The War Between The Libyas

Noon prayer at the Ajdabiyah checkpoint is ominous. Thick white rain clouds and the whipped yellow whirls of a sandstorm move across the face of the shrub-studded desert. And no one here is praying. The rumble of an enemy warplane somewhere overhead — at least that’s what people think it is — mingles with the thunder of an impending rainstorm. The rebels shout to one another across a landscape littered with bullet casings and other debris. The militia is a disorganized collection of mutineers from the military of Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, plus oil workers, day laborers, schoolteachers, bankers and at least one rugby player. Suddenly, someone among them lets loose with round after round of antiaircraft fire. A fighter 100 ft. (30 m) away launches a surface-to-air missile at the invisible target above. As everyone waits for death or a distant boom, rain starts to fall.

Mohammed al-Tahawy, in his 30s, is one of the bankers among the rebels. He moves deliberately, slowly, not charging forward like his compatriots, not whooping and yelling and blasting celebratory gunfire as many of them do. His feet don’t look as if they belong to a warrior: he’s wearing socks with his sandals. His round face and rosy cheeks are framed by a short, messy beard, for which he apologizes. “If you see a long beard,” he explains, “that’s because we are in the fight one month.” No one has had time to shave. As he talks, one of his trigger-happy comrades fires off a shot.

(See TIME’s exclusive photos of the unrest in Libya.)

Al-Tahawy is from Tobruk, which is more than eight hours by car from Ajdabiyah if you take the long highway that links the big cities and towns on Libya’s coast. The eastern cities on that route very quickly threw off Gaddafi’s yoke in a few days around Feb. 15 — Tobruk, which, al-Tahawy brags, was the first city to raise the revolutionary flag; al-Baida; Benghazi, which has become the rebel capital; Ajdabiyah. Then the ragtag volunteers advanced westward, their eyes on Libya’s capital, Tripoli, which lies almost at the other end of the 700-mile (1,125 km) highway. For about a week, the horde, numbering in the thousands, seemed unstoppable. Moving from Ajdabiyah, they took the oil-refinery town of Brega and then the next petroleum center, Ras Lanuf. For al-Tahawy, the pace of victory is further confirmation of the Libyan people’s immense dislike of their leader. He says Gaddafi is a liar and a tyrant given to bombast. Al-Tahawy is confident that the rebels have the people power to take him down one town at a time.

(See the latest scenes of unrest in Libya.)

The rebels’ mood shifts erratically from confidence to jubilation to utter panic. But their enthusiasm has, for the most part, managed to overcome their indiscipline. Nevertheless, the regime is staging determined and brutal counterattacks against what has been called Free Libya. And the government can field warplanes and helicopters and tanks, manned by perhaps enough true believers to turn a revolution into a civil war of attrition.

On the other side of that war from al-Tahawy is Major Ahmed Mahmud, one of Gaddafi’s die-hard loyalists. After the rebellion broke out in the east, he was part of a contingent sent to try to retake the town of al-Baida. By his account, the offensive was a disaster. “We fought for days around the airport,” says Mahmud, 30, a tall, well-built officer whose large eyes and wide smile are framed by a tan desert turban. “We were very badly beaten. About 120 soldiers were caught and killed, and some had their throats slit,” he says, drawing his finger across his neck with a shiver.

Mahmud is back in Tripoli guarding Libya’s Central Bank, an old colonial building near the harbor. Its brick exterior bears the inscription “The authority and the revolution and the weapons are in the hands of the people.” For him, those words perfectly capture the thinking of Libya’s Brother Leader, as Gaddafi is officially known. “He is not a king, he is not a sultan, he is not a President,” Mahmud says, explaining why he so fiercely defends the colonel. “If you were with Gaddafi for even one minute, you would know the truth, the right path to take.”

See exclusive photos from inside Tripoli.

See pictures of the tents of Gaddafi.

If Gaddafi falls, Mahmud and his fellow loyalists have much to lose: a military salary and pension, free education and health care and heavily subsidized housing, gas, electricity and food, all thanks to the billions of dollars that Libya has on hand from its oil sales. Furthermore, Mahmud insists, “we have had freedom for 41 years. We can do what we want. We sleep with our houses unlocked. There is security.”

In Mahmud’s eyes, that security is now under threat, not so much from a popular revolt but from al-Qaeda fighters who he believes have infiltrated Libya in order to tear the country apart. He parrots the message that government officials have drummed into Libyans over the past few weeks. Gaddafi repeats the allegations in speech after speech. In a country where news is tightly censored, Gaddafi’s message has huge sway — at least for those who would like to believe it. Mahmud is adamant: “About 90% of those who are fighting are not Libyan. They are al-Qaeda.” His charge mirrors the accusation of the opposition, that Gaddafi’s military is primed with foreign mercenaries.

(See the top 10 autocrats in trouble.)

To the Last Bullet
Both sides believe victory will come when Libyans take up arms to take back their country. “Our plan is simple,” says Mahmud’s commander, General Abdulrahman Fadah Abdulrahman. “Every Libyan has a gun — old people, women, every person. And those who don’t have guns, we will give them guns.” A short man in his 40s, with a green felt hat and sunglasses, he is supremely confident of the outcome. Mahmud is too. “I have wanted to be a soldier all my life,” he says.

