On Friday, a large force from a brigade led by one of Gadhafi's sons led a new attack on Zawiya, the closest opposition-held city to Tripoli, a resident said. The troops from the Khamis Brigade — named after the son — attacked Zawiya's western side, firing mortars and then engaging in battles of heavy machine guns and automatic weapons with armed residents and allied army units, said the resident.
"Our men are fighting back the force, which is big," the resident said. Zawiya, about 30 miles (50 kilometers) west of Tripoli, has beaten back several assaults the past week.
Throughout the night and into the early hours Friday, pro-Gadhafi forces also fired mortars and anti-aircraft guns at the outskirts of opposition-held Misrata, Libya's third largest city located just east of Tripoli, a doctor in the city said. He said it appeared to be an intimidation tactic, causing no casualties.
As the detail from the Misrata attack indicates, I get the impression that the training level is so low that Khaddafi forces approach the rebel lines, perhaps halt when they come under fire, and then stand off firing weapons from a distance, hoping the other side breaks and runs.
This isn't real war. Attackers need to fire and maneuver, ultimately closing with the enemy to kill them or drive them away. Standing off and just spraying lead is just an up-armed gangland battle. The side that can first train their armed followers enough to follow real officers and NCOs (perhaps foreign volunteers or mercenaries with real military experience) to cross the kill zones (which, given poor training levels, will be more noise than deadly) to close with and defeat the enemy as real infantry is trained to do will start actually driving the enemy back.
The problem is, with each side proving themselves so far unable to actually attack opposing armed forces, the armed forces of each side (and I use the term loosely, obviously) could turn on targets easier to defeat--civilians on the other side. These targets don't shoot back and are easier to defeat, as the loyalists demonstrated in Tripoli:
Gadhafi loyalists in the capital have unleashed a wave of arrests and disappearances since last Friday's bloodshed. Bodies of people who vanished have been dumped in the street. Gunmen in SUVs have descended on homes in the night to drag away suspected protesters, identified by video footage of protests that militiamen have pored through to spot faces. Other militiamen have searched hospitals for wounded to take away.
Residents say they are under the watchful eyes of a variety of Gadhafi militias prowling the streets. They go under numerous names — Internal Security, the Central Support Force, the People's Force, the People's Guards and the Brigade of Mohammed al-Magarif, the head of Gadhafi's personal guard — and they are all searching for suspected protesters.
Slaughtering civilians is the traditional strategy of modern civil wars. At some point, one side--probably Khaddafi's loyalists because they worry that the West will eventually intervene if the fighting drags on--will conclude that they can't win by keeping the struggle relatively clean between the armed elements (and even air attacks by the Libyan loyalists seem to be directed at military targets--unless you think armed rebels in civilian clothers fighting you are really civilians--if press reports are accurate) and go full Congo, deliberately targeting civilians on the other side in a traditional Third World civil war in an effort to win before foreigners intervene.
But if each side has access to oil, the killing could go on a long time since each side has a geographic base that likely are resilient in the face of the poorly trained armed elements the other side has available.
You haven't even begun to see ugly yet in Libya.
UPDATE: If this is true, we'll be in Libya before long:
President Obama said Thursday that he had ordered plans giving the U.S. military "full capacity to act, potentially rapidly," in Libya if the situation there deteriorates.
I get the impression that we are hoping that the war will be won by someone before our miltiary preparations are completed, thus putting our words of support to the test.
But neither side has shown it can actually defeat the other side in an offensive battle. Unless one side just collapses from defections or desertions, I dare say that we'll be ready to intervene before the crisis ends.
