Oorlog in Libië #93: De slag om Tripoli laat niet lang op zich wachten

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Op maandag 28 maart 2011 13:38 schreef jpjedi het volgende:

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Vreemd genoeg zie ik geen subs op youtube.

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Op maandag 28 maart 2011 12:17 schreef doeterniettoezegiktoch het volgende:

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Op maandag 28 maart 2011 13:42 schreef Hans_van_Baalen het volgende:

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Tweede land dat de oppositie erkend. Het is uiteindelijk te verwachten van iedereen in de coalitie voor de NFZ, maar is nu door formaliteit officieel, van een Arabische Emiraat nog wel. Qatar steunt oa de nieuwe televisiezender die vanuit de oppositie komt, en stuurt jets.

Ben benieuwd of dit oprecht is (lijkt van wel), en de steun aan de oppositie onvoorwaardelijk is, of dat ze gewoon een wit voetje willen halen bij het westen ivm bijvoorbeeld WK.

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The Revolution Will Soon Be Televised
Free Libya gets its own satellite channel, hosted by -- you guessed it -- Qatar.

BY BLAKE HOUNSHELL | MARCH 28, 2011

DOHA, QatarFor the first time in its history, Libya is getting its own independent satellite channel.
A group of Libyans from abroad and inside the country is setting up the new station to broadcast news and commentary about Libya for a Libyan audience, with the aim of countering Libyan state propaganda and promoting dialogue about the country's future after Muammar al-Qaddafi, the brutal leader whose four-plus decades in power appear to be drawing to a rapid close.

The channel, to be called simply Libya TV, launches this week in Doha after less than two weeks of hurried preparation. Its founder is the avuncular Mahmud Shammam, a well-known Libyan expatriate journalist who edits Foreign Policy's Arabic edition.

Libya TV's initial team of 19 young staffers was assembled partly over Facebook, Shammam says. In mid-March, he put out a call for volunteers on his page and immediately got more than 200 requests to join. "One woman even said her life would mean nothing if she did not participate," Shammam told me. Another new staffer left Ajdabiya, an eastern city that until the last few days was occupied by Qaddafi's fighters, to join the network in Doha. The channel had to buy him a new set of clothes when he arrived.

Shammam, a staunch secularist, has long been an outspoken critic of Qaddafi's regime, dating back to his days as a student activist at Michigan State University, where he squared off against Qaddafi supporters led by Musa Kusa, now the regime's foreign minister and a key member of its inner circle. ("He's not stupid," Shammam says of Kusa. "He knows the regime is collapsing.")

Returning home to Libya after college, Shammam got into trouble after participating in the January 1976 student demonstrations in Benghazi, and left the country in March of that year, never to return. He has spent the years since as a journalist and activist, with stints at a number of different outlets, including nearly 10 years at the helm of Newsweek's Arabic edition. He's a frequent guest on Al Jazeera, where he was a board member for four years, and is close to Libyan opposition leaders both in and outside the country.

For the first month, Shammam hopes to broadcast four hours of original programming each day, including a 20-minute news bulletin and a half-hour talk show, and then extend it thereafter. He is keen to give Libya's young people, who have been at the forefront of the uprising, a prominent voice at the station. "The youth who liberate Libya can run it," he says. "If we don't let them take responsibility now, we're going to be in trouble."

According to Mohamed al-Akari, the new station's Tripoli-born manager, Libya TV has set up a studio in Benghazi and another in London, in addition to its headquarters in Doha, and has correspondents throughout Libya.

While editorially independent, the channel could prove an important outlet for the revolutionaries, especially if the drama of the uprising fades and the conversation shifts to less visually gripping topics like constitutional reform, political development, and education. International coverage of Tunisia and Egypt has dropped precipitously in the wake of the respective departures of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak.

In the early days of the uprising, Libyans set up the National Transitional Council (NTC), a body describing itself as "the political face of the revolution." The purpose of the council, a senior NTC representative told me, was to combat the regime's message that a post-Qaddafi Libya would mean chaos, tribalism, and civil war, as well as to "liberate our country, to speak to the world in one voice, and to mobilize support for the resistance."

One of the key challenges of a post-Qaddafi Libya will be combating the years of "indoctrination" Libyan children faced, he told me, noting the wide gulf between a highly educated, worldly diaspora that is eager to help rebuild the country and a bruised, battered population inside Libya that has known only Qaddafi for 42 years.

