How trapped Libyan leader spent last days

By PETER BOUCKAERT

When protests against the rule of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi broke out in Libya in February last year, Government security forces responded by opening fire on the protesters.

As initially peaceful protests transformed into a fully-fledged armed uprising against his 42-year rule, Gaddafi pledged to chase down the “cockroaches” and “rats” that had taken up arms against him “inch by inch, room by room, home by home, person by person.”

A brutal conflict began, with pro-Gaddafi forces indiscriminately shelling civilian areas, arresting thousands of suspected dissidents, holding many in secret detention, and carrying out summary executions.

 But after a North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) military intervention and eight months of intense conflict, it was Gaddafi and his inner circle who found themselves cornered and isolated in his hometown, the coastal city of Sirte. Moving from one abandoned home to the next, they tried to avoid fierce shelling by militias from Misrata, Benghazi and elsewhere who had surrounded the area. This is the story of those final days before a doomed escape attempt on the morning of October 20, 2011, involving a convoy of some 50 heavily armed vehicles.

Final moments

Reconstructing Muammar Gaddafi’s final days is difficult: Most of the trusted confidants and bodyguards in the small circle around him during his days as a hunted fugitive were killed in the attempt to escape from Sirte.

However, one close Gaddafi confidant survived the escape attempt: Mansour Dhao, a senior security official and the head of the People’s Guard.

Human Rights Watch and the New York Times located him in a detention facility in Misrata two days after the fighting that left Gaddafi dead and were allowed to interview him at length in private. Dhao offered a detailed account of Gaddafi’s desperate final days.

While HRW cannot independently confirm the details of Dhao’s account, they are consistent with those given by others who lived through the same experience in Sirte’s District Two but were not in direct contact with the deposed leader.

Gaddafi and his closest associates remained in the capital, Tripoli, until it fell to the armed opposition on August 28, last year. They fled in different convoys to various destinations.

Khamis Gaddafi, a son of Muammar who commanded the elite 32nd ‘Khamis’ Brigade of the Libyan military, was killed on August 29 as he fled Tripoli, in what is believed to have been a Nato air strike on his convoy. Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, fled to Bani Walid, a loyalist town in Misrata. He told HRW he was lightly wounded in an October 17 Nato airstrike on his convoy in Wadi Zamzam, as he tried to flee towards Sirte.

He was captured on November 19 near Libya’s southern border. A third son, Mutassim, who served as national security advisor and commanded the troops responsible for the eastern front in Libya’s civil war, was already based in Sirte at the time of the fall of Tripoli and he remained there.

Muammar Gaddafi himself fled to Sirte, where People’s Guard head Mansour Dhao joined him. Others with him, according to Dhao, included Ezzedin al-Hanshiri, the head of Gaddafi’s personal guard, Hamad Massoud, Gaddafi’s personal driver and a number of bodyguards.

Abdullah Sanussi, Gaddafi’s intelligence chief, briefly joined Gaddafi and his closest associates in Sirte immediately after the fall of Tripoli, but then traveled to Sebha, 500km to the south, to inform his wife that their son had been killed. He did not return.

Top associates

Mutassim Gaddafi, who remained in charge of the military defense of Sirte, did not stay with his father and other senior officials, but came to see them regularly.

Muammar Gaddafi and his senior associates originally stayed in the centre of Sirte, but as the fighting and shelling of the city intensified, they were forced to constantly move houses. Dhao described their  desperate circumstances as the militia fighters closed in on them:

“We first stayed in the city centre, in apartment buildings, but then the mortars started to reach there and we were forced to leave the apartment blocks and enter smaller neighborhoods in different parts of the city.

Finally, we moved to District Number Two (a neighborhood on the western outskirts of Sirte). We didn’t have a reliable food supply anymore; unfortunately our food supply was weak. There was no medicine.

We had difficulty getting water. The water tanks were targeted or maybe they were just hit in random shelling. Living was very hard. We just ate pasta and rice. We didn’t even have bread. Just about every Libyan house has some food stocks, so we used what we found in the houses we were staying in. “[Muammar Gaddafi] spent most of his time reading the Koran and praying. His communications with the world was cut off. There was no communication, no television, nothing.

No news. Maybe we could use the Thuraya [satellite phone] and get some news, from al-Rai, Russia Today,

BBC or France 24 – I mean, call people who watched those channels. We had no duties, we were just between sleeping and being awake. Nothing to do. The supervision of the battle was done by Mutassim, we were just companions to [Muammar Gaddafi].”

Towards the end, the once all-powerful leader was sleeping in abandoned homes, scrounging for food and simmering with anger over the steady deterioration of his situation, according to Dhao.

