Gadhafi's Death in Perspective
October 20, 2011
Rebel fighters killed former Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi on Oct. 20 outside the town of Sirte. His body was then brought back to Misurata, where it was filmed being dragged through the streets. Several close aides, including family members, have been reported killed or captured as well.
Gadhafi’s death is symbolically important for the rebels, but the fall of Sirte is even more significant for the effect it will have on the future stability of Libya. With the final holdout of the pro-Gadhafi resistance overtaken, the National Transitional Council (NTC) can now move to form a transitional government. But multiple armed groups across the country will demand a significant stake in that government, which will have serious implications for the future unity of the people who heretofore were referred as the Libyan opposition.
Gadhafi’s death is symbolically important for the rebels, but the fall of Sirte is even more significant for the effect it will have on the future stability of Libya. With the final holdout of the pro-Gadhafi resistance overtaken, the National Transitional Council (NTC) can now move to form a transitional government. But multiple armed groups across the country will demand a significant stake in that government, which will have serious implications for the future unity of the people who heretofore were referred as the Libyan opposition.
Though the Benghazi-based NTC has been widely recognized in the international community as the sole legitimate representative of the Libyan people, this has long since ceased to be the case in the eyes of many Libyans. The NTC is one of several political forces in the country. Since the rebel forces entered Tripoli on Aug. 21, there has been a steady increase of armed groups hailing from places such as Misurata, Zentan, Tripoli and even eastern Libya itself that have questioned the authority of leading NTC members.
These groups have been occupying different parts of the capital for two months now, despite calls by the NTC (and some of the groups themselves) to vacate. They also have been participating in the sieges of cities in which pro-Gadhafi remnants continued to hold out after the fall of Tripoli. Throughout this period, the NTC has repeatedly delayed the formation of a transitional government, in recent weeks citing the ongoing fight against Gadhafi as the reason. NTC leaders said that once the war was finally over, the official “liberation” of Libya would be declared and a transitional government would be formed. The fall of Sirte means this moment is at hand.
With so many armed groups operating in Tripoli and elsewhere in Libya, a peaceful resolution to the question of who should take power is unlikely. The main groupings come from Benghazi, Misurata, Zentan and Tripoli, but there are other, smaller militias as well that will want to ensure they are represented in the new Libya. The divide is not simply geographic but also exists between Islamists and secularists as well as between Berbers and Arabs.
The shape of the new Libya is highly uncertain, but what is clear is that the NTC is not going to simply take control where Gadhafi left off. Certain members of its leadership may play a key role in any transitional government, but not without serious compromises or, even more likely, violence occurring in the process. Pro-Gadhafi tribal elements in the last region to fall to rebel fighters also will be a potential source of violence in the coming months, as they will fight to make sure they are not left out of the future power structure.
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GADDAFI DEAD—–
This is from the Gateway Pundit...VERY GRAPHIC!
This is the image they are showing on Arab television.
The image was captured on a mobile phone camera by French photographer Philippe Desmazes for Getty.
The image was captured on a mobile phone camera by French photographer Philippe Desmazes for Getty.
He was reportedly shot once in the head and once in both legs.
Former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi died of wounds suffered on Thursday as fighters overran his hometown Sirte.
He sure looks dead.
(Graphic Video)
(Graphic Video)
Gaddafi reportedly shouted, “Don’t shoot!” before he was killed.
TIME Live reported Gaddifi was captured and killed today in Libya.
UPDATE: GRUESOME VIDEO- Gaddafi captured alive, beaten bloody and shot dead by militants.
Mumammar Gaddafi, son Mo'tassim killed; dictator's body placed in mosque
SIRTE (LIBYA): Muammar Gaddafi is dead, Libya's new leaders said, killed by fighters who overran his home town and final bastion on Thursday. His bloodied body was stripped and displayed around the world from cellphone video. Later the body of the fallen dictator has been taken to Misrata where it is placed in a mosque.
Senior officials in the interim government, which ended his 42-year rule two months ago but had laboured to subdue thousands of diehard loyalists, said his death would allow a declaration of "liberation" after eight months of bloodshed.
"We confirm that all the evils, plus Gaddafi, have vanished from this beloved country," Prime Minister Mahmoud Jibril said in Tripoli as the body was delivered, a prize of war, to Misrata, the city whose siege and suffering at the hands of Gaddafi's forces made it a symbol of the rebel cause.
"It's time to start a new Libya, a united Libya," Jibril added. "One people, one future." A formal declaration of liberation, that will set the clock ticking on a timeline to elections, would be made by Friday, he said later.
Western leaders, who had held off cautiously from comment until Jibril spoke, echoed his sentiments now that Gaddafi, a self-styled "king of kings" in Africa whom they had lately courted after decades of enmity, was dead at 69.
British Prime Minister David Cameron, who with French President Nicolas Sarkozy was an early sponsor of February's revolt in Benghazi, said: "People in Libya today have an even greater chance after this news of building themselves a strong and democratic future."
