Gadhafi Battles to Hang On

Associated Press

Libyan rebels claimed control in Benghazi Monday as forces loyal to the regime continued to battle in Tripoli.

Libya's Col. Moammar Gadhafi violently crushed protests raging across his country Monday—and his armed forces loosed mercenary soldiers upon the capital to shoot protesters, witnesses said—as military, police and diplomats abandoned government posts and swaths of the country's east fell under control of antiregime forces.

Protests spilled into the capital, the western city of Tripoli, where Col. Gadhafi had long spread Libya's oil wealth generously and where he enjoyed his greatest support. Demonstrators who started their anti-regime protests last week in the country's east, a cradle of anti-Gadhafi activism, had taken control of the city of Benghazi there, witnesses said.

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Associated Press

In this video image broadcast on Libyan state television early Tuesday, Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi is shown.

The events mark the first time that uprisings roiling the broader Middle East have destabilized a major oil-producing state, threatening to add the Libyan strongman to the list of autocratic leaders ousted since the beginning of the year.

In an interview broadcast on Libyan state television early Tuesday morning, a tired, defiant looking Col. Gadhafi dispelled media rumors he had left the country. "I am in Tripoli, not in Venezuela. Do not believe these channels—they are dogs." He was shown emerging from a car, holding a white umbrella. It wasn't clear whether the interview was live or recorded.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Monday appealed for an end to the "unacceptable bloodshed" in Libya. "We join the international community in strongly condemning the violence in Libya," she said in a statement. The State Department ordered its embassy staff out of Tripoli.

A senior U.S. official briefed on Libya said, "It's a deteriorating situation, and you can't rule out at this stage a civil war." The United Nations Security Council plans to meet at 9 a.m. Tuesday to discuss the situation in Libya, according to a U.S. official.

Tripoli residents reported Monday that pro-Gadhafi troops, including what appeared to be battalions of foreign fighters, were being ferried to different parts of the city in helicopters. There were widespread reports that these and other government-friendly forces fired live rounds at protesters in the capital, as the Libyan response far exceeded the violence of other clashes across the region.

Libyan deputy foreign minister Khalid Kaim, in an interview Monday night with the Al Jazeera news channel, denied reports that foreign mercenaries were working in Libya.

Col. Gadhafi's support dissolved on multiple fronts Monday. In the east, residents of several cities said government security forces had withdrawn from the streets to their bases, for now ceding all or parts of cities to protesters.

In Baida, close to Libya's border with Egypt, witnesses said local police turned their guns on the army's second brigade after it deployed inside the city and fired live rounds at protesters. The local police's flip forced the surprised army forces to withdraw to the airport on the city's outskirts, witnesses said.

A Libyan man who identified himself as an army spokesman told Al Jazeera news by telephone late Monday that military officers had issued a statement urging their colleagues to join the protests against the government. He said the statement called on soldiers "to march to Tripoli and overthrow" Col. Gadhafi.

The speaker's rank and military division were unclear, as were the number of officers who had signed. Early Tuesday, Libyan television called police and military to return to their stations.

Libya's ambassador to the U.S., Ali Aujali, formally broke with Col. Gadhafi on Monday and called for him to step down. The deputy head of Libya's delegation to the United Nations, meanwhile, said he had stopped taking orders from the government and is asking the international community to enforce a no-fly zone over Libya's airspace so it couldn't bring in more mercenaries.

Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's four-decade-old rule appeared in increasing jeopardy on Monday as anti-government protests reached the capital of Tripoli for the first time. Reuters' Jon Decker reports.

Amateur footage shows protests spreading to Libya's capital city while Gaddafi's son called on the nation to work with the regime to "create a new Libya".

"The information that we are getting is that the regime is killing whomever goes out on the streets," the Libyan U.N. official, Omar al Dabashi, told the British Broadcasting Corp.'s World Service. "He [Col. Gadhafi] has clearly declared a genocide against his own people."

On Monday afternoon, two Libyan Air Force Mirage jet fighters flew to Malta, and Maltese online websites, citing local officials, said the pilots had claimed political asylum in the small Mediterranean nation. The pilots told local authorities they had escaped to Malta after refusing orders to bomb protesters in Libya's eastern city of Benghazi, the country's second-largest and a center of protests, according to Times of Malta.

Maltese officials couldn't be immediately reached to confirm these reports.

Seif al-Gaddafi, the son of the president, late Monday denied widespread reports that Libyan aircraft had opened fire on civilians. In a statement broadcast on state television, he said there had been air strikes away from residential areas and targeting weapons warehouses outside of Tripoli, according to the BBC, which was monitoring Libyan state television.

U.S. officials said Libya is potentially explosive because it is essentially a conservative tribal society that has been forcibly integrated by Col. Gadhafi's security forces since he took over in 1969.

During Italian colonial times, the country was ruled as three autonomous states, with the east and the city of Benghazi largely in charge of its own affairs. If Col. Gadhafi is deposed, these officials said, many Libyans will likely revert to their clan or geographic affinities.

"People identify with their clans, particularly as you go further into Libya's hinterland," said a former U.S. official who worked closely with Col. Gadhafi. "Historically it's been difficult to unify them."

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The Warfala tribe, one of the largest among Libya's population of 6.4 million, announced Sunday it was throwing its heft behind the protesters.

Amid concerns that the turmoil could curtail global oil supplies, Brent crude at one point Monday topped $105 a barrel, its highest level in 2½ years. A leader of a tribal group opposed to Mr. Gadhafi increased market jitters when he said government opponents could sabotage oil production if the government doesn't stop the attacks.