“We moved places every four or five days, depending on the circumstances.

We would stay in the empty houses, but sometimes there would be some families around us. When people would leave the city, we would go stay in those emptied areas. Houses were just left open. We moved around in normal cars, a car or two, which would drop some of us off and then go for the others. Mortars and Grad missiles fired by the revolutionaries often hit the houses we were staying in.

Three of the guards were wounded, but there was no doctor. [As time went on] Muammar Gaddafi changed into becoming more and more angry.

Mostly he was angry about the lack of electricity, communications and television, his inability to communicate to the outside world. We would go see him and sit with him for an hour or so to speak with him, and he would ask: ‘Why is there no electricity? Why is there no water?’”

His inner circles

Muammar Gaddafi, his inner circle, and the remaining fighters around Mutassim Gaddafi were not the only people remaining in District Two, the final residential area under loyalist control as militia forces closed in.

Wounded loyalists and other patients had also been moved from the main Ibn Sina hospital to an ad hoc field clinic inside District Two as the hospital came under the control of the militias, and some civilians had also chosen not to leave their homes despite the fierce fighting, although most were young, fighting-age men, with very few women or children remaining during the final days of the battle.

When the final escape attempt came, many of these non-combatants would become casualties of war or victims of war crimes. During the night of October 19 to October 20, Sirte’s District Two was under intensive and continuous bombardment from Grad missiles and artillery. The attack lasted until the early morning, when militia commanders discovered that a convoy of loyalist vehicles was trying to escape the city.

HRW interviews with surviving members of Gadaffi’s convoy have revealed fresh details of the escape attempt.

Mutassim Gaddafi decided to make his move during the early morning hours of October 20.

He organised for loyalists to gather at the ad hoc clinic and attempt to flee accompanied by the wounded from the clinic as well as the civilians who had remained.

Mutassim’s original plan was apparently to attempt to break out around 3:30 or 4am, but the loading of the wounded and organising of the remaining civilians took longer than expected, delaying the departure until 8am.

By then, many of the militia fighters had returned to their fighting positions, denying the 50-vehicle convoy the element of surprise. Based on the later tally of the dead, wounded and captured the convoy consisted of approximately 250 persons. Most of the vehicles were 4-by-4 pickups, heavily loaded with munitions and weaponry and often with mounted machine or anti-aircraft guns.

HRW found no indication that the Gaddafi combatants used the wounded or remaining civilians as human shields to prevent themselves from being attacked during their flight from District Two. Non-combatants interviewed by HRW all said they fled District Two with the convoy voluntarily, although not all of them appeared to have been aware at the time that Muammar Gaddafi and his inner circle would be in the convoy.

However, there is no doubt that placing wounded persons and non-combatants within a heavy armed convoy protecting Muammar Gaddafi and his inner circle placed them in mortal danger. Many of them were killed during the attempted break-out.

The convoy first attempted to sneak westward, along the coast, traveling inside abandoned residential neighborhoods, but soon ran into militia forces.

The loyalists managed to fight its way through some initial skirmishes and make it to a main road heading south out of the city, but as it reached the open road it was struck by an air-fired missile that exploded next to the car carrying Muammar Gaddafi and other leadership figures, according to Mansour Dhao:

“[As we escaped], the air coverage was against us and targeted us immediately, twice. We were nearly hit by a missile – they didn’t hit our car directly, but the missile hit right next to us and created such a powerful blast that the air bags in the car inflated and I was hit by shrapnel.”

Unable to continue down the main road, the convoy again tried turning off into neighbouring dirt roads west of the main road to escape the overflying warplanes and drones, and the militia fighters attempting to stop them.

There was no escape: the convoy ran right into the base of another Misrata militia, and found itself trapped, with war planes flying overhead. The fighters on the convoy refused to stop fighting, and attacked the militia base blocking the road ahead of them, hoping to overpower it and break open an escape path, according to Khalid Ahmed Raid, a commander at the base:

“The convoy came towards our brigade building and shot at our gate with RPGs [Rocket-Propelled Grenades], and then opened fire on us. So we began to fight back. They tried to go around our base, and some of them went under the main road using the tunnels to try and approach our base. We opened fire on them with our [anti-aircraft] guns.”

As the convoy got pinned down and fought with militia fighters, Nato fighter jets bombed it with two low-altitude airburst GBU-12 500-pound bombs, spraying the vehicles and their occupants with shrapnel. The bombs and the secondary explosions caused by the explosion of munitions that had been loaded on the vehicles killed many of the occupants of the vehicles, incinerating those who were inside the vehicles near the center of the blast.