John Schettler's Blog, page 15
March 16, 2011
The Struggle Continues
03/16/11 - Mustafa Gheiriani, a rebel spokesman in Benghazi characterized the situation today quite clearly. "The fighting is fierce. His supply lines are stretched so he can't push on from Ajdabiyah. We've got some surprises in store. We're going to fight on and we're going to win." The war of words was answered by Gadaffi's son, who claimed the war was 48 hours from a successful conclusion. Then came the surprises.
Opposition web sites reported that the resistance has been able to fly Mig-23 aircraft and at least one helicopter and attack Gaddafi government naval vessels off the coast of Ajdabiya, sinking two ships and damaging a third. Reuters quickly echoed the story. The "Free Libyan Air Force" also bombed Saadi Brigade tanks near Ajdabiya and reportedly struck a government airfield near Surt as well. Another surprise from the rebel forces who appear to be slowly organizing their military arm in the face of heavy pressure from Gaddafi's forces. The rebels also seized an oil tanker with 25,000 tons of fuel. Another surprise.
There are conflicting reports on the status of Ajdabiya, with both sides still claiming control, and reinforcements are on the way from Benghazi. CNN reporters traveling with Gaddafi forces claim that the brigade is massing outside the town, with substantial ammunition and supplies, which may have been replenished from a nearby ammo depot. Water and fuel are being mustered for the fighting ahead. And there is still low level fighting in Mersa El Brega, well behind Saadi Brigade lines.
In the west, yet another attempt to take Misurata has now apparently failed when opposition fighters stopped Gaddafi army units on three fronts and even captured at least two tanks in the fighting. The resistance there is but a shadow of what the army will find if it tries to take Benghazi. The Saadi Brigade would be ill advised to plan an attack on that city. They have proven they have the firepower and skill to push into rebel held towns, but the brigade has had considerable trouble holding and securing the ground it takes, with rebel infiltrations behind their lines and fighting erupting again in cities the government claimed they took days ago. This would be the case should the brigade move north into Cyrenacia, where rebel forces could infiltrate and cut the road south to Ajdabiya with relative ease.
It is clear that Gaddafi forces must decisively take, clear and secure Ajdabiya as a base for further operations. That has not yet been accomplished, but should they succeed they must then decide whether to advance on Benghazi or race for Tobruk to cut off support for the rebellion that might come from Egypt and isolate the revolution in Cyrenacia.
This is all going to take much longer than 48 hours, and we may see more rebel "surprises" in the hours and days ahead.
In Bahrain, the Sunni king has taken a leaf from Gaddafi's book in his bid to crush opposition--bring in mercenaries. Hundreds of foreign troops, mostly from Saudi Arabia, have entered the island nation and did what local security forces were loathe to do--they fired on civilians in a bloody crackdown, wuth hundreds wounded and many killed. The invasion has heightened ethnic Sunni-Shia tensions throughout the region.
03/15/11- As troops from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other Gulf Cooperation Council forces rush into Bahrain in American made tanks and APCs, to help the Sunni Kingdom put down a popular Shia revolt, the very same parties condemn Gaddafi's use of the military against the Libyan people. The Middle East certainly gets confusing, doesn't it? France and the UK now both support a No Fly Zone, while the US remains indecisive as Obama turns his attention to Japan.
Today Gaddafi appears to have made the decision to fight for Ajdabiya, being unwilling to bypass such a hard rebel nugget of resistance astride the vital road back to Surt and Tripoli. Both bombs and leaflets urging the population there to starve out the rebels in their midst were used in the initial effort to soften Ajdabiya up. Meanwhile, Khamis Brigade forces in the west also claimed nominal control of Zuwarah near the Tunisian border, and are now going house to house with lists of names to round up suspected dissidents. Gaddafi played his string of small victories for all it is worth, offering the rebels in the east a cease fire and amnesty. He was answered by a 2000 strong force of rebels led by ex-Army commandos who infiltrated back into Mersa El Brega and now control a large segment of the residential district there, behind Gaddafi's main column!
