When a desert storm is raging all around, the new frontline against the Islamic State in Libya could not feel more like a no-mans land.
The vast emptiness of the Sahara stretches as far as one’s eyes can see, and as hourglass-fine sand blasts in all directions, both the sky and the desert seem to blur into one.
Camped out at a crossroads at the hamlet of Abugrein are some 3,000 Western-backed fighters, manning defences on a road that leads to Colonel Gaddafi’s home city of Sirte, which fell to Isil control last year. As the storm reached its peak last Friday, though, it was hard enough for them to even see their enemy, never mind fight them.
“This kind of weather makes us feel very vulnerable as we can’t see where the Isil fighters are,” said field commander Mohammed al Afayda, 40, as he stood next to a line of pick-up trucks mounted with heavy machines guns, bazookas and multiple rocket launchers. “They can use these storms to move around as they like and attack us all of a sudden.”
Most of the Libyan gunmen now massed for a planned assault on Sirt4e are fighters from nearby Misrata who learned their combat skills during the revolution against Gaddafi in 2011.
Indeed, for many of them, the road into Sirte is familiar territory. The city was the scene of Gaddafi’s last stand in October of that year, in which he was found hiding in a culvert and killed on the spot.
Yet that very victory five years ago also laid the seeds of the new battle ahead. Humiliated at their defeat, those in Sirte who had prospered under Gaddafi later welcomed in foreign fighters from Isil, allowing the group complete control by early last year. Gaddafi’s showpiece city is now home to anything up to 6,000 Isil fighters, making it the group’s main outpost outside of Syria and Iraq, and a possible launchpad for attacks on Europe.
With a new, UN-backed government of national unity taking up power in Tripoli last month after two years of deadlock, the fight to retake Sirte is now finally on, with world leaders agreeing to lift Libya’s long-standing arms embargo at a meeting in Vienna last Monday.
Their hope is that removing Isil from Sirte will help Libya get back on its feet again, paving the way also for action against the people-smugglers who operate there with impunity.
However, if the opening skirmishes in the fight are anything to go by, it is also likely to be a considerably tougher scrap that the last battle for Sirte five years ago.
Back then, Mr Fayda and his comrades were up mainly against Gaddafi mercenaries, who, like ordinary soldiers, would retreat or quit altogether if the going got too tough. The same cannot be said of their latest adversaries, for whom dying in battle is all part of the job.
“These guys all wear suicide belts, and they march at us from 100 yards away without retreating or caring if they get hit,” said Captain Mufta Fadil, 54, a grey-haired army veteran wearing sandals under his military fatigues.
In the fortnight since the operating to besiege Sirte began in earnest, Isil have used such “martyrs” to deadly effect, deploying car bombers to hurtle down the dual carriageway towards the Misratan frontlines.
On Wednesday, the terror group inflicted its biggest casualties yet, with a huge truck bomb that was covered, Mad Max-style, with makeshift armour plating. It withstood even a hail of fire from a truck-mounted anti-aircraft gun, and when it blew up it caused a towerblock sized fireball. Some 26 Misratan fighters were killed, and dozens more injured were sent to the field hospital further down the road.
Such attacks are as simple as they are effective – and in the view of the Misratan commanders, they could be stopped in equally simple fashion by modern anti-tank weapons. However, despite the pledges of Western aid in the fight against Isil in Sirte, no such weapons have been forthcoming because of the arms embargo, which remained in place as long as Libya had no unified government.
That is a very bitter issue indeed for men like Colonel Mahmoud Isqal, a senior commander of forces at Abugrein. He pointed out that while the West has only lifted the arms embargo now, he and his men have actually been manning the frontlines about Abugrein for more than a year now, during which they have lost some 200 men.
“My men are well trained troops, but they are very angry with the West,” he said, gesturing out at the scrubland beyond the berm, where Isil snipers often hide in patches of dense bush.
“For a year and a half we have been talking with them about weapons, asking for weapons, special operations training, logistics and medical help, but we get none of it. This is the whole world’s problem and we are being left alone to face it.”
British and American special forces had been in to help, he confirmed, but “not much”, and only to provide occasional pieces of intelligence. His own spies inside Sirte, by contrast, had provided vast amounts of intelligence back to the West, but so far “nobody had acted on it with airstrikes”.
His fighters had not even been given non-lethal help such as night goggles – supplies by Britain to Syrian rebel groups – or a field hospital. “You’d think the West could at least give us a floating hospital off the coast,” he said. “If we’d proper help at the start, we could defeated Isil in Sirte when they were just a few hundred men, rather than the thousands that are there now.”
The response of Western diplomats – as ever – is that these matters are complicated and take time, and that once the new government establishes its authority over Libya’s myriad militias, more Western weapons help will come. Yet the longer the delay in that happening, the more the new government will lose credibility with the very people it needs to win over.
Meanwhile, the fight goes on, the two sides pushing each prodding each other’s defences up and down the desert road, sometimes pushing forwards, sometimes being driven back. With the sand in the air and bunches of tumbleweed blowing past, it is like watching a Western movie on steroids, although as the Misratan gunslingers point out, not everyone is fighting fair.
Before retreating from any piece of territory it holds, Isil also sows landmines in it, a process that is all too easy in the soft desert sand. Several Misratan fighters have already been killed by the landmines, and clearing any reclaimed turf is a slow process.
Isil also blends in with the local civilian population for defence, as shown by the bullet-ridden Isil truck that lay by the roadside. It looked just like a civilian vehicle, yet inside the cabin, which was still stained with dried blood, the Telegraph saw small Isil logos plastered all over the windscreen. At the Misratan frontlines, it would have been hard to tell whether the oncoming vehicle was a suicide bomber on another mission or just another family of refugees seeking to flee Sirte.
Mr al-Fayda, who commands a southern section of the frontline at the town of Baghla, expects many more such car bombs in coming months. Recently, he says, his men discovered an entire warehouse full of them, hidden in an Isil-controlled village that had become the Detroit of the carbomb-making world.
“There were scores of them in there, all assembled and ready to go,” he said. “One was packed full of rockets in the back as well – the explosion it would have made would have been huge.”
telegraph.co.uk
