 men in Urwah Company are part of a couple of hundred in the Brigade of the Revolutionaries of Sabratha. Like Bashir, they’re from Sabratha, a coastal city of 100,000 famous for its magnificent Roman ruins, a far cry from this hazy, parched no man’s land. Because Sabratha was retaken by Qaddafi’s forces after an initial uprising in February, many men fled 60 miles south to continue the fight. Their furthest outposts are three or four miles from areas patrolled by Qaddafi troops. The Sabratha fighters there can hear their enemy over the walkie-talkies both sides use for field communication. Some of the men have tried to convince Qaddafi’s soldiers to surrender, but haven’t gotten far.

The nearest town, Zintan, is a 15-minute drive up hairpin turns through a mesa that looks a lot like parts of the American west. But it’s an insular, conservative place very different from Libya’s coastal cities. In two days walking and driving around Zintan, I see only two women on the street, both with faces covered.

“Zintan: love it or leave it,” quips the youthful-looking, 43-year-old Dr. Ibrahim, part of the group brought in from Djerba by Colonel Bashir. He’s a Sabratha-born, British-educated specialist in neuromuscular disease, who came here from Britain on his summer vacation with aid for the front-line fighters. Unfortunately, the high-quality British running shoes he hoped to donate were confiscated by Tunisian customs as “commercial merchandise.” But his group has succeeded in bringing a third British ambulance here for the fighters.

While in Benghazi and smaller eastern coastal cities like Bayda and Derna, Libyans are exploring larger social changes, in Zintan, life feels more static. Yet here, too, shopkeepers press food on me for free, and there’s a spirit of generosity to foreigners, along with some quasi-Appalachian suspicion.

At the gravel pit, the men of Urwah Company are grateful for electricity and running water and the three simple meals a day prepared by one of their group. They know many other fighters have it worse. Lunch on the day I visited was macaroni with chunks of lamb, followed by green melon and tea. But they are impatient to get on with retaking their home town of Sabratha before the fasting month of Ramadan begins in just a few days. During Ramadan, the company won’t be eating or even drinking water between sunrise and sunset (only front-line fighters are allowed to break their fast).

Baha, 23, tells me that they are getting desperate to do something, so much so that they don’t care if they live or die, “which isn’t good.” Lanky, with stringy hair and a wispy beard, he’s one of a fair number of English speakers at the camp. (“I’m sorry Qaddafi did not give me the chance to become educated and learn English,” another man tells me in Arabic Baha translates; Libya’s public schools stopped teaching foreign languages at one point, with private courses available only to the middle and upper classes.)

Baha, born in England, has a degree in financial computing from the United Kingdom and for the last two years worked with the Libyan Investment Authority in Tripoli. He tried to flee to Tunisia in June. The border police confiscated his Libyan passport, and his family drove him south to the desert instead, where he was met by fighters from Urwah Company on June 19. The company’s namesake Urwah, a 41-year-old Sabratha man killed in Brega near the start of the revolution, was a cousin of his, and his father recently visited him here from London. An uncle, a fighter stationed at the Tunisian border, told Baha not to participate in the most recent action Urwah Company undertook, in Gwalish, because he was too green.

Sabratha is so close that fighters based here used to make their way at night to its outskirts. But a few weeks ago, Qaddafi’s forces tightened security within and around the town. They’ve also arrested an increasing number of citizens, whether on suspicion of trying to flee to Tunisia, as many western Libyans have done, or of helping the freedom fighters. Even taking a phone call from someone at the front is enough for imprisonment. Libya has two phone networks, and one is still under Qaddafi’s control. The other, Libyana, was hacked by the revolutionaries and is free for calls within the network, though it can’t dial out of network.

Almost every man I meet from Sabratha reels off a list of jailed relatives; Bashir’s brother is among them. The owner of the gravel company was promptly arrested when he returned to Sabratha from setting it up for the fighters. Most detainees have been sent to prison in Tripoli. Mohamed al-Fitory, a dignified 56-year-old retired high school English teacher who taught some of the men fighting here, says there are 50,000 prisoners in Tripoli, including his eldest son and four of his nephews. In fluent English, he matter of factly states he expects some of the prisoners will be shot by Qaddafi’s men in the last days of the regime.

