Revolutionary fighters struggled to regroup Saturday outside the Muammar Qadhafi loyalists’ stronghold of Bani Walid after being beaten back by fierce resistance from followers of the former ruler, temporarily quieting one battlefield while commanders leading a second offensive tried to open a new front into Col. Qadhafi’s tightly defended hometown.
There were no signs anti-Qadhafi forces planned a swift counter punch into Bani Walid, a mountain enclave about 150 km southeast of Tripoli. The fighters withdrew on Friday after facing withering sniper fire and shelling from loyalists units holding strategic positions above the valley entrance to the town.
“This may be the worst front Libya will see,” said fighter Osama Al-Fassi, who joined other former rebels gathered at a feed factory where they drank coffee and took target practice at plastic bottles. “I don’t think we will have orders to move in today.”
Meanwhile, more families fled the town. At least a dozen cars streamed out during the lull in the combat.
A 50-year-old civil servant leaving with his family, Ismail Mohammed, described the pro-Qadhafi forces as “too strong” inside Bani Walid and suggested a generational divide between young people strongly behind the uprising and older Libyans often more cautious about whether the revolutionary forces can bring stability.
“The youth wanted this revolution and sometimes you can’t control your own son,” he said.
The tough defence of the holdout bastions of Bani Walid and Sirte — on Libya’s central Mediterranean coast — displayed the firepower and resolve of the Qadhafi followers and indicated Libya’s new rulers may not easily break the back of regime holdouts. It also raised fears the country could face a protracted insurgency of the sort that has played out in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“The Qadhafi loyalists have so many weapons,” cried Maab Fatel, a 28-year-old revolutionary fighter on the front lines in Bani Walid on Friday.
“This battle is really crazy,” Mr. Fatel said, his uniform splattered with blood from carrying a wounded comrade.
Revolutionary forces began on Friday by streaming into Bani Walid but pulled back after intense fighting failed to dislodge pro-Qadhafi snipers and gunners from strategic positions. The two sides traded relentless mortar and rocket fire across a 500-meter-wide desert valley called Wadi Zeitoun that divides the town between north and south.
Mohaned Bendalla, a doctor at a field hospital in nearby Wishtata, said at least six revolutionary fighters were killed and more than 50 were wounded in Friday’s battles.
Inside the town, a radio station believed linked to one of Col. Qadhafi’s main propagandist kept up a steady stream of appeals to fight and rants that demonised the revolutionaries as traitors who did not honour Islamic values.
“These revolutionaries are fighting to drink and do drugs all the time and be like the West, dance all night,” the announcer claimed. “We are a traditional tribal society that refuses such things and must fight it.”
Ahmed Omar Bani, a military spokesman for Libya’s transitional government, dismissed such allegations, saying the revolutionary forces’ only goal was “to liberate our people.”
In Sirte — the second part of the twin offensives — Col. Qadhafi’s backers rained gunfire down from mosque minarets and high-rise buildings on fighters pushing into the city from the west on Friday. In the streets the two sides battered each other with high-calibre machine guns, rockets and rocket-propelled grenades.
Anti-Qadhafi commanders said on Saturday they were close to reaching a surrender accord with leaders of the Harawa region, some 80 km east of Sirte. If the Harawa deal is reached, it would open a new pathway into Sirte for revolutionary forces.
But Col. Qadhafi’s spokesman, Moussa Ibrahim, claimed loyalists are in no danger of losing the city.
“We have the ability to continue this resistance for months,” he said in a phone call Friday to Syrian-based Al-Rai TV , which has become the mouthpiece for the former regime.
The loyalists still hold a swath of Libya along the central coast and into the southern deserts more than three weeks after revolutionary fighters swept into Tripoli and drove out Col. Qadhafi. The whereabouts of the ousted leader and several of his sons remain unknown.
