Turkey working on ‘roadmap’ to end Libya war
Tayyip Erdogan has said Turkey was working on a “roadmap” to end the war in Libya which would include a ceasefire and the withdrawal of Muammar Gaddafi’s forces from some cities.

Turkey has held talks this week with envoys from Gaddafi’s government and representatives of the opposition.

“We are working on the details of this road map,” Prime Minister Erdogan told a news conference on Thursday.

He said a “real ceasefire should be settled immediately” and Gaddafi’s forces should withdraw from besieged cities.

“A comprehensible democratic transformation process that takes into account the legitimate interests of Libyan people should start immediately,” said Erdogan, calling for political reforms.

“The aim of this process should be to settle constitutional order that people freely elect their rulers.” (Al Jazeera)

General says US may consider sending troops into Libya as part of any international force
The U.S. may consider sending troops into Libya with a possible international ground force that could aid the rebels, the former U.S. commander of the military mission said Thursday, describing the current operation as a stalemate that is more likely to go on now that America has handed control to NATO.

But Army Gen. Carter Ham also told lawmakers that American participation in a ground force would not be ideal, since it could erode the international coalition attacking Moammar Gadhafi’s forces and make it more difficult to get Arab support for operations in Libya.

He said NATO has done an effective job in an increasingly complex combat situation. But he noted that, in a new tactic, Gadhafi’s forces are making airstrikes more difficult by staging their fighters and vehicles near civilian areas such as schools and mosques.

The use of an international ground force is a possible plan to bolster the Libyan rebels, Ham said at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing.

Asked whether the U.S. would provide troops, Ham said, “I suspect there might be some consideration of that. My personal view at this point would be that that’s probably not the ideal circumstance, again for the regional reaction that having American boots on the ground would entail.”

President Barack Obama has said repeatedly there will be no U.S. troops on the ground in Libya, although there are reports of small CIA teams in the country.

Pressed by Sen. John McCain, a leading Republican, about the situation in Libya, Ham agreed that a stalemate “is now more likely” since NATO took command. (Associated Press)

Saif Gaddafi: his father’s son, or the would-be face of Libyan reform?
On 19 February Dr Muhammad al-Houni, a Libyan academic and long-time adviser to Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s son, Saif al-Islam, finished a speech he had written for his patron to deliver on state television in the midst of a crisis.

Four days into the Libyan uprising, Houni suggested Saif strike a conciliatory tone. He should apologise for those who had died in the country’s east. He should insist too on the necessity of reforming his father’s four-decades-old regime, announcing a tranche of long-promised laws to usher in new freedoms.

“I wrote down what he must say,” Houni recalled on Thursday. “I said he should say sorry for the victims. But he went to his father and his father did not like it. So his father changed the speech.”

When Saif appeared on television, he looked and sounded every inch his father’s son, waving his finger angrily, and saying the words that have since become notorious: “We will fight until the last man, until the last woman, until the last bullet.”

Houni left Tripoli the following day. Shortly afterwards he issued a furious open letter to his former employer, accusing Saif of “donning his father’s cloak, which is contaminated with 40 years of his deeds”.

Once regarded as the Gaddafi family’s friendly, reform-minded western face, Saif, supported by his brother Saadi, has emerged in the past week as the most visible figure in the regime’s efforts to negotiate an end to the conflict on its own terms.

One influential figure, who knows the regime and members of the Gaddafi family well, is convinced that Saif speaks for the family with his father’s support.

“They are looking for a way out,” said the source. “It makes sense for Libya if there is a good exit [for Gaddafi]. What I understand they are saying is that the sons want to continue playing a political role [after the regime has fallen] by having their own party.

“They would accept an interim government and a transition period. What they will not accept is being forced to leave the country. It is what Saif has been working [on]. It is about getting the sides to sit down together and talk and also about having an exit strategy that is not insulting to Gaddafi: that leaves him but without power. That’s what Saif is fighting for.” (The Guardian)

Nato ‘apologises for hitting Libya rebels’
The commander of Libya’s rebel forces has said Nato apologised for mistakenly hitting a column of rebel tanks near the eastern town of Ajdabiya.

Gen Abdelfatah Yunis said the deadly air strike had occurred despite a warning to Nato that the tanks were being moved to the front line.

Nato said it was investigating the claim, without giving further details.

Rebels said four rebels died, while local doctors told the BBC at least 13 fighters had been killed in the strike. (BBC)

Inside Gaddafi’s dark places: The headquarters of Benghazi’s Revolutionary Committees
On February 17, at the beginning of the revolution, one of the first buildings that demonstrators stormed in Benghazi was the headquarters of the Revolutionary Committees. They razed it.

The Revolutionary Committees (al-lijan al-thawriyah) are Gaddafi’s die-hards. Established in the 1977 as the ideological vanguard of the Green revolution, their members have a reputation as thugs who menace, beat up, and sometimes kill those who take issue with the regime.

Being a Revolutionary Committee member can be lucrative, too. It is widely reported that members special benefits — such as cars and cash payments — for their dirty work. Members have also been promoted to senior government posts, in recognition of their loyalty to the Colonel.

