Tripoli struggled with collapsing water and power supplies today as rebels now in control of most of the Libyan capital battled for towns still held by Muammar Gadafy’s forces.
Sporadic bursts of gunfire echoed around Tripoli, but the street fighting of recent days, much of it in the traditionally pro-Gadafy Abu Salim neighbourhood, seemed to have died away.
The rebel National Transitional Council (NTC) is trying to assert its authority and restore order in Tripoli but its top officials have yet to move there from Benghazi in the east.
The coastal highway to Tripoli is cut by pro-Gadafy forces holding Sirte, the deposed leader's birthplace, 450km east of the capital. They are defying rebels who had hoped Sirte would surrender swiftly after the fall of Tripoli.
"There is intensive consultation and negotiation with the community leaders of Sirte," NTC spokesman Mahmoud Shammam said in Tripoli. "We can take it militarily, but we want to take it peacefully."
He said rebels controlled the border post of Ras Jdir on the coast road between Tripoli and Tunisia after capturing it yesterday, but were still fighting around the town of Zawara, about 160km west of the capital.
Col Gadafy's own whereabouts remain unknown - rebels hunting him say the war will not end until the 69-year-old colonel who kept Libya in his grip for 42 years is captured or killed.
A convoy of six Mercedes cars crossed from Libya into Algeria yesterday, Egypt's state MENA news agency reported, quoting a rebel source. It was impossible to verify the report, but Mena quoted the source as speculating senior Libyan officials or Col Gadafy himself and his sons may have fled Libya.
The NTC and the Western powers that backed rebel forces with a five-month bombing campaign are acutely aware of the need to prevent Libya collapsing into the kind of chaos that plagued Iraq for years after the US-led invasion of 2003.
Meanwhile, there is mounting evidence of atrocities in the days before the fall of Tripoli.
Dozens of decomposing bodies still lay in and around Abu Salim's main hospital, abandoned by medical staff during the fighting. It was not clear how they died.
Five bloated bodies lay on trolleys at the entrance to the emergency department. They appeared to be pro-Gadafy fighters. Two of them were dark-skinned, possibly among the thousands of sub-Saharan Africans who were drafted in to fight for the regime.
Twenty-five bodies lay in the garden, wrapped in rugs and sprinkled with lime in a vain attempt to keep down the smell. Surgical masks and gloves were scattered on the ground. Ambulances were still parked in front of the hospital.
Amnesty International said yesterday it had evidence pro-Gadafy forces had killed several prisoners in two camps in Tripoli since the battle for the capital erupted a week ago.
Sky News reported that one of its correspondents had counted the bodies of around 53 people in a burned-out warehouse in Tripoli after apparently being executed by the regime earlier this week.
The International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva has expressed concern about treatment of detainees on both sides. The ICRC has been able to visit some prisoners, but “there are hundreds more probably”, spokesman Steven Anderson said.
Life remains far from normal in Tripoli, whose two million people are grappling with a breakdown in basic services, even as many of them celebrate the overthrow of a hated leader.
"There are widespread shortages of fuel, food and medical supplies, particularly in the Nafusa Mountains and Tripoli," UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon said in New York, citing reports the water supply to Tripoli and its environs may be in danger, putting three million people or more at risk.
The shortages in Tripoli have worsened, even though NTC chairman Mustafa Abdel Jalil said on Thursday his forces had discovered huge stockpiles of food and medicine in the capital that would eliminate any shortfalls.
Leaders of the National Transitional Council, which has Western support, are pressing foreign governments to release Libyan funds frozen abroad, warning of its urgent need to impose order and provide services to a population traumatised by six months of conflict and 42 years of Gadafy rule.
But Col Gadafy’s long-time allies in Africa, beneficiaries of his oil-fuelled largesse and sympathisers with a foreign policy he called anti-colonial, offered him a grain of comfort and irked the rebels by refusing to follow Arab and Western powers in recognising the NTC as the legal government.
Combined with the reluctance of major powers like China, Russia and Brazil, to see Europeans and Americans dominate a nation with Africa's biggest oil reserves, the African Union's resistance may slow the pace at which funds are released.
Mahmoud Jibril, head of the government in waiting, said time was short. Visiting Turkey, he said: "We have to establish an army, strong police force to be able meet the needs of the people and we need capital and we need the assets."
If fighting continues unchecked, there are fears that Libya's conflict will spill over into the remote regions of Mali, Niger, Chad and Mauritania.
Algeria has said it believes the chaos inside Libya, and large quantities of weapons circulating there, are already being exploited by al-Qaeda's North African branch.
And an influential former Malian rebel, believed to have been involved in the trade of looted weapons from Libya, has been killed in Mali, officials said last night. .
However, taking control of the Ras Jdir border post reopens a path for humanitarian aid and other supplies from Tunisia to Tripoli.
Rebel leaders are determined to show they are in charge, though estimates vary of when the NTC will move formally from its Benghazi base in the east to the war zone that is Tripoli. NTC leaders stress they want to work with other rebel groups that sprang up later in the west as well with those who have previously supported Col Gadafy.
Driving home the unity message, rebel fighters in Tripoli, who come from all over a country fragmented by tribal and regional divisions, have been placed under the unified command of a military council, Tripoli's top rebel commander said.
Agencies