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Incident

Gaddafi forces shell Libya’s Misrata, 10 killed

10 June 2011 20:45 (UTC +04:00)

Baku â€“ APA. Forces loyal to Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi shelled the rebel-controlled town of Misrata on Friday, killing at least 10 people, APA reports quoting â€œReutersâ€.
A Reuters journalist saw the bodies at the hospital in the besieged port city and heard the barrage strike.
Pressing ahead with a campaign to help end Gaddafi’s rule, NATO warplanes pummeled a town west of the capital Tripoli despite unmet calls from the United States and Britain for more allies to share the logistical burden of the bombing missions.
Russia, which has voiced misgivings over the use of foreign military force and has extensive commercial interests in Libya, wants to mediate reconciliation between Tripoli and the rebels.
The latter, struggling against Gaddafi’s fighters, were promised more than $1.1 billion in aid on Thursday by Western and Arab powers convened in Abu Dhabi -- though the donors also demanded details on how a post-Gaddafi government might work.
In already war-ravaged Misrata, a Reuters journalist counted 10 bodies in a hospital following heavy shelling by Libyan troops to the west. At least 10 other people were wounded.
The artillery barrage came close to the hospital, though the building is far from the front lines.
Rebels said pro-Gaddafi forces had also shelled their positions in the Western Mountains region on Thursday night, and accused NATO of not doing enough to stop them.
"They (Gaddafi forces) are shelling Zintan with Grad missiles," said rebel spokesman Abdulrahman, referring to a town 160 km (100 miles) southwest of Tripoli. "There have been no NATO air strikes for a week."
A second rebel spokesman, Juma Ibrahim, said the towns of Yafran and Nalut had also been struck and that Gaddafi’s forces were massing near the Tunisian border to try to retake the Wazin crossing from the rebels.
A Reuters journalist in Tripoli heard a loud explosion in the capital just after midnight, a common time for NATO strikes, but there were no further blasts later on Friday morning.
DEADLOCK
Gaddafi troops and rebels have been deadlocked for weeks between the eastern towns of Ajdabiyah and the Gaddafi-held oil town of Brega. Rebels also control the western city of Misrata and the range of Western Mountains near the Tunisia border.
The rebels, who rose up against Gaddafi five months ago as political upheaval coursed through the Arab world, lack military hardware and order but enjoy widespread sympathy abroad.
Gaddafi’s alleged excesses have helped. At the United Nations, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) said this week its investigators had found evidence linking Gaddafi to a policy of raping opponents, including issuing of Viagra-like drugs to troops to encourage mass rapes.
The Libyan leader says the rebels are Islamist militants and foreign intervention is a front for a grab at the country’s oil. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, appearing at the Abu Dhabi meeting of the 22-nation Libya contact group, said talks were under way with people close to Gaddafi that had raised the "potential" for a transition of power.
She did not elaborate on the discussions but said: "There is not any clear way forward yet."
Despite the new aid pledges from France, Italy and Turkey, rebels voiced frustration at the pace of the intervention.
"Our people are dying... So my message to our friends is that I hope they walk the walk," rebel Oil and Finance Minister Ali Tarhouni said.
Rebels hosted the first foreign leader at their Benghazi stronghold on Thursday -- Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade, who offered to ease Gaddafi, his former African Union ally, from power.
"It is in your own interest ... that you leave power in Libya and never dream of coming back," said Wade.
Another visitor to Benghazi was Mikhail Margelov, Russia’s Africa envoy, who on Friday said he would fly to Tripoli as soon as NATO provided a corridor through its Libyan no-fly zone.
Margelov held out hope for a Libyan reconciliation, though he said Gaddafi had "lost the moral right to play a role in Libya’s political life in the future by bombing his own people." [nLDE7590FS]
NATO STRAINS
Libyan state television reported on Thursday that the NATO-led alliance had hit civilian and military targets in the town of Zuwarah, 120 km (75 miles) west of Tripoli, after resuming strikes in the capital that had ebbed since March.
Another rebel spokesman said 22 people had been killed in fighting with pro-Gaddafi forces over the last week and asked why attack helicopters had not been deployed to support them.
"The situation is a stalemate -- both sides are adopting hit-and-run tactics," rebel spokesman Abdelsalam said from Misrata. "NATO has to change something."
NATO officials say the mission is already strained and a meeting of the organization’s defense chiefs in Brussels this week showed little appetite for stepping up operations, despite the resilience of Gaddafi’s decades-old regime.
Citing shortcomings in Libya and in Afghanistan, another NATO theater of war, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said on Friday the alliance risked becoming irrelevant soon if European partners did not boost their military spending and commitment.
A memo leaked to the Financial Times suggested U.S. operations in Libya had cost $664 million by mid-May, putting it on course to exceed the $750 million that Gates last month projected would be spent this year.
Rear Admiral Philippe Coindreau, who heads French operations over Libya, said that the strikes against Gaddafi’s forces were increasingly wearing them down and that helicopters would "accelerate" this attrition.
The alliance says the bombing aims to protect civilians from the Libyan military, which crushed popular protests in February.