Tripoli: Fighting Empties the Seaside Capital

August 25, 2011

Libyan rebels gesture as they change the flag in Abu Salim district in Tripoli, Libya, August 25, 2011

Driving into Tripoli is to drive into a ghost city. It looks like a set for a Hollywood apocalypse film.

Instead of a bustling seaside capital of 1.5 million people, we drove Thursday past kilometer and kilometer of shuttered metal storefronts.

We arrived to find a city stripped of people.

As shots rang in the distance, only an occasional car or pickup truck raced down glass-strewn streets.

Entering from the west, we met checkpoints every block. Tense rebels dressed in tee-shirts, shorts and sandals manned roadblocks improvised from mattresses, even school desks.

Heavily armed, they were men from the mountains, unable to direct us to our hotel. Fifteen minutes after we left one beachfront hotel, a firefight erupted outside.

After four days of fighting in the capital, the rebels control about three-quarters of the city. But opposition ranges from single snipers to formations of entrenched Gadhafi loyalists.

Our driver took a wrong turn and we soon were traveling alongside the avocado green and mustard yellow of Colonel Gadhafi's six square-kilometer base, breached by the rebels on Tuesday. The base's outer walls bore the signs of a heavy assault - blast marks, burn marks, and holes blown through reinforced concrete by rocket-propelled grenades. All vehicles outside the walls were charred wrecks.