Ragtag army of volunteers vow to take on Gaddafi

AJDABIYA - Stepping gingerly over an anti-personnel mine left on the floor of a weapons bunker, a rebel guard points out the anti-tank missiles, piled haphazardly on top of each other.

It was these bunkers which Libyan pilots tried to bomb three days ago.

In this abandoned army base, a vast complex in the desert west of Ajdabiya, more than a dozen bunkers are crammed with missiles, grenades, tank shells, mines and much more.

In one bunker, the guard casually gestures to a crate of white cylindrical containers he claims contain radioactive material.

In the hands of a trained army, it would be a formidable arsenal. In the hands of a volunteer army, its usefulness is more debatable.

The ragtag group that guards the base, a mix of civilians and soldiers, is not even sure they have anything to fire the weapons with, blaming looters who broke into the base when the town fell 10 days ago.

Nevertheless, such concerns have done little to dent their enthusiasm. "This is the front line of the eastern part of Libya," says Ali Mohammed, a guard and one of thousands to defect from Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's army after Libya's eastern capital, Benghazi, fell to rebel protesters. "We will stay here until we die."

And die they might. In the days that followed the uprising in the east - an impeccably executed assault that routed Gaddafi's forces after several days of fighting - the Libyan leader has dug in, surrounding himself with die-hard loyalists and elite guards in Tripoli.

Yesterday, the regime launched a land and air offensive in the country's east at dawn and briefly captured Brega, before being driven back. The early momentum that swept across the country, starting in the east, appears to be faltering, and some of the protesters admit it could take weeks, and more bloodshed before the Libyan leader is eventually ousted.

Senior military officers who have defected from Gaddafi are firm that this is a people's revolution, which should be finished by the people, and not the military. Colonel Nasser Busneina, one of several air force commanders to defect to the oppositionsays: "We don't want to turn the revolution into a military battle between two sides."

Experts agree Gaddafi still commands the loyalty of sufficient numbers of troops, among them militias and mercenaries, to inflict huge damage on Libya's population.

In Benghazi, opposition forces have formed a military council, the first step towards creating a unified force capable of challenging Gaddafi. But so far, at least, there are no formal plans to march on the capital.

- Independent