When you see footage of Gaddafi supporters in Tripoli waving green flags with gusto and holding Gaddafi’s portrait aloft, many of those you see are probably Revolutionary Committee members.

Their Benghazi headquarters looks like an outsized high-modernist tepee. A fence in green trim surrounds it. Inside its burnt remains, there is a mural that reflects some of the ideological affinities between Gaddafi’s Third Universal Theory and communism. There are heroic laborers, rockets, and lots of right angles. It wouldn’t look out of place in Minsk.

A few other people are walking through the building, poking around. “Is this your first time in this building?” I ask a man in a black faux-leather jacket, probably in his late 20s.

“Yeah — only Revolutionary Committee members were allowed in this place before. And anyway, I wouldn’t have had any reason to come.”

He seems a little nervous talking about it. I imagine how it must feel being in the burnt-out headquarters of an institution whose name has been associated with fear for as long as you can remember.

I talk to another man, in his early 30s. It’s his first time here too. “You know, the Revolutionary Committee members — they’re not the kind of people you’d want to associate with. If someone introduced me to a friend and said he was a Revolutionary Committee member, I’d stay away from the guy.” He shakes an imaginary hand as if only decorum demands it, and then feigns walking away.

He then explains that many people are still uncomfortable speaking about the Revolutionary Committees. “They’re scared that Gaddafi could come back, you know?”

Fear of die-hards dies hard. (Ryan Calder)

C J Chivers reports:

Late Monday afternoon, as Libyan rebels prepared another desperate attack on the eastern oil town of Brega, a young rebel raised his rocket-propelled grenade as if to fire. The town’s university, shimmering in the distance, was far beyond his weapon’s maximum range. An older rebel urged him to hold fire, telling him the weapon’s back-blast could do little more than reveal their position and draw a mortar attack.

The younger rebel almost spat with disgust. “I have been fighting for 37 days!” he shouted. “Nobody can tell me what to do!”

The outburst midfight — and the ensuing argument between a determined young man who seemed to have almost no understanding of modern war and an older man who wisely counseled caution — underscored a fact that is self-evident almost everywhere on Libya’s eastern front. The rebel military, as it sometimes called, is not really a military at all.

What is visible in battle here is less an organized force than the martial manifestation of a popular uprising.

With throaty cries and weapons they have looted and scrounged, the rebels gather along Libya’s main coastal highway each day, ready to fight. Many of them are brave, even extraordinarily so. Some of them are selfless, swept along by a sense of common purpose and brotherhood that accompanies their revolution.

“Freedom!” they shout, as they pair a yearning to unseat Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi with appeals for divine help. “God is great!”

But by almost all measures by which a military might be assessed, they are a hapless bunch. They have almost no communication equipment. There is no visible officer or noncommissioned officer corps. Their weapons are a mishmash of hastily acquired arms, which few of them know how to use.

With only weeks of fighting experience, they lack an understanding of the fundamentals of offensive and defensive combat, or how to organize fire support. They fire recklessly and sometimes accidentally. Most of them have yet to learn how to hold seized ground, or to protect themselves from their battlefield’s persistent rocket and mortar fire, which might be done by simply digging in.

Prone to panic, they often answer to little more than their mood, which changes in a flash. When their morale spikes upward, their attacks tend to be painfully and bloodily frontal — little more than racing columns down the highway, through a gantlet of the Qaddafi forces’ rocket and mortar fire, face forward into the loyalists’ machine guns.

And their numbers are small. Officials in the rebels’ transitional government have provided many different figures, sometimes saying 10,000 or men are under arms in their ranks.

But a small fraction actually appear at the front each day — often only a few hundred. And some of the men appear without guns, or with aged guns that have no magazines or ammunition.

For the nations that have supported the uprising, the state of the rebels’ armed wing — known as the Forces of Free Libya — raises many questions. It seems unlikely that such a force can carry the war westward, through dug-in Qaddafi units toward the stronghold of Surt, much less beyond, toward Tripoli, the Libyan capital. And a sustained war of attrition could quickly bleed their ranks dry.

The Guardian reports:

Britain is to urge Arab countries to train the disorganised Libyan rebels, and so strengthen their position on the battlefield before negotiations on a ceasefire, senior British defence sources have indicated.

The sources said they were also looking at hiring private security companies, some of which draw on former SAS members, to aid the rebels. These private soldiers could be paid by Arab countries to train the unstructured rebel army.

In what is seen in effect as the second phase of the battle to oust Muammar Gaddafi, it is now being acknowledged that the disorganised Libyan rebels are not going to make headway on their own. Nato member countries are looking at requesting Arab countries, such as Qatar or the United Arab Emirates, to train the rebels, or to fund the training. Qatar and the UAE are already involved in the Nato-led no-fly zone.

Some cabinet sources said that another Arab country that might be willing to train the rebels is Jordan. They are thought to have the best-trained officers, and are possibly the best army in the region, one Cabinet source said. The training of the Libyan rebels might take as long as month to turn them into an effective force capable of holding ground, and organise flanking manoeuvres. A source said: “They’re not advancing, they’re just driving up the road, and when they see guns drawn they turn round and go back again.”