When I express surprise that a man of his age, father of eight and grandfather of seven, is fighting alongside men of 19, he says, “Qaddafi makes no difference between the people who fight and those who do not. It is imposed upon us.” He does daily weapons practice from 7 to 11 a.m.

While Colonel Bashir adjusts the positions of three men who shoot at the homemade targets, a fighter who is a fisherman in civilian life tries to make explosives using machine gun rounds and tin foil. We watch as he sets the packet on fire—but it burns rather than explodes. “I guess it needs more work‚ a lot more work!” Baha jokes. The improvised missile bases welded here are more impressive, U.S.-made 2.75-inch rockets triggered by car batteries. The men here received weapons training from Qatari soldiers and Tunisians, but they don’t have enough ammunition to practice as often as they need to.

The Sabratha Brigade men are urbanites, most with at least some college, and they are sophisticated enough to be aware of the possibilities for self-dramatization in their situation. “I’d never held a gun in my life” and “I never expected to be a fighter” are common refrains. Quite apart from Qaddafi’s success at making sure only his guys owned guns, Libyan culture is far less oriented to physical training than American culture. Some of the men don’t even have running shoes, much less army boots; hence Dr. Ibrahim’s donation. Their barracks are filled with black-wheeled suitcases, not backpacks.

Yet they’ve adapted to this new life, with impressive self-discipline and morale. Rotating crews keep the bathrooms and kitchens cleaner than I’ve seen in many small American bases in Afghanistan, and the idea of sneaking in drugs or alcohol is unheard of. (Most of the men pray five times a day.) They do have a satellite TV, but I don’t see anyone watching it on my visit. They drink water from cutoff plastic water bottles.

The Sabrathans have the advantage of being from a small country and a face-to-face society. Even those educated overseas, like Canadian-born Hammam, a 20-year-old student, soon fit seamlessly into the group. Though the men are from every walk of life—I met a fireman, a mechanic, a taxi driver, a cook, a pharmacy student, and a couple of engineers—most knew each other from Sabratha and many are related. This is reminiscent of American militias in our Revolution, and even the Civil War.

But also like those militias, each of the handful of brigades here seems to make decisions on its own, with only loose coordination with the -others or with the titular commanders in Benghazi.

My trip with Colonel Bashir was arranged under the auspices of Benghazi-based Mustafa Sagezli, the American-educated deputy commander of the Martyrs of the 17th of February Brigade. While the term “brigade” in the Western Mountains often refers to a mere couple of hundred men, the Martyrs of the 17th of February actually has the numbers of an American Army brigade, around 3,000, scattered around Libya. But few people in the Sabratha Brigade or in Zintan seem to know who Sagezli is. Decisions are apparently made by the local military council in Zintan, then referred upward to Benghazi.

A young friend who fought around Nalut with the Tripoli Brigade, trained by Sagezli’s men in Benghazi, estimates that all the units in the Western Mountains operate autonomously and don’t add up to 1,000 men altogether.

The good news here is on the ground level: These men from Sabratha are, like the Libyans I met in Benghazi, smart, fairly well-educated, motivated, and self-disciplined. But though there’s vague talk of an upcoming offensive, there’s little discussion of strategy. The plan seems to be to move forward to cut Tripoli off from its coastal link to Tunisia. But no one could explain how 1,000 men could surround a city of two million. Several men asked me to tell the world that they need heavy weapons and four-by-four vehicles that can cross the desert; with these, they explain that they could sneak up on Qaddafi’s forces. This may be true, but even a thousand men with heavy weapons wouldn’t end the war.

Meanwhile, the men here report that conditions in the Qaddafi-held western Libyan coast continue to deteriorate. In Tripoli, men sleep in their cars in miles-long lines for gas, tossing their trash out the window. Garbage trucks work once every week or two, and electricity, says Hammam, is “on and off, mostly off.” In Sabratha, they hear, some food prices have shot up by 300 percent. This Ramadan looks to be a grim one in western Libya.