The action shows the difficulty faced by Gaddafi and his small army of mercenaries and loyalists. He has the firepower to blast his way into towns and take nominal control over them, but he does not have the troops to garrison, hold and secure the ground, particularly in the larger cities, where a low lever guerrilla resistance is now replacing the direct confrontation in street fighting. The rebels will not give up as easily as he hopes. Mersa El Brega is a town of only 4600 people with little built up area, yet Gaddafi's troops have been unable to decisively secure that hamlet as they advance on Ajdabiya. Good luck should they ever reach Benghazi, a city of 800,000 people all decidedly hostile to Gadaffi's regime.
If Az Zawiya and Misurata are any template for what may occur, Gadaffi will have hard fighting in Benghazi, and there will be much destruction. In Misurata the Colonel has come up with a novel approach, Not only is electricity, phone and internet cut off, but now he has turned off the water for the 300,000 there. You can last only a week or two without water, so goes the logic in his demented mind.
Perhaps we should look over History's shoulder at the Iran Iraq war where Iranian Shia youth launched human wave banzai charges against Saddam's armor for 7 years before they sued for peace. There is no shortage of fervor and zeal among Libya's rebel forces. Just a shortage of arms, ammunition and military know-how. But the recent defeats they have suffered will be their teacher. Don't write off the rebel resistance any time soon. They are learning, organizing, toughening up under Gaddafi's fire.
The coming hours and days will see the important battle for Ajdabiya play out as Japan's nuclear reactors continue careening towards full meltdown. No shortage of drama in the news these days.
03/14/11 - How likely was the Libyan rebellion to roll westward to Tripoli from its strongholds in the east? Very unlikely. In spite of his little victories on the coast, how likely is Gaddafi to quickly storm Benghazi and topple the rebellion? Very unlikely, at least not with the forces he has deployed to the eastern campaign at this time. Therein lies the heart of this story.
Popular uprisings are sustained by the people in massive numbers within heavily populated urban centers. The road to Tripoli is long and thin, and blocked by a major bastion of Gaddafi support in the city of Surt. The rebellion was foolish to try and migrate west along this road to liberate Tripoli. If that is to happen it will have to come from the population within Tripoli itself. The rebellion in the east was successful because it originated in Libya's second most populous city, Benghazi, and then rippled out to regional towns and cities until all of Cyrenacia was in the anti-Gaddafi camp. This quickly led to defections within army units stationed there, and the rebels were able to get hold of a few heavy weapons to bolster their confidence.
But the haphazard and badly disorganized rush to the west along the desert roads was ill advised, from a military standpoint, and really doomed to failure from its inception. It was stopped at Bin Jawad by the Gaddafi Saadi Brigade, which has now rolled the rebels back through Mersa El Brega to the gateway city of Ajdabiya. (Population 200,000) This city, a small but densely built up fist of opposition, will now present Gaddafi's eastern campaigners with a thorny problem. ABC news reports it is defended by one of Gaddafi's ex-ministers, with his head to lose should he be captured. "General Abdel Fatah Yunis, who resigned as interior minister and joined the revolt when rebels rose up against Mr Gaddafi in mid-February, said his troops would defend the strategic town of Ajdabiya at all costs. "War is a matter of advance and tactical withdrawal," the white-haired general told reporters at a hotel in Benghazi, just hours after his forces abandoned Brega under heavy fire. "And even if our forces have withdrawn tactically a few kilometers, that means nothing in military terms, especially when you are fighting in territory that is semi-desert. There is not a lot of value to this land," he said.
If not taken, the city will sit astride the Saadi Brigade's lines of communications back to Surt, and make an advance further east inadvisable. Yet to take this place Gaddafi forces may have to engage in some heavy urban fighting against determined resistance fighters who know that to lose is to lose everything. In such conditions Gaddafi's advantage of air power and armor is less effective than it has been in the relatively open terrain fought for and gained last week by his forces.
Militarily, the rebel withdrawal to this position was exactly what they should have done. Gaddafi must now fight for this city, as he did in Az Zawiya, or he must invest it and bypass it for ground further east. Neither choice is very promising for him. Bloody fighting in Adjabiya could put the story back in the headlines, as news teams will inevitably become weary of picking through the rubble of Japanese coastal cities for something more dynamic. It also buys time for the West to find a backbone, or even the Arab league to formulate some plan to support Benghazi. Yet to bypass Ajdabiya, Gaddafi will have to split his Brigade in two, and the troops left behind will have to be strong enough to impose and hold a siege there while the second column, now much weaker, advances into territory that is completely hostile to the Gaddafi regime. In my opinion this is a task beyond the capabilities of the single brigade assigned to the eastern campaign at this time. It will have to be strongly reinforced to proceed into Cyrenacia with any chance of snuffing out the rebellion. Ahead lies the large city of Benghazi, a battle ten times the size of the one that awaits Gaddafi at Ajdabiya.
