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rebels tried to push deeper into government-held territory east of the capital.
A Reuters team in Dafniya, the outskirts of the rebels’ western bastion of Misrata, described rebels firing artillery and rocket launchers with a range of about 20 kilometres.
Rebels said they were aiming for tanks and munitions in Naimah near Zlitan.
“We had a strategy to finish everything today but some of the fighters think it’s a game,” a rebel unit commander called Mohammed Ali told reuters. “They shot when they weren’t supposed to shoot and they have ruined it,” he said after rebels took cover at the main Dafniya front from heavy mortar barrage. Warplanes could also be heard in the skies above, although it was unclear if there had been strikes.
Zlitan, just 160km from Tripoli, is the next major town on the Mediterranean coast road to the capital. Capturing it would be a major victory. The exchanges were the heaviest in the area since since last week when 31 rebels were killed.
At the field hospital in Dafniyah ambulances arrived with at least five seriously wounded rebel fighters, most with shrapnel wounds. The rebels have said they would not attack Zlitan because of tribal sensitivities, but have been recruiting fighters from the town and waiting for the inhabitants to rise against Muammar Gaddafi. Nato planes also resumed bombardments of Tripoli on Friday with six loud explosions ringing out in the south of the city. The rare daytime strikes, which hit the capital over the course of about half an hour before noon, sent columns of thick black smoke into the sky.
The rebellion rose up four months ago to the day in the eastern city of Benghazi and Nato intervention in Libya has now been going on for nearly 13 weeks – longer than many of its backers anticipated – and the strains are beginning to show within the alliance. French Military spokesman Thierry Burkhard suggested the rebels were honing in on Gaddafi’s stronghold of Tripoli.
“The opposition forces seem to have taken the ascendancy on Gaddafi’s troops, which shows just how much attrition they are enduring,” he told reporters on Thursday.
The rebel advance, he said, was “essentially in the West and in a belt they are now developing around the Tripoli region.” Rebel advances towards Tripoli have been slow, while weeks of Nato strikes pounding
Gaddafi’s compound and other targets have failed to end his 41-year-old rule.
Rebel forces are fighting Gaddafi’s troops on two other fronts: in the east of the country around the oil town of Brega and in the Western Mountains southwest of Tripoli. Juma Ibrahim, a rebel spokesman in Western
Mountains town of Zintan, said Gaddafi loyalists were massing in Gharyan, about 120km south-west of Tripoli. – Reuters.
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