West Counting On Breakup Of Qaddafi Coalition
The New York Times reports:
TRIPOLI, Libya — The official government tour was supposed to show Western journalists the suffering of people who had been driven from their homes by the allied bombing in the city of Mizda, Libya. But the people themselves did not cooperate: when a half-dozen of them emerged from their tent encampment and fired rifle shots, the visitors were forced to beat a hasty retreat.
It was a fleeting display of the kind of defiance of official authority that coalition forces are counting on from the people and tribes of western Libya, who dominate the country’s military, to drive Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi from power.
In the allies’ shadow war in Libya, airstrikes are aimed not only at Colonel Qaddafi’s tanks and artillery, but also at the elite of his remaining armed forces in an effort to persuade them to turn against their embattled leader. He may be able to hold out against Western warplanes, but he cannot long survive without the loyalty of certain tribes — the Warfalla, the Margaha and his own people, the Qaddafa — whose members now dominate the government’s only dependable militias.
“The question is how much pressure can you put on the tribal elements in the armed forces?” asked Gary Li, a defense analyst who has studied the Libyan military. “Can you turn his own tribe against him? And just who out of the reduced army remaining stays with Qaddafi until the bitter end?”
As Colonel Qaddafi’s militias beat back the rebels’ advance in eastern Libya on Tuesday, it was clear that the last 10 days of airstrikes had failed to cripple his forces enough to erase their advantage in firepower. Nor have the strikes renewed the uprising that briefly threatened his stronghold in Tripoli, the capital, four weeks ago.
“Where is Sarkozy?” the rebels in Bin Jawwad, Libya, lamented on Tuesday when they did not get the air cover that they had come to expect and that had been ordered by President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, President Obama and other Western leaders.
By the late afternoon, the rebels were retreating, and Colonel Qaddafi’s forces had pushed past Bin Jawwad for an attack on the oil town of Ras Lanuf, which the rebels had retaken only on Sunday. Reports late Tuesday said the loyalists had advanced as far east as Brega, another strategic oil town. The events on Tuesday, which amounted to a rout, erased days of rebel gains.
Because Colonel Qaddafi’s forces had been weakened even before the allies began the air campaign, the rebels’ weakness on Tuesday was all the more pronounced, said Henry Boyd, an analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.
Of his roughly 50,000-man army, Colonel Qaddafi evidently trusted only two militias — with a total of about 10,000 men — to deploy against the rebels, Mr. Boyd said. They are the 32nd Brigade, a formidable unit that is loyal to his son Khamis, and the Ninth Regiment, which has less training but is now believed to be under the direction of another son, Muatassim. The fighters in both units are mostly members of the Warfalla, Margaha and Qaddafa tribes.
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