"We need a heavy dosage of dialogue," says Shammam, speaking for the new satellite channel. "We want Libyans to think about the future: the rule of law, civil society, a new constitution. We want to promote a culture of forgiving."

Libya TV is being funded primarily by donations from Libyan businessmen abroad, including one $250,000 contribution from a wealthy Libyan donor in Britain. The state of Qatar, in addition to agreeing to host the network on its soil, has turned over the facilities and technical staff of Al-Rayyan, a local channel focused on cultural programming.

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Op maandag 28 maart 2011 13:38 schreef jpjedi het volgende:

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Vreemd genoeg zie ik geen subs op youtube.

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Libyan rebels advance on Muammar Gaddafi's home town
Rebel-held Benghazi celebrates reports of the fall of Gaddafi's birthplace Link to video

Libyan rebels are advancing on Muammar Gaddafi's home city, Sirte, after retaking all the ground lost in earlier fighting as government forces broke up and fled under western air strikes.

Revolutionary forces rapidly moved more than 150 miles west along Libya's coastal road, seizing several towns without resistance, as the first witness accounts emerged of the devastating effect on Gaddafi's army and militia of the aerial bombardment that broke their resistance at Ajdabiya on Saturday.

A Libyan rebel spokesman said Sirte had been captured by the rebels on Monday morning, but there is no sign the city has fallen. Sirte marks the boundary between the east and west of Libya and has great symbolic importance as Muammar Gaddafi's hometown.

The area was quiet after heavy bombardment from the pre-dawn hours and there was no sign it had been taken by the Benghazi-based rebels advancing from the east. It is rumoured that the outskirts have been planted with landmines.

Rebels retook the important oil towns of Brega, Ras Lanuf and Ben Jawad, and continued on the open desert road towards Sirte, about 95 miles away.

A doctor treating wounded government soldiers described hundreds of deaths, terrible injuries and collapsing morale.

Two loud explosions were heard on Sunday night near Sirte. It was not immediately clear what had been hit but local people said a military installation in the city was bombed on Saturday night – one of many targeted across the country in a week of coalition strikes. Soldiers manning a mobile radar station on the outskirts of the city looked nervous as night fell and aircraft were heard overhead.

Large numbers of armed men, militiamen as well as regular soldiers, were on the streets and there was less of the exuberant defiance and loyal pro-Gaddafi slogans of the sort heard constantly in Tripoli.

Travelling eastwards from the capital, the war feels closer. In Bani Walid, south of Tripoli, tank transporters carrying dirty armoured fighting vehicles drew a small crowd, and an appreciative volley of machine gun fire. Other Libyan army vehicles moved west along the main road, including some heavy tanks – Soviet-made T-72s – but there were no signs of large-scale movement.

Everywhere, there are long queues at petrol stations, sometimes with hundreds of vehicles stretching down the road as they wait. At one queue, drivers were relieved when a tanker finally delivered a load of fuel, but then reacted with frustration when there was no electricity to operate the pumps.

As well as its political significance as Gaddafi's birthplace, Sirte is seen as important to his defence of Tripoli, the capital, which is now less than 300 miles from the rebels' frontline. Control of the oil terminals at Brega and Ras Lanuf is in itself a major gain because it could bring the rebel administration significant revenue from exports if production resumes. Rebels moved unchallenged along a road littered with evidence of the air campaign and the speed of their enemies' retreat. The blackened carcasses of tanks, armoured vehicles and military trucks were pushed to the side of the road.

In their hurried retreat from Ras Lanuf, government forces abandoned piles of ammunition. They included grey wooden boxes containing rockets but stamped as holding "parts of bulldozer", manufactured in North Korea. In Bin Jawad, residents said a destroyed municipal building had been hit by an air strike. The rebels forced captured Gaddafi fighters on to buses and drove them to Benghazi.

Witnesses described the bombing's devastating effects on his forces.

A doctor at the hospital in Ras Lanuf, which treated most of the government soldiers wounded in the coalition air raids on Ajdabiya and the road from Benghazi, described hundreds of casualties, breaking morale and many soldiers faking injuries to escape the assault.

The doctor – who wished to be identified only by his first name, Abdullah – had responded to a call from Gaddafi's government for medical personnel to go to the front two weeks ago. Today, he accidentally found himself on the rebel side of the line.

"The first days, Gaddafi's forces had very high morale and they came in large numbers, thousands. There were the army soldiers and then the volunteers in the militia," he said.

