Rebels shoot down plane

THE bodies of the two airmen were sprawled face down in the sand, the molten core of their wrecked jet engine still glowing beside them.

Just over an hour before, this grim jumble of metal that lay strewn across the Libyan desert was a Russian-made fighter jet.

Now it was the first surface-to-air kill of the rebel militias massing westwards along the Gulf of Sidra, hell-bent on going all the way to Tripoli.
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''First there were helicopters that came to take a look over the area, to see what we were doing,'' said witness Lamin Marharj. ''Then they sent the aircraft about two hours later to bomb and attack us.''

A balding man in his mid-50s with a neatly trimmed pepper-and-salt beard, Marharj looked more like the local sage than a freshly enlisted revolutionary.

The area he spoke of was Ras Lanuf, an outpost of the Sirte Oil Company that serves as one of the largest oil terminals in Africa, where forces loyal to besieged dictator Muammar Gaddafi had just staged yet another of their enigmatic retreats.

How can it be that a fighting force so well equipped as Gaddafi's troops is losing so much ground so quickly to such a bedraggled bunch of revolutionaries known collectively as the shabab, the Arabic word for ''the youth''.

That the shabab managed to shoot down the Sukhoi Su-24 seemed remarkable enough given their inexperience with the weapons they are handling.

But according to Maharj, as the fighter-jet made a first pass over Ras Lanuf, and then a second, a young man simply picked up a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, took aim and fired, scoring a direct hit.

At the site of downed plane, in a shallow valley known as Swadi Wadi al-Haj, about two kilometres south of the main highway in a direct line with the Ras Lanuf airport, the young men who had gathered to inspect the smoking debris were seized with excitement, firing semi-automatic rifles into the air instead of talking.

''Gaddafi, halas [finished],'' said a young mannamed Adel and who had travelled to Ras Lanuf from Benghazi on Saturday to join the fighting.

''Tomorrow - Sirte,'' he added, with rather more hope than authority.

Amid the fervour there was also a reverence for the two pilots, whose bodies were quickly covered with blankets.

Exactly how many Libyan-born men are fighting to suppress this popular uprising is unclear, but on the ground there is an inordinate inclination among the rebels to attribute the men they see to other nationalities.



Time and again, witnesses to various battles and skirmishes attribute foreign features to the men fighting against them.

They are either black or speak unfamiliar languages.

In the case of the downed aviators, after one rebel made a close examination of their skin and hair colour, he declared them to be of Far Eastern origin.

''Very short, their skin is so soft, and their hair is black. These are not Libyan men,'' the man said. The others nodded in agreement.

Back on the highway, behind the airport landing strip, Ras Lanuf's vast oil terminal stood partly veiled by the dust of a mild sandstorm.

Its gates wide open, empty of people, the terminal had a phantom-like feel as its motors hummed away, ignorant of the surrounding chaos. A few kilometres west, at the roadhouse which serves as a gateway to Ras Lanuf's residential district, a crowd of 200 shabab had established a kind of local military revolutionary headquarters.

Surely no set-designer could have arranged such an image of a rebellion in action.

Young men stood around chatting between stacked boxes of ammunition, cheerfully munching on tuna-filled bread rolls.

Others decided that gathering around the anti-aircraft guns to sing triumphant songs mocking Gaddafi and his sons was a better way to go, punctuating the chorus by firing off a couple of deafeningly loud rounds.

If supplying the shabab with life's essentials seems like a logistic nightmare, it hasn't turned that way thus far.

At every checkpoint along the highway, bottled water is piled high alongside abundant food packages. Lorries are still making their petrol deliveries on time, and the electricity is still running.

''It's as if the termites have been eating this regime from inside out for decades but no one really knew it,'' said Abdelmola Fahry, 33, a paediatrician from the city of Benghazi who was on hand to provide medical assistance to anyone who needed it.

''That's the only way I have been able to explain all this to myself, how easy it all seems.

''It's so surprising because no one has trusted anyone enough to be able to talk about all this in the past, yet now we are all trusting each other in battle like we are brothers. I don't believe it, what I'm seeing.''

Whether or not the eventual fightback from Gaddafi is coming remains impossible to tell.

Amid all the rumours swirling around the country, the most consistent appears to be that Gaddafi lacks the support to crush the uprising.

Yet as the events in Zawiyah, west of Tripoli, over the weekend showed, Gaddafi is prepared to use brutal force when he wants to.

''Yesterday I saw about 60 tanks belonging to the Gaddafi people on this hill,'' said the man who drove me to Ras Lanuf on Saturday pointing to the horizon. ''Where have they gone?''