Over the weekend Israeli site Debka posted two articles of interest. One claimed Syria's Assad has sent arms and munitions by sea to re-fuel Gaddafi's forces, the other that the rebels were beginning to flee from Benghazi. They seem to feel that, bolstered by his string of small victories between Bin Jawad and Mersa El Brega, Gaddafi can now just roll on into Benghazi and storm the place. But another Gaddafi attack on Misurata failed again this weekend, leaving that strategic western city still in the hands of the revolution. If the Debka story is confirmed, it also points out the weakness inherent in Gaddafi's military, which now relies on outside arms shipments and imported mercenaries to sustain its bite. In my opinion Debka's reporting is far to optimistic on Gaddafi's behalf.
The little dictator now has his real work cut out for him. He must take or bypass Ajdabiya , then move another 200 kilometers to Benghazi and fight the heart of the rebellion there successfully and decisively if he is to win. I do not see that he can accomplish this easily, and we are likely to see a much longer struggle now that the "war" has come to ground strongly held by the rebellion. Gaddafi would be better advised to focus on taking Ajdabiya with the resources at hand, and then knife across the desert roads, taking the right hand fork to Tobruk as Rommel did, then fight for Tobruk. This would effectively isolate the rebellion in Cyrenacia. If he could also retake Misurata, he would then control enough territory to sustain his regime, and could basically ignore the rebellion indefinitely though this means he must settle for riding roughshod over only half of Libya for the foreseeable future. He should not fight for Benghazi.
As for the No Fly Zone, in my opinion it is much ado about nothing, and will stand merely as a symbol of Western or Arab League support for the rebellion if ever declared and enforced. Gaddafi is probably flying no more than ten to twelve aircraft on any consistent basis, old Mig 23s, a few Su-22s and one Mirage. (He has more planes in inventory but most are not air worthy). As I have stated before, the burden of proof where control of Libya is concerned, lies firmly with Gaddafi. The rebels only have to be stubborn and resist by whatever means they have. The road ahead for Gaddafi remains long and difficult, and time favors the rebellion as it has been gaining more legitimacy and recognition from European and Arab states.
Opposition web sites reported that the resistance has been able to fly Mig-23 aircraft and at least one helicopter and attack Gaddafi government naval vessels off the coast of Ajdabiya, sinking two ships and damaging a third. Reuters quickly echoed the story. The "Free Libyan Air Force" also bombed Saadi Brigade tanks near Ajdabiya and reportedly struck a government airfield near Surt as well. Another surprise from the rebel forces who appear to be slowly organizing their military arm in the face of heavy pressure from Gaddafi's forces. The rebels also seized an oil tanker with 25,000 tons of fuel. Another surprise.
There are conflicting reports on the status of Ajdabiya, with both sides still claiming control, and reinforcements are on the way from Benghazi. CNN reporters traveling with Gaddafi forces claim that the brigade is massing outside the town, with substantial ammunition and supplies, which may have been replenished from a nearby ammo depot. Water and fuel are being mustered for the fighting ahead. And there is still low level fighting in Mersa El Brega, well behind Saadi Brigade lines.
In the west, yet another attempt to take Misurata has now apparently failed when opposition fighters stopped Gaddafi army units on three fronts and even captured at least two tanks in the fighting. The resistance there is but a shadow of what the army will find if it tries to take Benghazi. The Saadi Brigade would be ill advised to plan an attack on that city. They have proven they have the firepower and skill to push into rebel held towns, but the brigade has had considerable trouble holding and securing the ground it takes, with rebel infiltrations behind their lines and fighting erupting again in cities the government claimed they took days ago. This would be the case should the brigade move north into Cyrenacia, where rebel forces could infiltrate and cut the road south to Ajdabiya with relative ease.
It is clear that Gaddafi forces must decisively take, clear and secure Ajdabiya as a base for further operations. That has not yet been accomplished, but should they succeed they must then decide whether to advance on Benghazi or race for Tobruk to cut off support for the rebellion that might come from Egypt and isolate the revolution in Cyrenacia.