Back in the rebel east, al-Tahawy also has no doubt about the willingness of his compatriots to fight to the last bullet. He points out that Libyan men have to go through compulsory military service, so the rebels are not complete neophytes. “The big guns we don’t know how to use,” he admits, “but the civilians are all using the Kalashnikovs and a lot of small guns.” He says he tries to counsel the young hotheads against firing celebratory salvos at the slightest excuse. “I told them, ‘Stop, stop. Save the ammunition.’ But you know, sometimes we have to keep the spirit up.” Still, says a doctor in rebel-held Brega, “there are a large number of casualties from friendly fire.” At least one person in Ajdabiyah died after his rocket-propelled grenade misfired.

(See more about Libya.)

The desert, however, is an arena where people power plays at a disadvantage. West of the revolutionary strongholds, as the rebels march toward Tripoli, they leave behind the hills, forests and a daisy chain of relatively dense urban centers that have been hotbeds of dissent for years, entering land that flattens out, the white sand of the Mediterranean shoreline giving way quickly to juniper and sage scrub and a seemingly endless expanse of dirt and discarded plastic bags. Towns along the way are small, easy for the military to garrison, spread far apart, located at highway intersections or clustered around oil facilities. And if eastern Libya is guerrilla country, central Libya is tank terrain. Some of the great battles of World War II were fought by Axis and Allied tank commanders over the course of several years in a back-and-forth war along the North African coast. Of course, nothing on the scale of those battles is going to occur in the Libyan civil war. But only the forces loyal to the Gaddafi regime have anything resembling a modern army. And speeding down a straight desert highway with no air support, armor or cover is almost suicide.

See TIME’s special report “The Middle East in Revolt.”

See TIME’s Middle East covers.

The rebels realized that after their week of bracing conquests. Almost as soon as they captured Ras Lanuf, their militias were repulsed when they pushed into Bin Jawad, a town 50 miles (80 km) west on the coastal road. On March 6, regime forces bombarded them with tank shells, rocket-propelled grenades, gunfire and air strikes from planes and helicopters, sending the disorderly force fleeing east, back to Ras Lanuf, pursued by Gaddafi’s air force. Says al-Tahawy: “What you see is a mix of the normal people of the streets and the normal soldiers. No generals. I know we’re missing discipline.” Unless they can muster leadership and master military discipline — as well as improve the quality of their armaments — a spirited anarchy may remain the defining characteristic of eastern Libya’s fledgling army. The rebel city closest to Tripoli, Zawiyah, surrounded by loyalist territory, put up a long defense against the regime, with terrifying stories of tanks against flesh making it out of Gaddafi’s information cordon. But spirit, no matter how heroic, is not enough to win wars.

(Watch TIME’s interview with Gaddafi.)

Especially when the looming obstacle on the highway is Sert, Gaddafi’s hometown. His government has made it clear that it has no intention of letting the rebels get there. Behind the rebel lines, talk of an impending battle for Sert makes even optimistic opposition leaders nervous. “The difficulty is that Sert is well armed and the revolutionaries have only light weapons,” says Colonel Lamin Abdel Wahab, a member of the rebels’ military council in Benghazi. The anxiety in Free Libya has grown so much that an earlier aversion to foreign intervention on its behalf has given way to an enthusiastic plea for a no-fly zone to be imposed by NATO or the U.S.

In America, the fact that some rebels call themselves mujahedin — holy warriors — has raised the specter of the Afghan fighters who, after being armed by the U.S., turned from fighting the Soviet Union to abetting Osama bin Laden. Most of the rebels in Libya say that fear is nonsense. Hamid Gabayli, a ground engineer turned fighter says the regime wants the world to think “we are Taliban or al-Qaeda because they want to fool the Americans. But we are just religious. That’s all.” Others echo him. “We don’t like bin Laden, and we don’t like al-Qaeda,” says Idriss, at the Ajdabiyah checkpoint. The men around him nod. It’s another reason al-Tahawy apologizes for his and his friends’ facial hair. “It’s not necessarily what you see on the TV,” he says. “It’s not necessarily that the man is al-Qaeda” because he has a beard.

Islamist extremism does have a recent history in Libya. The town of Darnah, east of Benghazi, was the site of a failed Islamist uprising against Gaddafi in the 1990s. Later it became known for the young men who left it to join the insurgency in Iraq after the U.S. invasion that overthrew Saddam Hussein. “If you asked any of the mujahedin from Libya in Iraq where they’re from, they said Darnah,” says al-Tahawy. He adds that Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, the fearsome leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq who was killed in 2006, once said, “I will go to Darnah to see what is this city that is sending so many.” But few among the Libyan rebels have Iraq fighting experience, al-Tahawy says. Most of those veterans are dead.

(See a photographic history of the rule of Colonel Gaddafi.)

Downplaying the role of piety, however, may be a disservice to those who have taken up arms against a despot. Islamic scholars in eastern Libya say pious Muslim men in particular were persecuted under Gaddafi, and they are determined to bring down the dictator. “He tried to stop people from going to dawn prayer because people who do this are very devout,” says Sheik Abdel Hamid Ma’toub, a religious leader in Benghazi. “He knows that the most dangerous people in Libya are those who go to dawn prayers.” Men who pray, he says, fear God, not Gaddafi.

In Brega, a sandstorm whips dust through a checkpoint as trucks full of fighters pass. The men in them fire their guns into the air, shouting “God is great.” Nearby, Wanis Kilani, an engineer, reflects on the use of the word mujahedin. “We are mujahedin in Libya only,” he says. “We don’t have any interest outside Libya.” Then he pauses. “Actually, don’t use the word mujahedin. Use revolutionaries.”

See the Top 10 Everything of 2010.

See TIME’s Pictures of the Week.