The new national flag, resurrected by rebels who forced Gaddafi from his capital Tripoli in August, filled streets and squares as jubilant crowds whooped for joy and fired in the air.
In Sirte, a one-time fishing village and Gaddafi's home town that grandiose schemes had styled a new "capital of Africa", fighters danced, brandishing a golden pistol they said they had taken from Gaddafi.
Accounts were hazy of his final hours, which also appeared to have cost the lives of senior aides. But top officials of the National Transitional Council, including Abdel Majid Mlegta, said he had died of wounds sustained in clashes.
Muammar Gaddafi killed in gunbattle
See photoOne possible description, pieced together from various sources, suggests that Gaddafi may have tried to break out of his final redoubt at dawn in a convoy of vehicles after weeks of dogged resistance. However, he was stopped by a NATO air strike and captured, possibly three or four hours later, after gun battles with NTC fighters who found him hiding in a drainage culvert.
NATO said its warplanes fired on a convoy near Sirte about 8:30 a.m. (0630 GMT), striking two military vehicles in the group, but could not confirm that Gaddafi had been a passenger.
Accounts from his enemies suggested his capture, and death soon after from wounds, may have taken place around noon.
One of Gaddafi's sons, heir-apparent Saif al-Islam, was at large, they believed. NTC official Mlegta told Reuters that he was surrounded after also trying to flee Sirte. Another son,Mo'tassim, whose arrest was announced earlier in the day, had been killed resisting his captors, Mlegta added.
He said that the elder Gaddafi had been wounded in both legs early in the morning as he tried to flee in the convoy which NATO warplanes attacked. "He was also hit in his head," he said. "There was a lot of firing against his group and he died."
There was no shortage of NTC fighters in Sirte claiming to have seen him die, though many accounts were conflicting. Libyan television carried video of two drainage pipes, about a metre across, where it said fighters had cornered a man who long inspired both fear and admiration around the world.
After February's uprising in the long discontented east of the country around Benghazi -- inspired by the Arab Spring movements that overthrew the leaders of neighbouring Tunisia andEgypt -- the revolt against Gaddafi ground slowly across the country before a dramatic turn saw Tripoli fall in August.
Muammar Gaddafi killed in gunbattle
LIBERATION
An announcement of final liberation was expected as the chairman of the NTC prepared to address the nation of six million. They now face the challenge of turning oil wealth once monopolised by Gaddafi and his clan into a democracy that can heal an array of tribal, ethnic and regional divisions he exploited.
The two months since the fall of Tripoli have tested the nerves of the motley alliance of anti-Gaddafi forces and their Western and Arab backers, who had begun to question the ability of the NTC forces to root out diehard Gaddafi loyalists in Sirte and a couple of other towns.
Gaddafi, wanted by the International Criminal Court on charges of ordering the killing of civilians, was toppled by rebel forces on Aug. 23, a week short of the 42nd anniversary of the military coup which brought him to power in 1969.
NTC fighters hoisted the red, black and green national flag above a large utilities building in the centre of a newly-captured Sirte neighbourhood and celebratory gunfire broke out among their ecstatic and relieved comrades.
Hundreds of NTC troops had surrounded the Mediterranean coastal town for weeks in a chaotic struggle that killed and wounded scores of the besieging forces and an unknown number of defenders.
NTC fighters said there were a large number of corpses inside the last redoubts of the Gaddafi troops. It was not immediately possible to verify that information.
The death of Gaddafi is a setback to campaigners seeking the full truth about the 1988 bombing over Lockerbie in Scotland of Pan Am flight 103 which claimed 270 lives, mainly Americans, and for which one of Gaddafi's agents was convicted.
"There is much still to be resolved and we may now have lost an opportunity for getting nearer the truth," said Jim Swire, the father of one of the Lockerbie victims.
Swire has never believed in the guilt of Abdel Basset al-Megrahi who was convicted of the bombing in 2001 and sent to serve a life sentence in a Scottish prison. Al-Megrahi was released and sent back to Libya in 2009 because he was thought to only have a few months to live.
"Although we have not a scrap of evidence that Gaddafi himself was involved in causing the Lockerbie atrocity, my take on that was that at least he would have known who was," Swire told Sky TV.
"I would have loved to see Gaddafi appear in front of the International Criminal Court both to answer charges against the gross treatment of his own people... and to hear what he knew about the Lockerbie atrocity."
'One Gaddafi son dead, another being surrounded NTC'
One of Muammar Gaddafi's sons, Mo'tassim, has been killed by fighters from Libya's NTC while another, Saif al-Islam, is trying to flee the fallen city of Sirte but is being surrounded, a senior NTC military official said on Thursday.
"Mo'tassim was killed by the fighters. He was trying to fight back and he was resisting them," National Transitional Council official Abdel Majid Mlegta told Reuters.
"Saif al-Islam is trying to flee Sirte in a small convoy. Our fighters are encircling them," he added.
