Libya rebels pressure Tripoli

NY Times:

Having consolidated control over almost all of Libya’s western mountains, rebel leaders here say they are now pursuing a two-pronged strategy to bring down the government of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi: starving it of resources while covertly arming a growing guerrilla force within Tripoli itself.

Though the rebels consolidated their hold on most of the Nafusa mountains only about two weeks ago, officials from the opposition stronghold of Benghazi and the operatives from the underground network in Tripoli were all here on Friday night discussing strategies already under way. The mountain rebels showed a reporter an oil pipeline they had recently cut off to Colonel Qaddafi’s last working refinery, in Zawiya.

Now rebels have their sights on Gharyan, a city of about 85,000 that is the last Nafusa mountain town under Colonel Qaddafi’s control. It is widely known as a hotbed of opposition to Colonel Qaddafi and rose up swiftly at the start of the uprising, and if the rebels can take it within the next three weeks, as they hope to do, they will block a crucial supply route from Algeria and the south.

Meanwhile, the rebels say, they have been appealing with increasing success to the Tunisian government to choke off the supply of fuel coming through the Qaddafi-controlled coastal border crossing at Ras Jedir. “It is very painful for the people of Tripoli but unfortunately we need to do that,” said Anwar Fekini, a French-Libyan lawyer and rebel organizer who recently visited Tunis to help press the case, following a visit for the same purpose by the leader of the rebel’s National Transitional Council, Mustafa el-Jalil.

In an interview, a leader of the rebel underground visiting here in the mountains said that the rebels had been smuggling in a growing number of guns as well as C4 plastic explosives, while borrowing a tactic from their mountain allies by making their own crude (and often unsafe) handguns.

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The rebels are attacking the checkpoints used by the government to control movement within the capitol. Cutting the supply lines may eventually starve Qaddafi of the logistics he needs to keep fighting, but I suspect he is not going to run out of ammo anytime soon, although he might run out of oil and transportation fuel soon.

Time maybe the most important element in the calculation of those fighting Qaddafi. NATO is having trouble sustaining its operations and its strategy has evolved into a siege and war of attrition, because of the failure to use combined arms combat force which could have reduced Qaddafi in short order with less loss of life.