The top US military officer said air strikes had hobbled Libyan forces, but admitted the conflict was moving into “stalemate” as Muammar Gaddafi’s troops pressed on with their punishing siege of rebel Misrata. Rebels welcomed U.S. plans to deploy unmanned aircraft, typically operated remotely from the United States. But it emerged bad weather had forced the first two drones sent to Libya to turn back. “It’s certainly moving towards a stalemate,” said Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. military’s joint chiefs of staff, addressing U.S. troops during a visit to Baghdad.
“At the same time we’ve attrited somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of his main ground forces, his ground force capabilities. Those will continue to go away over time.” Doctors at the hospital in Misrata, the rebels’ last major bastion in the West of the country, said nine insurgents were killed in fighting on Thursday. Rebel fighters, outgunned by government forces, describe a bitter, block-by-block war of attrition amid shattered buildings and streets carpeted with debris.
The enemy is sometimes only yards (metres) away. “Gaddafi’s fighters taunt us. If they are in a nearby building they yell at us at night to scare us. They call us rats,” one rebel said. Hundreds of people are believed to have died in Misrata during the siege. At the hospital, ambulances raced in carrying wounded fighters. Doctors said that four of the nine rebels killed died in a fierce battle around the Tripoli Street thoroughfare.
