A doctor returned from Ireland is among those resolved to make what could be a last stand, writes MARY FITZGERALD,Foreign Affairs Correspondent in Ajdabiya, Eastern Libya
FOR THE past two weeks, Salem Langhi has followed the shifting frontline in the battle that will determine his country’s fate.
An orthopedic surgeon who worked for 16 years in Ireland before returning to Libya last September, Salem felt moved to act when the uprising that first started in the country’s second-largest city Benghazi evolved into fierce fighting in the desert further west.
He left his home in Benghazi to volunteer at the hospital at Ras Lanuf, a coastal town where fighting between rebels and forces loyal to Muammar Gadafy ebbed and flowed before the latter finally pushed the ragtag rebel army back.
As the frontline moved to the oil hamlet of Brega eastward along the coast, so did Salem, before he finally ended up here in Ajdabiya, the town where Libya’s rebels may have their last stand. With the frontline now just kilometres away, the opposition headquartered in Benghazi has vowed to defend this gateway town at all costs.
If Ajdabiya falls, it would open two roads to Gadafy’s forces – one that leads directly to Benghazi 160km away, and another highway that slices straight to the border with Egypt, close to the strategically important northeastern port of Tobruk.
“There will be a massacre if Gadafy’s forces come here,” Salem says, sitting in Ajdabiya’s deserted hospital, where all but one patient has been evacuated due to the risk of aerial attack.
“I am determined to stay until the end. I am needed here, just like all the other doctors who have come to volunteer their services. This is a people’s revolution – we all have to play our part.”
Yesterday morning rebel positions on the outskirts of the town came under heavy aerial attack. There were also reports of heavy shelling on its hinterland. Those of Ajdabiya’s 120,000 residents who have not already fled were staying indoors. Shops were shuttered and only a handful of vehicles circled the town’s jittery streets. Squares where last week scores of young people gathered waving the pre-Gadafy flag and firing celebratory gunshots in the air were deserted.
Pamphlets dropped from the skies yesterday crowed that the regime was “coming to free Ajdabiya from the traitors”.
The rebels were guilty of “destruction, vandalism and terrorism”, they claimed. “No to lies and dividing our unity and nation”, the notices read. “Let’s work together to make Ajdabiya a safer place and catch the enemies who are friends of the Americans and shake the hands of the Jews.”
One man scrunched up the leaflet and threw it away in disgust. Later, hospital staff took to the streets in a convoy of ambulances, drawing anxious residents from their homes to watch the medics stage their defiant march.
“Gadafy is not going to scare us with his weapons,” one young doctor blared through a loudspeaker, as his colleagues, including Salem Langhi, raised their fists in the air. “He’s not going to enter here.”
Another yelled in hoarse tones: “We are going to win no matter how many martyrs it takes . . . Gadafy go to hell.”
Yesterday’s morning assault took place as the rebels launched a counterattack to try to regain a foothold in Brega.
On Ajdabiya’s western edge, close to where the air strikes took place, knots of rebels gathered around truck-mounted anti-aircraft guns pointing skyward. The sound of a plane overhead prompted a furious round of firing but the aircraft flew on untouched, tracing a white plume across the sky. Vans filled with fresh-faced fighters raced past.
“Go, go, go from here,” yelled one man as he drove by. Majdi Montasser, a fisherman turned fighter from Benghazi, said he had lost several friends in recent days.
“God is the best weapon we have now,” he shrugged. Others were more upbeat.
“We will never allow Gadafy take Ajdabiya,” said Osama Kashmi, who had come from Brega.
“The town is united against him and we have no fear of Gadafy’s forces. God and the people will defend Ajdabiya.”