Libya produces 1.8 million barrels of oil daily, and its 41 billion barrels of proven reserves represent more than 3% of global supplies.

Since Col. Gadhafi reconciled with the West in 2003 and shut down the country's nuclear program, Libya has also been a major growth market for Western oil companies. The unrest threatens to undo years of effort by companies that have courted Mr. Gadhafi in the face of heavy political criticism.

On Monday, Wintershall, the oil and gas exploration arm of Germany's BASF AG and one of the largest operators in Libya, announced it was shutting around 100,000 barrels a day of output.

Libya has barred journalists from reporting on the events. The group Human Rights Watch said it had confirmed 233 deaths during the uprising so far, but witnesses and internationally based opposition groups estimated the toll was far higher.

Moammar Gadhafi's Libya

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Libya Protests Intensify

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Calls placed to cell phones within the country were largely disrupted Monday. Several residents described their country's events by Internet phone.

Libyan protests that began last week escalated dramatically Saturday. Fierce fighting raged in Benghazi, Libya's second city, on the country's northeast coast after residents finished burying an early victim of the protests. As they marched from the graveyard and neared an army base in downtown Benghazi, soldiers opened fire with machine guns, according to several residents.

Benghazi's residents said some neighborhoods of the city had been consumed by full-fledged urban warfare between protesters and pro-government forces. Residents said pro-Gadhafi loyalists driving around in cars fired rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns in the streets.

Protests sprang up on the outskirts of Tripoli for the first time Sunday, say some of these residents. Col. Gadhafi's forces moved quickly to counter them, witnesses said.

Protesters who were in Green Square, the site of Sunday's mass protests in the capital, say uniformed soldiers opened fire on the crowds there, which numbered in the thousands. Waleed, a resident of Tripoli who was at the square Sunday, said the crowds were mostly men under 30 years of age. In the late afternoon, gun shots rang out within the crowd, he said. He said a friend saw two men standing next to him shot in the chest and killed.

"No one could tell where the bullets where coming from. Bullets were flying in the air and bodies were falling," Waleed said.

A doctor who was working at Tripoli's Central Hospital emergency room Sunday night said the hospital operated on 40 people between into the early hours Monday morning, all suffering from gunshot wounds. The hospital received bodies of 12 more people who had died on route to the emergency room, all with gunshot wounds to their heads, neck or chest, the doctor said, adding that many of the casualties were from the area around Green Square.

On Monday morning at around 3 a.m., emergency-room operations at the Central Hospital stopped because the doctors ran out of vital medication. The doctor said they had to turn ambulances away and have them take wounded people to other, smaller hospitals in the city.

The violence, which included protestors setting fire to some government buildings, continued into the night. Col. Gadhafi's special forces patrolled the city along with what appeared to be the foreign troops, several residents said by telephone.

Mr. Gadhafi's 42-year reign has veered wildly between violent extremes and bewildering farce. When the then-27-year-old army captain grabbed power from King Idris in a 1969 coup, few people could have predicted he would become one of the world's longest-lasting and most recognizable leaders. His eccentric and radical outbursts have angered and astonished Western leaders.

Mr. Gadhafi's support for Palestinian terrorists in 1986 prompted President Ronald Reagan to describe him as the "mad dog of the Middle East." By 2009, after a deal in which he revealed his country's nuclear program, his relations with the West had thawed far enough to allow him to visit New York, where he camped in a Bedouin tent and delivered an off-the-cuff, 94-minute harangue against imperialism to the United Nations General Assembly.

Col. Gadhafi's at-times eccentric international profile aside, it is the corruption, inefficiency and autocracy of his regime that has driven a popular uprising against it.

Uprising in the Middle East

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Regional Upheaval

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The country's eastern half has a long history of resistance to outsiders and of friction with Col. Gadhafi's government in Tripoli. Until Col. Gadhafi seized control, power was focused in the east. Benghazi was the seat of the monarchy. The new regime made Tripoli its capital, and Libya's center of gravity shifted.

Although Libya's main oil fields and export facilities were in the east, Col. Gadhafi funneled most of the country's rapidly growing wealth to the western provinces.

"Gadhafi deliberately didn't put much money into the east and it was left to stagnate and grow very dilapidated," said Charles Gurdon, a Libya expert and managing director of Menas Consulting. "It led to lots of opposition, some Islamist and some not."

Over the past two decades, most of the opposition to Col. Gadhafi's rule has emerged around Benghazi, including the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group which attempted to assassinate the Libyan leader in 1996. The current unrest traces its roots back to an uprising by student Islamists in the 1990s that Col. Gadhafi viciously suppressed. He deployed the army's feared second brigade, commanded by one of his sons, Khamis, against the students. Many who weren't killed in the mayhem were thrown in jail, many of them in Tripoli's Abu Salim Prison.

About a year later, in 1996, prisoners at Abu Salim, many of whom were from Benghazi, launched an uprising. A regime bombardment left 1,200 prisoners dead, according to Human Rights Watch. The "Abu Salim massacre" has since been a rallying cry for activists and opposition in Libya and a thorn in the regime's side.

The protests now shaking the country first flared outside Benghazi's courthouse on Feb. 15 after security forces arrested two outspoken members of the families of victims of the Abu Salim incident in 1996, as well as a human-rights lawyer, pushing their demands for compensation from the government, according to human-rights activists.

—Jay Solomon and Adam Entous in Washington and Leila Hatoum in Dubai contributed to this article.

Write to Margaret Coker at margaret.coker@wsj.com and Charles Levinson at charles.levinson@wsj.com
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