Colonel Gaddafi’s Hat. Alex Crawford
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are now ready to be refilled with fresh pictures.
The doctor tells us the rebels are organizing food for us. Great. We haven’t eaten all day. We sit talking to them. It is difficult to get a sense of how many rebels there are as we stay in one room and people keep coming in and out – mostly to rubberneck the foreign journalists. They express their gratitude to us for being with them and talk about the battle. The men are all defectors, and most have been in the Gaddafi army for at least ten years. They seem to be around early to mid-thirties. I ask to see ID just out of interest and they produce their army identification cards with photos. They are Libyans and an example of the defectors we’ve heard about. I take pictures of them on my BlackBerry as we don’t want to run down our camera batteries. Also there is very little light and Martin doesn’t think any pictures he takes on his camera will be very clear. At this stage we are just thinking ‘conserve energy’. We have no idea what’s around the corner. The men seem friendly enough. Their clothes are grubby and worn, though. Most are wearing what look like very old army uniforms which haven’t seen a decent wash in quite some time. Their hair is straggly and, overall, they look like they have been living rough for a while. But they’re chirpy enough, answering my questions with good humour.
For them the turning point, they tell us, was when they were ordered to fire on civilians, fellow Libyans. They have little love for Gaddafi, whom they seem to think is quite mad, deranged. They ask about us, about Sky News. They assume I must be married to either Tim or Martin and are a little shocked when I say neither. But what does your husband think? How on earth does he feel about you working with men who are not even relatives? This would raise eyebrows among much of the Muslim population. Does he mind you going away so much? Have you children? Who looks after them? It is all a foreign world to them.
The food is taking so long and we are shattered. I think I am going to try to get some sleep because I know we will be up in a few hours and on the move again. I excuse myself and take off to the adjoining room and the big, double bed waiting there. I say to Martin and Tim: ‘There’s plenty of room. Please don’t sleep on the floor.’ Tim has absolutely no intention of sleeping on the floor, but it’s going to be very cosy with three of us on the bed. Martin decides to bite the bullet and take his chances with the rebels. He ends up in another room with a bed all to himself. Lucky devil. What our hosts make of this arrangement is anybody’s guess.
Later the doctor wakes us up when the food arrives. It’s past midnight. None of us feels much like eating now but the doctor is insistent. The rebels have gone to a lot of trouble. No is not an option. We struggle up and sleepily eat our way through a bowl full of rice and a red mixture with chunks of meat and pasta floating in it. It’s actually quite delicious. I never really got a clear explanation how they managed to rustle this up but it seemed to involve a bit of a journey and a fair amount of preparation given the time it took. We flop back to sleep as soon as we have bolted our food.
The rebels fire rockets throughout the night. It seems to be a message to the Gaddafi forces sitting outside the town – we’re not asleep and we’re not going anywhere. Don’t even think about attacking us.
Chapter Two
DAWN ATTACK
We’re woken before first light. The doctor is anxious to go. ‘We should start to make a move,’ he says. I am standing on the balcony of our room just waiting for the others when I see the red tracers of machine-gun fire on the horizon. I call Martin to get the camera. We’re all watching as there’s more – and then the explosion of a tanker. We see huge clouds of smoke rising from the resultant fire. The cloud is only about two to three miles away. ‘That’s near the hospital,’ the doctor says. ‘They are coming inside the town.’
I ring the office in London. ‘The Gaddafi forces are beginning an attack on Zawiya,’ I tell Kasia, the young news desk editor on duty. ‘Are you all right?’ she asks. Her voice is very concerned.
We need to get to ground level and out of here. We are fair-ground ducks here on the hotel’s seventh floor. We all run downstairs. In the foyer, we can see there is barely controlled panic. There are all sorts of men here. Some look like soldiers. Others are obviously civilians, wearing jeans and T-shirts.
We watch aghast as they rush around desperately preparing for battle. One offers me a flak jacket and a helmet. I put the helmet on, then realize it isn’t a spare one. It is his. I give it back. I can’t take his only protection and, besides, I don’t want to be mistaken for a rebel. The men are busy getting out weapons, unwrapping them and putting them together. There is such pandemonium that grenades are being dropped and rockets are rolling across the floor.
One man is busy giving a quick demonstration on how to fire an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade). He is bending down on one knee, holding the RPG launcher on his shoulder. He moves it around, then shows how to pull the trigger. The youngster who has been listening intently has straggly, curly hair and glasses. He is one of many who look like university students. It’s a lads’ army. The pupil says, ‘Allahu Akbar’, takes hold of the weapon and runs off to fight.
There is already firing outside and we can hear the tanks getting closer and closer. Some men are dragging anti-aircraft guns away, others are positioning machine-guns on the corner of the hotel. ‘Do you want to go to the mosque?’ one fighter asks us. I turn to Martin. ‘What do you think?’ He says: ‘Crawfie, Gaddafi’s troops aren’t going to respect a mosque.’ I know he’s right. We have reported on the Pakistan army storming a mosque and killing militants inside the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. ‘But we are definitely going to be hit if we stay here,’ I reply. It seems like the least worst option.
The man has a small combi van outside ready and waiting. We all pile in. It is just a short drive around the Square to the opposite end, where the small mosque is situated, but bullets are whistling around the van. We can see fires are already alight around the Square where rockets have landed. There are freshly dug graves of those rebels who have already died in the fighting on the grassy patch in the centre of the Square. The mosque is blaring out anti-Gaddafi rhetoric in between religious exhortations. It doesn’t look much like a safe haven. Outside there is a gaggle of people shouting, chanting, praying, calling on others to join them in the fight.
As we sprint out from the van into the mosque, I see straight away that they have turned one of the two small rooms inside into a field hospital. There are about three doctors dressed in green medical gowns waiting for casualties. They have three mobile beds already set up. That’s pretty much all they can fit inside the room.
The mosque is really small, one of the smallest I have ever been in. There is an open courtyard roughly four metres square. There is another small room about the same size opposite the medical room. We open the metal door and see there are already a couple of people inside sheltering – young boys, barely men. Bags of flour and sacks of wheat are propped up against the walls and cooking utensils piled up on top of them. It’s a storeroom. Right at the rear end of the courtyard, beyond these two rooms, is the praying area.
We don’t even have time to find a seat inside the storeroom before the first injured are brought into the mosque and, within minutes, more and more. The tiny clinic is very soon overwhelmed. The doctors have little equipment or medicines to treat the injured – saline drips, morphine, bandages seem to be all that is available. And the injuries are horrendous. There are men with the backs of their heads blown away, but they’re still conscious, muttering ‘Allahu Akbar’ as they are carried by friends. How does that happen? How can they still talk when their brains are exposed? How are they still conscious when I can see inside their skulls?
Martin and I are rushing around filming what we can, each with one camera, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to even cross the small courtyard. Bullets are pinging off the floor. We can see machine-guns firing just outside the mosque. We can hear the tanks so, so close now. The sound is deafening. The noise of battle is everywhere – above us, to the sides of us, behind us. And it’s all sorts of noises –