This is all going to take much longer than 48 hours, and we may see more rebel "surprises" in the hours and days ahead.
In Bahrain, the Sunni king has taken a leaf from Gaddafi's book in his bid to crush opposition--bring in mercenaries. Hundreds of foreign troops, mostly from Saudi Arabia, have entered the island nation and did what local security forces were loathe to do--they fired on civilians in a bloody crackdown, wuth hundreds wounded and many killed. The invasion has heightened ethnic Sunni-Shia tensions throughout the region.
03/15/11- As troops from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other Gulf Cooperation Council forces rush into Bahrain in American made tanks and APCs, to help the Sunni Kingdom put down a popular Shia revolt, the very same parties condemn Gaddafi's use of the military against the Libyan people. The Middle East certainly gets confusing, doesn't it? France and the UK now both support a No Fly Zone, while the US remains indecisive as Obama turns his attention to Japan.
Today Gaddafi appears to have made the decision to fight for Ajdabiya, being unwilling to bypass such a hard rebel nugget of resistance astride the vital road back to Surt and Tripoli. Both bombs and leaflets urging the population there to starve out the rebels in their midst were used in the initial effort to soften Ajdabiya up. Meanwhile, Khamis Brigade forces in the west also claimed nominal control of Zuwarah near the Tunisian border, and are now going house to house with lists of names to round up suspected dissidents. Gaddafi played his string of small victories for all it is worth, offering the rebels in the east a cease fire and amnesty. He was answered by a 2000 strong force of rebels led by ex-Army commandos who infiltrated back into Mersa El Brega and now control a large segment of the residential district there, behind Gaddafi's main column!
The action shows the difficulty faced by Gaddafi and his small army of mercenaries and loyalists. He has the firepower to blast his way into towns and take nominal control over them, but he does not have the troops to garrison, hold and secure the ground, particularly in the larger cities, where a low lever guerrilla resistance is now replacing the direct confrontation in street fighting. The rebels will not give up as easily as he hopes. Mersa El Brega is a town of only 4600 people with little built up area, yet Gaddafi's troops have been unable to decisively secure that hamlet as they advance on Ajdabiya. Good luck should they ever reach Benghazi, a city of 800,000 people all decidedly hostile to Gadaffi's regime.
If Az Zawiya and Misurata are any template for what may occur, Gadaffi will have hard fighting in Benghazi, and there will be much destruction. In Misurata the Colonel has come up with a novel approach, Not only is electricity, phone and internet cut off, but now he has turned off the water for the 300,000 there. You can last only a week or two without water, so goes the logic in his demented mind.
Perhaps we should look over History's shoulder at the Iran Iraq war where Iranian Shia youth launched human wave banzai charges against Saddam's armor for 7 years before they sued for peace. There is no shortage of fervor and zeal among Libya's rebel forces. Just a shortage of arms, ammunition and military know-how. But the recent defeats they have suffered will be their teacher. Don't write off the rebel resistance any time soon. They are learning, organizing, toughening up under Gaddafi's fire.
The coming hours and days will see the important battle for Ajdabiya play out as Japan's nuclear reactors continue careening towards full meltdown. No shortage of drama in the news these days.
03/14/11 - How likely was the Libyan rebellion to roll westward to Tripoli from its strongholds in the east? Very unlikely. In spite of his little victories on the coast, how likely is Gaddafi to quickly storm Benghazi and topple the rebellion? Very unlikely, at least not with the forces he has deployed to the eastern campaign at this time. Therein lies the heart of this story.
Popular uprisings are sustained by the people in massive numbers within heavily populated urban centers. The road to Tripoli is long and thin, and blocked by a major bastion of Gaddafi support in the city of Surt. The rebellion was foolish to try and migrate west along this road to liberate Tripoli. If that is to happen it will have to come from the population within Tripoli itself. The rebellion in the east was successful because it originated in Libya's second most populous city, Benghazi, and then rippled out to regional towns and cities until all of Cyrenacia was in the anti-Gaddafi camp. This quickly led to defections within army units stationed there, and the rebels were able to get hold of a few heavy weapons to bolster their confidence.
