A Libyan army unit loyal to dictator Col. Moammar Gadhafi attacked antigovernment protesters holed up in a mosque in a key city west of the capital, blasting a minaret with anti-aircraft missiles and automatic weapons, a witness said, according to WSJ.
The witness, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals, said the 9 a.m. attack came a day after an aide to Col. Gadhafi, identified as Abdullah Megrahi, came to the city and warned the protesters to "leave or you will see a massacre."
"We told him we are not leaving, either death or victory," the witness said.
Meanwhile, one of Col. Gadhafi's closest aides, Ahmed Gadhaf al-Dam, said he has defected to Cairo in protest of the regime's fierce crackdown on demonstrators. When you have defectors like al-Dam, it is hard to see how Gadhafi can hold on to power much longer. A guy like al-Dam knows how to read the tea leaves and is only about staying on the side that will prevail.
The type of government that will replace Gadhafi is unkown.
The problem with deciding who's winning is a lack of RELIABLE info coming out of the country. It is difficult to tell how many soldiers Momo still controls. In fact, HE may not know how many soldiers he has. No one can verify even an approximate amount of people killed.
ReplyDeleteIt could be like Katrina, where we expected 10,000 dead or more (and got far less). Or it could be like the Asian Tsunamis, where hundreds of thousands perished, but no one knew how much. The body count just kept getting higher day by day.
Momo says there are 3 million people in the country, the CIA says there's 6 million. No one may have actually been killed, or there could be 60,000. There are so few credible sources in the country, yet Libya controls 1-2% of global oil output. Crude spiked to $119 a barrel today.
Would SOMEONE go there and figure out what's going?