"They were fighting the rebels, no problem, and winning. But then came the bombing [by coalition air strikes]. The first day we had 56 seriously wounded. To the head, the brain, lost arms and legs. Soldiers with a lot of shrapnel in them. It was like that every day after."

Abdullah said all the wounded were on the Gaddafi side, with about two-thirds being those injured in the bombing of Ajdabiya where there were days of fighting as government forces blocked the rebel advance.

The doctor said he did not know how many soldiers were killed in the air strikes, because the bodies were taken from the battlefield for burial.

"The soldiers who came to the hospital told me there were 150 dead just on the first day of the bombing. After that, there were fewer because they hid," he said.

"It started to have a big effect on their morale. They said they could fight the rebels but not the planes. In recent days, many of the soldiers were trying to find excuses to leave the front. Ten to 20 a day came to the hospital pretending they were injured, asking for a medical certificate. They didn't have any physical injuries, but I gave it [a certificate] to them."

Abdullah was sceptical about rebel accusations that many were foreign mercenaries. He said he had not see anyadded it was possible that some of the soldiers were not Libyan.

But he did say that Gaddafi's forces had systematically maltreated the civilian population, particularly those suspected of coming from the de facto rebel capital of Benghazi and other towns in the east under the revolutionaries' control.

"There was bad treatment of the civilians. One patient came here who had been trying to escape Ajdabiya with his family. The government army shot him in the leg," he added.

"The idea I got from civilians who came to the hospital is that things were very bad for them. They were beaten. Some said their family members had disappeared. They didn't know if they were killed."

Some of Gaddafi's forces were billeted in the el-Adeel hotel, in Ras Lanuf, which they looted as they fled, taking mattresses and televisions and levering open cash machines in the lobby. On walls across the town they sprayed in green paint three words: "God, Gaddafi, Libya."

Beyond Sirte lies the large town of Misrata, most of which is in rebel hands after an attempt by Gaddafi to retake it was driven off by air strikes. Government forces kept up their shelling at the weekend, although residents said it was considerably less intense than a week ago, after 12 hours of aerial bombardment by western planes destroyed more than 20 tanks and drove Gaddafi's forces to the edge of the town.One rebel, Sami, told Reuters by telephone that pro-Gaddafi forces had fought with rebels in Misrata. "All day long we heard clashes between rebels and Gaddafi forces in the area of Tripoli Street, in the city centre," he said. "We heard tanks, mortars and light weapons being used."

Misrata is the only big rebel stronghold left in the west of Libya and is cut off from the main rebel force fighting Gaddafi's troops in the east.

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Op maandag 28 maart 2011 13:40 schreef pippicaro het volgende:

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eerst klikken dat je op youtube wil kijken en op youtube op " volledige beschrijving weergeven " klikken...

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Op maandag 28 maart 2011 13:49 schreef doeterniettoezegiktoch het volgende:

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For English subtitles, make sure "CC" button on playback bar is RED (on).

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Op maandag 28 maart 2011 13:58 schreef Hans_van_Baalen het volgende:
#LibyaFeb17_com LibyaFeb17.com / source: AJE
Revolutionary scouts find road to Sirt heavily land mined - #libya #feb17 - bit.ly/gMw91n

tegenstrijdig met een eerder bericht dat de hele weg tot aan Sirte open zou liggen.

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Revolutionary scouts find road to Sirt heavily land mined
_{Posted on March 28, 2011}

General Hamdi Hassi, an opposition commander in the town of Bin Jawad says that while taking Sirte will not be easy, NATO airstrikes have evened the scales between the pro- and anti-government forces.

He says that fighting was ongoing in Nawfaliya, about 100km from Sirte, and scouting parties had found the road towards the Gaddafi stronghold to be heavily mined.

He says that the current opposition strategy is to combine military assault with attempts to win over local tribes who are still loyal to Gaddafi.

Speaking to the Associated Press, he said:

Sirte will not be easy to take. Now because of NATO strikes on [the government's] heavy weapons, were almost fighting with the same weapons, only we have Grad rockets now and they dont Theres Gaddafi and then theres circles around him of supporters, each circle is slowly peeling off and disappearing. If they rise up it would make our job easier.

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Op maandag 28 maart 2011 13:52 schreef Slayage het volgende:

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en wat dat mg betekenen weet ook niemand, ik ken iig geen youtube filmpjes, waar je subtitles aan en uit kan zetten, waarschijnlijk bedoelen ze transcript ipv subtitles