A NATO bombing blitz which the alliance insisted was not aimed at Moamer Gaddafi rocked Tripoli on Tuesday, as rebels in besieged Misrata claimed to be pushing back the Libyan strongman’s forces. The United Nations, meanwhile, said the offensive against pro-democracy protesters launched by Gaddafi’s forces was paralysing the oil-rich nation and causing the population to suffer widespread shortages of essential goods.
Jets screamed in low over the Libyan capital in the early hours of Tuesday, carrying out an unusually heavy bombardment over roughly three hours, an AFP correspondent said. The blasts came after NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen said time was running out for Libyan leader Gaddafi.
He said Gaddafi “should realise sooner rather than later that there’s no future for him or his regime” and would ultimately lose his decades-old grip on power given the “wind of change” sweeping the Arab world, the death of Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden and mounting pressure on the Taliban in Afghanistan. NATO clarified that its bombing campaign was not specifically targeting Gaddafi.
“We do not target individuals,” NATO’s deputy spokeswoman Carmen Romero told AFP in Brussels. She said the bombing raid in Tripoli is part of the alliance’s strategy of destroying Gaddafi’s military machine as long as it threatens civilians, not an escalation of the campaign. “We continue with the same strategy: to reduce the Gaddafi regime’s capacity to hit civilians as much as possible,” Romero said.
NATO will “continue to attack Libyan command and control centres as well as all facilities that can be used by the Gaddafi army,” she said. Gaddafi had escaped a similar NATO bombing blitz on May 1 in Tripoli, which killed his second youngest son, Seif al-Arab, and three of his grandchildren.
NATO in an operational update Tuesday said it had hit three command and control facilities in the vicinity of Tripoli, one in the port city of Misrata and ammunition dumps in the vicinity of Mizdah and Sirte, Gaddafi’s home town.
