Libyan forces say they’ve made further advances into Sirte, as part of efforts to recapture the city from ISIL militants. After a lull in fighting last week, government-backed troops have launched a fresh assault, pounding ISIL targets with artillery shells and air strikes. The forces had advanced rapidly on the militant group’s coastal stronghold in May. But snipers, suicide bombers and mines have slowed their progress into the city centre. Authorities say more than 3-hundred troops have been killed and more than a-thousand 3-hundred wounded since May. Sirte is ISIL’s most important base outside Syria and Iraq. Its loss would be a major setback for the militant group.
The fighters – they can scarcely be described as the soldiers of a regular army – press themselves behind the wall, the North African summer sun burning down on them.
Shots are heard, and there is the dull sound of mortars exploding in the worst fighting here in weeks. On the sand-encrusted rear window of a pick-up truck, someone has written “el mansur” in Arabic script – victory.
“We’re going in now,” Ghasri’s son says fingering his camouflaged helmet as he takes his leave of his father.
“You’ve come too late. The battle against Islamic State is over,” Ghasri had told the reporters a few days earlier, looking at them over his glasses much like a strict teacher.
The comment may be exaggerated but it is not entirely unjustified.
Berlin, Paris, London and Washington all expressed concern a few weeks ago at the spread of Daesh in Libya, putting its numbers at more than 6,000 jihadis in control of a coastal strip stretching for 300 kilometres.
Stopping the advance would be impossible without massive airstrikes from Western powers, observers said. The main trading centre of Misrata could fall, followed by Tripoli just 190 kilometres to the west, they warned.
But then the Misrata militias mobilized. Today burnt out vehicles line the road eastwards from the city to Sirte, where until recently Daesh held sway.
The trucks were crammed with explosives that the jihadis detonated, causing heavy casualties among the fighters as they advanced to lay siege to Sirte.
Daesh extremists – considerably fewer than the estimates put out by Western military officials – were rapidly pushed back to the town, the birthplace of Muamer Ghaddafi, the dictator who was toppled and killed in 2011.
But the looming battle to take full control of the city, street by street, is likely to be bloody.
“We’re fighting people who want to die. That makes them inhuman,” says one of the militia leaders sitting at the back of a smoke-filled café as he draws on his hookah, his dark eyes sunk deep in a troubled face.
Ismael Shukri, the head of military intelligence in the region, says the jihadis have come in from Tunisia, Egypt and other neighbouring countries. Among them are fighters from the Boko Haram extremist group based in north-eastern Nigeria.
