Libya’s rebels were threatened by a rift on Thursday, as their progress on the battlefield slowed and one of Moamer Kadhafi’s sons said his family has forged an alliance with Islamist insurgents. The unity of the revolutionaries became the latest casualty of the shock assassination of a top general, as a key rebel group demanded senior ministers and military brass be fired.
The February 17 Coalition — whose members kick-started the revolt against Kadhafi — told AFP the ministers of defence and international affairs must be sacked following last week’s murder of General Abdel Fatah Yunis.
Abdulsalam el-Musmari, a judge who heads the coalition, criticised the events leading up to Yunis’s murder and the handling of its aftermath by the rebels’ governing National Transitional Council. The facts surrounding the general’s death have been opaque, with senior members of the NTC giving incomplete and contradictory accounts of how he died, who killed him and the motive for the murder.
“We have two main demands,” Musmari said. “The resignations of the defence minister (Jallal al-Digheily) and his deputy and for all the armed groups to fall under the national army or lay down their weapons.” In a separate written statement, the February 17 Coalition also demanded the sacking of Ali Alasawi — the NTC’s minister for international affairs — and a probe into why he approved a warrant for Yunis’s arrest. The group’s blistering criticism marks the most public sign yet of tensions between Libya’s revolutionaries and the NTC that has come to be their de facto government.
After five months of fighting against Kadhafi’s regime, the NTC has come under increasing scrutiny, with unease fuelled by slow progress on the military front. That lack of progress was laid bare on Wednesday in the eastern town of Zliten, where Kadhafi forces appeared to have repelled a rebel attack.
A day after punching into the centre of Zliten, sparking fierce clashes, rebel sources admitted they had pulled back from the centre. The rebels scored a minor victory Thursday, when an oil tanker with 73,000 tonnes of petrol steamed into the port of Benghazi, with rebels on board claiming they had seized the vessel from government control between Malta and Tripoli.
Meanwhile, Seif al-Islam Kadhafi, a high-profile son of the Libyan strongman who rebels have been fighting to oust for five months, said his family had forged an alliance with Islamist rebels among the insurgents to drive out the secular opposition to his father’s 40-year rule.
