Fighters loyal to Libyan leader Muammar Gadaffi mounted a fierce counter-attack in the city of Sirte on Saturday, forcing back the NATO-backed NTC counter-revolutionaries under a barrage of rockets and shelling.
The NTC mercenaries fled two kilometres in disarray to the city’s captured police headquarters shouting ‘run, run, run!’
After absorbing rocket fire and heavy shelling from NTC terrorists in the morning and early afternoon, proGadaffi fighters, now concentrated in the Dollar and Number Two neighbourhoods, unleashed their own barrage in the late afternoon.
The counter-revolutionaries were taken by surprise as Grad and other rockets, shells and machine-gun fire rained down on them and rapidly retreated from their positions on the edge of the two neighbourhoods.
Thick black smoke covered the two districts as rockets and shells filled the air and smashed into buildings.
Earlier, medics at a field hospital on the western outskirts of Sirte said that one civilian was killed and around a dozen injured on Saturday.
Before the bold counter-attack, Omran Allahoyb, NTC commander of a Misrata brigade, had said: ‘Gadaffi fighters are now concentrated in a small place but we can’t enter all at the same time. We need a plan to defeat them
‘We can take this place in one day but I will lose 100 men,’ he said.
Allahoyb suggested, that the best strategy would be to bomb the area of around 1.5 square kilometres into submission.
Another NTC commander, Wesam bin Hamaibi, claimed the mercenaries had hesitated because: ‘The resistance from the two neighbourhoods is high because we believe there are four to five important people inside.
‘We are sure that (Gadaffi’s son) Mutassim and (Libyan defence minister) Abu Bakr Yunis are inside.
‘We also believe that Saif al-Islam and Gadaffi are possibly inside.
‘We want to capture them alive to hand them over to the judiciary rather than killing them, which is why we are still not going to have a massive attack.’
Meanwhile, the NTC has been shocked by clashes with pro-Gadaffi fighters in Tripoli on Friday in the first fighting to rock the Libyan capital since its capture in August.
The head of the self-styled supreme military council in Tripoli, Abdelhakim Belhaj, pledged tough action against the pro-Gadaffi fighters and ‘sleeper cells’ of the former regime, which he said would be targeted in a clean-up operation.
Pro-Gadaffi fighters clashed with NTC mercenaries in Abu Salim, a district around ten kilometres south of the city centre known to support Gadaffi.
Abdelrazaq al-Aradi, vice president of the NTC ‘security committee’ in Tripoli, told a news conference that around 50 armed Gadaffi supporters were behind the violence, 27 of whom were arrested on Friday.
Aradi said that two Gadaffi supporters and one NTC gunman were killed, while another 30 people were wounded.
Local residents said that Gadaffi loyalists exchanged heavy machine-gun fire with hundreds of NTC mercenaries in pick-up trucks.
Abu Salim residents said the fighting broke out during pro-Gadaffi demonstrations after noon prayers, prompted by a call to rise from a pro-Gadaffi Libyan television presenter, broadcast on Iraqi TV channel Al-Rai.
One NTC mercenary said: ‘Gadaffi told them in a message last night to rise up after Friday prayers.
‘That’s why these few people have come out and are causing this problem.’
Clashes were also reported in three nearby areas.
After the Abu Salim clash, one angry local resident shouted from his car to a foreign journalist: ‘Gadaffi was better.’
He pointed to his pregnant wife with a small girl playing on her lap and another beside her.
Giving a thumbs up, she said: ‘Gadaffi! – Now no good, no water, no food for baby, nothing.’
Rubbing her belly, her husband added in Arabic ‘Nothing’.
The flare-up came as a setback to the NTC, which hopes to proclaim the country’s ‘liberation’ within days, on the presumption Sirte will be finally captured by NATO’s mercenaries.
Fuming at the Gadaffi loyalists, a spokesman for the NTC in Benghazi said: ‘The thing I hear that is disturbing is that the fifth column has been doing some drive-by shootings around Tripoli today.
These are loyalists trying to wreak havoc.’
On Saturday, scores of NTC terrorists, carrying machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades and heavy weapons, circled the Abu Salim district’s complex of flats in an attempt to capture pro-Gadaffi fighters.
The mercenaries conducted house-to-house searches on Saturday, peering into water tanks looking for concealed weapons in the tower blocks that house some of Tripoli’s poorest inhabitants.
Residents said that one woman was taken off when a green Gadaffi flag was found in her flat, while a man was shot dead for shouting pro-Gadaffi slogans last week.
Meanwhile, the resistance in Sirte and Bani Walid continued despite renewed NATO bombing raids.
Nato was conducting ‘intensive overwatch missions’ around both areas, according to the Ministry of Defence in London.
UK warplanes struck three armed trucks belonging to former regime forces hidden beneath trees east of Bani Walid on Thursday, the ministry said.
‘The vehicles were successfully engaged by our aircraft, using Paveway guided bombs, and destroyed,’ Major General Nick Pope said in a statement.
Nato has called the continued resistance by pro-Gadaffi forces in Sirte ‘surprising’, as NTC forces have the area surrounded.
NTC forces in Sirte pounded loyalists holed up in two neighbourhoods with rocket and machine-gun fire on Friday, but also suffered heavy casualties themselves, with wounded men streaming into frontline medical units, before being evacuated to field hospitals on the city’s outskirts.
At the NTC-captured Ibn Sina hospital in Sirte, Barbara Frederick, of the charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said around 500 wounded people had been brought in from the city’s western front since an assault was launched October 7.
The hospital was filled with debris but at least two operating rooms were in service.
Around 100 civilians, mostly families of medical staff, were camped inside the facility, some two kilometres from the front line.
• The NTC government has yet to move from Benghazi to Tripoli.