The British decision to find ways to train and equip the rebels is a further sign of the determination of the coalition administration to drive out Gaddafi. It is argued that the training, if requested by the rebels, would not be in breach of the UN resolution as it would be covered by the mandate allowing “all means necessary” to protect the civilians from attacks by Gaddafi.

Meanwhile, the Associated Press reports:

Libya’s former-energy minister said Wednesday that several members of Moammar Gadhafi’s inner circle want to defect, but many are too scared to abandon the dictator fearing the safety of themselves and their families.

Omar Fathi bin Shatwan, who also served as industry minister, told the Associated Press that he had fled by fishing boat to Malta on Friday from the western Libyan city of Misrata.

Shatwan, who left the government in 2007, said he still had contact with some government figures and explained that many feared for their safety. In some cases, their families are under siege, he said.

“Those whose families are outside Libya will flee if they get a chance,” Shatwan said. “But many can’t leave, and all the families of ministers are under siege.”

Shatwan said he had last had contact with Gadhafi in 2006, and had not spoken with the tyrant’s sons since leaving office. “Ministers who are friends of mine, I have spoken to them,” he said.

The 59-year-old said he had spent 40 days at his home in Misrata before escaping from Libya, and witnessed Gadhafi’s forces pounding the city with heavy artillery and relentlessly shooting civilians.

Gaddafi appeals to Obama to intervene in Libya
Our dear son, Excellency, Baraka Hussein Abu oumama, your intervention is the name of the U.S.A. is a must, so that Nato would withdraw finally from the Libyan affair. Libya should be left to Libyans within the African union frame. (Mu’aumer Qaddaffi, Leader of the Revolution, Tripoli 5.4.2011)

Iran backs Libyan rebels, chastises West over oil, Bahrain
Libya’s rebellion has put Iran in an awkward position. Tehran has tried to balance support for the Libyan opposition, which it views as part of a region-wide “Islamic awakening,” with rejection of the NATO-led military strikes.

Iranian officials charged that the U.N.-endorsed military intervention on humanitarian grounds is hypocritical and part of a secret Western agenda. Tehran opposes any military intervention in the Middle East, even if in Iran’s interest, because of the precedent it sets. Iran also opposed the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, despite the fact Saddam Hussein was Iran’s main adversary in the region.

In his Nowruz (New Year) speech last month, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei charged that the United States and its allies were motivated by interest in Libyan oil. Iran’s foreign ministry spokesperson said that coalition was pursuing a new form of colonialism. (Tehran Bureau)

Sanctions are dropped against Libyan defector
The Obama administration dropped financial sanctions on Monday against the top Libyan official who fled to Britain last week, saying it hoped the move would encourage other senior aides to abandon Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the country’s embattled leader.

But the decision to unfreeze bank accounts and permit business dealings with the official, Moussa Koussa, underscored the predicament his defection poses for American and British authorities, who said on Tuesday that Scottish police and prosecutors planned to interview Mr. Koussa about the 1988 Lockerbie bombing and other issues “in the next few days.”

Mr. Koussa’s close knowledge of the ruling circle, which he is believed to be sharing inside a British safe house, could be invaluable in trying to strip Colonel Qaddafi of support.

But as the longtime Libyan intelligence chief and foreign minister, Mr. Koussa is widely believed to be implicated in acts of terrorism and murder over the last three decades, including the assassination of dissidents, the training of international terrorists and the bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. (New York Times)

Libya rebels ‘pressured into Lockerbie apology’
Libya’s rebel administration has said that it signed an apology for the Gaddafi regime’s role in IRA attacks and the Lockerbie bombing under pressure from the British government, and that the document is the result of “misunderstanding”.

After initially denying that the document existed, the revolutionaries’ governing council acknowledged that its chairman, Mustafa Abdul Jalil, had indeed signed an apology on behalf of the Libyan people for Gaddafi’s provision of semtex used in IRA bombings and for the blowing up of the Pan Am flight in 1988. It also promised compensation.

Amid division and confusion over the declaration, which some blamed on a translation mix-up, council officials said that the issue of the Libyan government’s responsibility for attacks in the UK came up only because it was pressed on the revolutionary administration by the British. (The Guardian)

Libya’s rebel forces need more than just weapons
Robert Haddick, the managing editor of Small Wars Journal and a columnist for Foreign Policy magazine, said the rebels’ most significant need is basic instruction in both offensive and defensive tactics at the small-unit level — and in identifying and training commanders.

“You could train hundreds of men in those skills, maybe even thousands, in two months, probably,” Mr. Haddick said.

“But I think the more difficult task, and something that would take far more time, would be to select leaders — squad leaders, platoon leaders and company commanders,” he said.

There is no good estimate on how many Libyans have taken up arms on the side of the rebellion. Many are not even full-time, but show up for a fight and then return home. They are of questionable physical conditioning. They have little training in weapons and none in military discipline.

Among the rebels, according to American intelligence estimates, are about 1,000 men who have trained with the Libyan army, as both officers and foot soldiers, before changing sides. The government’s force is estimated at roughly 30,000. (New York Times)