But the haphazard and badly disorganized rush to the west along the desert roads was ill advised, from a military standpoint, and really doomed to failure from its inception. It was stopped at Bin Jawad by the Gaddafi Saadi Brigade, which has now rolled the rebels back through Mersa El Brega to the gateway city of Ajdabiya. (Population 200,000) This city, a small but densely built up fist of opposition, will now present Gaddafi's eastern campaigners with a thorny problem. ABC news reports it is defended by one of Gaddafi's ex-ministers, with his head to lose should he be captured. "General Abdel Fatah Yunis, who resigned as interior minister and joined the revolt when rebels rose up against Mr Gaddafi in mid-February, said his troops would defend the strategic town of Ajdabiya at all costs. "War is a matter of advance and tactical withdrawal," the white-haired general told reporters at a hotel in Benghazi, just hours after his forces abandoned Brega under heavy fire. "And even if our forces have withdrawn tactically a few kilometers, that means nothing in military terms, especially when you are fighting in territory that is semi-desert. There is not a lot of value to this land," he said.
If not taken, the city will sit astride the Saadi Brigade's lines of communications back to Surt, and make an advance further east inadvisable. Yet to take this place Gaddafi forces may have to engage in some heavy urban fighting against determined resistance fighters who know that to lose is to lose everything. In such conditions Gaddafi's advantage of air power and armor is less effective than it has been in the relatively open terrain fought for and gained last week by his forces.
Militarily, the rebel withdrawal to this position was exactly what they should have done. Gaddafi must now fight for this city, as he did in Az Zawiya, or he must invest it and bypass it for ground further east. Neither choice is very promising for him. Bloody fighting in Adjabiya could put the story back in the headlines, as news teams will inevitably become weary of picking through the rubble of Japanese coastal cities for something more dynamic. It also buys time for the West to find a backbone, or even the Arab league to formulate some plan to support Benghazi. Yet to bypass Ajdabiya, Gaddafi will have to split his Brigade in two, and the troops left behind will have to be strong enough to impose and hold a siege there while the second column, now much weaker, advances into territory that is completely hostile to the Gaddafi regime. In my opinion this is a task beyond the capabilities of the single brigade assigned to the eastern campaign at this time. It will have to be strongly reinforced to proceed into Cyrenacia with any chance of snuffing out the rebellion. Ahead lies the large city of Benghazi, a battle ten times the size of the one that awaits Gaddafi at Ajdabiya.
Over the weekend Israeli site Debka posted two articles of interest. One claimed Syria's Assad has sent arms and munitions by sea to re-fuel Gaddafi's forces, the other that the rebels were beginning to flee from Benghazi. They seem to feel that, bolstered by his string of small victories between Bin Jawad and Mersa El Brega, Gaddafi can now just roll on into Benghazi and storm the place. But another Gaddafi attack on Misurata failed again this weekend, leaving that strategic western city still in the hands of the revolution. If the Debka story is confirmed, it also points out the weakness inherent in Gaddafi's military, which now relies on outside arms shipments and imported mercenaries to sustain its bite. In my opinion Debka's reporting is far to optimistic on Gaddafi's behalf.
The little dictator now has his real work cut out for him. He must take or bypass Ajdabiya , then move another 200 kilometers to Benghazi and fight the heart of the rebellion there successfully and decisively if he is to win. I do not see that he can accomplish this easily, and we are likely to see a much longer struggle now that the "war" has come to ground strongly held by the rebellion. Gaddafi would be better advised to focus on taking Ajdabiya with the resources at hand, and then knife across the desert roads, taking the right hand fork to Tobruk as Rommel did, then fight for Tobruk. This would effectively isolate the rebellion in Cyrenacia. If he could also retake Misurata, he would then control enough territory to sustain his regime, and could basically ignore the rebellion indefinitely though this means he must settle for riding roughshod over only half of Libya for the foreseeable future. He should not fight for Benghazi.
As for the No Fly Zone, in my opinion it is much ado about nothing, and will stand merely as a symbol of Western or Arab League support for the rebellion if ever declared and enforced. Gaddafi is probably flying no more than ten to twelve aircraft on any consistent basis, old Mig 23s, a few Su-22s and one Mirage. (He has more planes in inventory but most are not air worthy). As I have stated before, the burden of proof where control of Libya is concerned, lies firmly with Gaddafi. The rebels only have to be stubborn and resist by whatever means they have. The road ahead for Gaddafi remains long and difficult, and time favors the rebellion as it has been gaining more legitimacy and recognition from European and Arab states.
