Colonel Gaddafi’s Hat. Alex Crawford
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has entered his chest. There are no medics in the ambulance, only two or three protesters who are trying to calm the man and urging the driver to go faster, faster.
The doors are flung open and there is a wave of noise. We tumble out of the back of the ambulance into a big crowd outside the hospital entrance. Among them are medics who pull the man onto a stretcher and he is whisked along inside to the emergency room. I’m surprised at how many people are in the hospital, how they have managed to get here so quickly. It is packed, packed with the injured, packed with mourners. Everywhere Martin points his camera, there are men with bullet wounds, wounds all down their backs, bullet holes in their arms, in their chests. Some of them look like pellets. One man lying on his stomach has dozens of pellet holes all over his shoulders and his back. A nurse comes up to us. Another woman at last. ‘This is Gaddafi. Look how he treats his people. This is Gaddafi!’ she is shouting.
Men are crying, hugging each other. There is no room to move anywhere. There are so many people, either injured or tending to the injured, but also worried friends and relatives and volunteers who just want to help in whatever way they can. Everyone is in a state of shock. One doctor in particular starts talking to us, taking us from ward to ward, helping us communicate with the patients. ‘Look at these wounds,’ he says. He is furious. ‘This is a shoot-to-kill policy. They are not trying to frighten people. They are trying to kill them.’
It looks like that to us too. We’re taken all around the hospital to see the random casualties – a man who was going to work, a woman out shopping, a child sitting on the doorstep of his home – all sprayed with bullets, shot by snipers, hit by Gaddafi troops. The intensive care unit is full too. Many of the injured have been shot through the head.
The doctor who has been taking a keen interest in us asks where we are going to stay. He is reluctant to give us his full name and asks us to call him Dr M. He is not alone in feeling wary about being seen on television and being tracked down by the Libyan secret police or the military at some later date. ‘It’s too late to try to leave Zawiya now,’ he says. ‘Even I am not going to my home. You’ll never get through the checkpoints. Do you have transport?’ Oh my God, the taxi driver! Where is he? Tim has joined us at the hospital by now and has been asking around for the taxi driver. No one has seen him. There aren’t any taxis at all in town right now.
Everything is not good.
The doctor says there is a hotel where we can stay. A hotel? Really? ‘Yes, it’s quite good. It is four-star. You will be safe there.’ He tells us the Gaddafi forces sometimes come into the hospital to fetch their wounded and dead. We don’t like the sound of that. The hotel it is, then. He says we’ll be taken by some of the fighters. It sounds unbelievably appealing. By now a few of the rebel fighters have heard about the foreign journalists in the hospital and have made themselves known to us. One is a big lad who talks with a slight American accent but who is half Irish. He is only 19 but seems to be well connected with the rebel ‘leadership’. He says his name is Tareg. His father is Libyan and his mother Irish. He is Muslim and has been schooled at the International School of Martyrs in Tripoli. His family also has a home in Wales. He tells us they have set up a ten-man council in Zawiya, headed by men from the military who have defected. But so far I have not seen any soldiers. They all seem to be civilians, all ordinary people from Zawiya who have found themselves caught up in a civil war.
‘We will arrange an escort,’ says Dr M. He tells us he lives in Canada, works as a surgeon there and only came back to Libya for a break. He has a family home here just outside the centre of Zawiya but he came to the hospital to help out when he heard there were lots of casualties. Now he seems to be running the place and looking after us to boot. For him it has become the most intense of working holidays. He seems alert but mellow, very at ease here and totally unfazed. He is with his young son, who is about 17 and wants to be a doctor too.
We’re taken outside. In the hospital car park, for the first time, we see regulation soldiers. They are wearing uniforms – filthy dirty uniforms admittedly – and they’re carrying weapons. There are about three or four of them. OK, I’m thinking, now this looks like the rebel ‘army’ we’ve been hearing about. With our new escorts, we suddenly feel emboldened. They have vehicles arranged and we set off in convoy through the city centre towards Martyrs’ Square. The doctor is following with his son in their car. I am asking them how much control they have of Zawiya. ‘We control virtually the whole city,’ the driver says. ‘They [Gaddafi forces] are mostly on the outskirts.’
As we near the Square, we can see roadblocks have been built by the rebels. There are military vehicles being used as obstacles along the road. There are a few armed men manning the checkpoints but, as soon as they see the rebel soldiers, we are waved through. In the Square there are many more men, some of them chanting. There are a few soldiers among them. The crowd we were with earlier must have retreated here. There is also a small mosque in the Square and the mosque’s loudspeakers are being used to rally the crowd and fill them with courage. Some people are holding hand-written messages scribbled on cardboard which say: ‘No Al Kayda here.’ It is in response to Gaddafi’s claim that the rebellion is promoted by Al Qaeda fighters high on what he called hallucinogenic drugs.
At the far corner of the Square there is an eight-storey building with barricades around it and armed men at the two side entrances. ‘The hotel?’ I ask with a sinking feeling. Yes, it’s the hotel. But the Zawiya Jewel Hotel has been taken over by the rebels and now it’s not so much a hotel as the rebels’ military headquarters. This is not good. We might not have been all that safe at the hospital but we’re going to be staying in the one place that Gaddafi’s soldiers will be pointing their tanks and guns at.
The hotel feels largely empty. There are lots of dark corridors and there seems to be very little electricity. We’re taken up to the seventh floor. They’ve opened up all the interconnecting doors so the rooms melt into one. The balcony overlooks the Square, with the mosque on the left. One of the soldiers closes the curtains and tells us to keep them closed if we are going to use any lights at all. ‘Snipers,’ he says. Tim and I decide we have to find out where the exits are. We need to know how to get out in a hurry if the Gaddafi forces attack. We need to know where to run to, how to disappear if we have to; that’s if we get a chance.
It’s dark now and even Dr M is looking worried. ‘I think we go as soon as it is light in the morning. You can come with me,’ he says. ‘I will take you to my house.’ Thank you. Thank you, good doctor. That sounds like the only plan.
Tim and I go downstairs to familiarize ourselves with the layout of the hotel. When we get to the basement we find the only back door is locked and, worse still, in the room next to the exit there is a man lying on a stretcher. He is attached to a drip but is being guarded by another man who is armed with an AK-47. The man lying down is wearing the green fatigues of the Gaddafi military. I think this is what they call the worst-case scenario: we are not only in the rebels’ headquarters but they have prisoners here too, prisoners whom the Gaddafi regime may well want to try to rescue. Or eliminate. The captive is not responding to questions anyway. I ask where he is from, how he came to be taken prisoner and what he was doing. But no, he will only reply there has been a mistake, he is not a sniper, he was only trying to defend himself. The rebel guarding him is pretty exasperated with the answers too. ‘He just keeps saying the same thing over and over,’ he tells me. ‘He is a liar.’ I quickly take a picture of him on my BlackBerry but the rebels are unhappy at this so I stop.
We go back upstairs and tell Martin the news. Little fazes Martin. He is a six-foot-three Irishman from a large family, brought up in County Down during the quaintly titled ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland. He grew up in a mixed area where Protestants and Catholics jostled each other and even children were accustomed to the place being mortared and were not surprised by the attempts to blow up the British Army stationed there. Martin is bursting with natural charm and has a keen sense of humour. He’s a seasoned cameraman who has been to a host of war zones, including Sudan, Zimbabwe, Iraq, Bosnia, Georgia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and many others. At this very moment he’s more worried about power. He has a limited amount of juice in his camera’s battery, and we haven’t brought chargers for our ‘day’ trip. No batteries mean no camera and no pictures