Colonel Gaddafi’s Hat

When we arrive at the Square, there is a demonstration all right but not the type we expected. About half a dozen demonstrators are moving down the middle of the road. Just a week ago – according to witnesses – this square was filled with rebels who were then fired on by government snipers in crow’s nest positions on buildings. It was here that soldiers opened up with live ammunition on those calling for change. But today the small group is waving the green flag of Gaddafi supporters, chanting their love and support for the Brother Leader. We’re disappointed and wonder whether this is going to be the end of our streak for freedom from outside the Rixos. Still, we get out – a little hesitantly – to see what’s going on and film. We realize instantly the marchers are clearly being organized and directed by soldiers on the sidelines. A big banner denouncing the BBC is pinned up on a building. As soon as the small group see Martin’s camera they start chanting enthusiastically. A short time later, a van pulls up in front of the soldiers and it is full of pro-Gaddafi placards and flags, which are handed out to the growing number of his supporters who are gathering or being corralled. The soldiers are more concerned with marshalling the pro-Gaddafi supporters than worrying about whether we have permission or not to be there. And besides we are doing just what the regime wants us to do – filming the support for the Colonel.

I try to do a piece-to-camera – with Martin filming me walking along – and the small group follows me everywhere, filling the background so the ‘crowd’ looks plump and heaving. Even when I keep fluffing my lines and retrace my steps, they too stop and come back with me as I start my walk-and-talk again. It’s almost hilarious, but also frustrating. I am racking my brains as to how we can show this farce in one of our television reports. I notice a soldier approaching our taxi driver and taking down the old boy’s mobile phone number. We leave shortly afterwards. We have some material for a report, but we’re all thinking the same thing. Are we missing something? Where are the rebel protests? Are they too scared to come out? We want to carry on looking. If there are none, then there are none. They can’t be invented. But we don’t want to be embarrassed by simply not finding them.

‘Why don’t we check out Zawiya?’ says Tim, out of nowhere. Zawiya is fundamentally important to the regime because it’s not only home to one of the two most important oil refineries in the country, but it also straddles the road between the capital and the Tunisian border to the west. It is right on a vital supply route – so retaining control of Zawiya is imperative. (The city has been in the news recently because the media group at the Rixos had been taken there on a chaperoned trip about a week earlier.)

Zawiya was supposed to be an example of a city which had been ‘retaken’ by the Gaddafi loyalists; where a small group of rebels had fought but lost. But when the media bus arrived in the centre they were met by flag-waving, protesting rebels. It was a bit of an embarrassment for the Gaddafi PR team. I agree with Tim. Let’s go to Zawiya. I haven’t got a better plan. We’ve now been in Libya and working on this story for about eighteen hours and got precisely diddly squat from the Opposition. So far we haven’t seen a single rebel or anyone who will call themselves an Opposition fighter or supporter in public.

Zawiya is only about thirty miles away – a relatively short distance if it wasn’t for the many checkpoints, which become more and more frequent the closer we get. At one stage we get a call from the foreign desk saying there’s been tear-gassing of rebel protesters back in Tjoura. Damn. How did we miss that? We were only just there. Should we go back? The taxi driver sighs. ‘We’re nearly there now,’ he says, rolling his eyes. So we carry on.

We breeze through the first few checkpoints. The taxi driver cannily puts all over his dashboard a huge Gaddafi poster which he’d been handed by the green-flag-waving people in Green Square. Tim pulls out his photocopied permission at each enforced stop and the driver indicates he is our minder. He has a natural authority which comes with age and living life, and the soldiers believe him. We get waved through. The driver gets a call on his mobile. I hear him saying, ‘Zawiya.’ When he puts the phone down, I ask: ‘That was the soldier from Green Square, wasn’t it?’ He laughs slightly nervously and nods but carries on regardless. The soldier is checking where the foreigners are going.

Then, as we get to the town’s perimeter, the atmosphere and mood at the checkpoints change. The checkpoints are much more heavy-duty, there are many more military personnel and there’s much more military hardware on show around the outskirts of the city. ‘No problem, no problem,’ says our driver. ‘Everything good.’ He takes us a circuitous route round the back, round the west, then the south. I like this man. He reminds me of my grandfather. He is gentle and wise and always charmingly polite, but he’s not going to be pushed around.

We’re stopped each time and asked several questions by the soldiers guarding the checkpoints. We explain we are guests of the government and the driver is questioned over and over again. Each time we have our hearts in our mouths, trying not to look anxious but desperately trying to work out the body language and the nuance of the conversations. I can hear the driver saying ‘Sky News’ a lot and ‘British’ and waving the permission letter. Whatever he says, he is convincing and we are allowed through. Martin notices we are one of the few vehicles heading into Zawiya. Most of the traffic is heading out of the city. And those who are fleeing are being given what looks like a pretty hard time. One family with young children is standing outside their vehicle looking on while the soldiers tear their belongings off the roof where they’ve been loaded, and throw them all over the ground as part of the ‘checking’ process.

Finally, we are inside Zawiya. The streets are empty but Martin still reminds the driver to remove his pro-Gaddafi poster. We are in rebel territory now, or so we believe. No point taking chances. The driver nods appreciatively and stuffs it into his footwell. We can hear the distant rumble of shouting. We hear the sound just a few seconds before we see a wave of people marching over the brow in the distance. Our driver stops. They are so far away I can’t quite work out what it is they are waving. Are they flags or weapons? And what flags are they marching under? Who are they?

Then, we see the rebels’ tricolour, the Libyan flag before Colonel Gaddafi’s coup in 1969, before he toppled King Idris and replaced it with his own all-green version. I jump out of the car at the same time as Martin is unravelling his legs and grabbing his camera gear. ‘Shall I stay with the taxi?’ says Tim. ‘No, take everything,’ I say. By this time the old man is very agitated. ‘No, no, come back. Danger, danger!’ he’s shouting. ‘It’s OK, don’t worry, we’re just going to see what’s happening. Wait for us, please,’ I reply.

We walk quickly towards the crowd of advancing protesters, wondering how they’re going to react to us. This is the city filled with youngsters who have been duped into ‘destruction and sabotage with drugs and alcohol’, according to Gaddafi. I look back and I see the driver doing a panicky, fast three-point turn to get out of the way of these rowdy rebels. I hope he’s finding somewhere round the corner to park.

And then the crowd is upon us. There’s a few seconds of nervousness as we wait to see how they react. But straight away they are welcoming. ‘Thank you, thank you,’ a few of them say in broken English. ‘Come, come.’ They are loud, they are angry and there are lots and lots of them. At first we think there are just a few hundred but soon we see, as the crowd snakes round corners and along streets, there are many more, running into thousands. We’re walking very quickly to keep up with them. It is steaming hot and within minutes we are sweating and puffing. The temperature has got to be in the high thirties now. The protesters are mostly on foot and the bulk of them are unarmed. In fact, they keep coming up and saying to us: ‘Look, Gaddafi said we had weapons. Where are the weapons?’

I spot a man holding a rifle and make a point of interviewing him, asking him why he has a weapon. ‘Defence,’ he says. There is a van driving very slowly in the middle of the crowd with men hanging out of it. We jump on – partly so Martin can film as we’re moving along, partly to have a breather. One of the men clinging onto the frame of the open door is holding a small pistol. But these are exceptions in a sea of marchers. The rest of them don’t even have sticks or stones, nothing at all.

They are mourning the loss of one of the rebel leaders, whom they have just buried in the city’s Martyrs’ Square. He has been shot by a Gaddafi sniper. They’re terrified of the snipers – of all the Gaddafi men who are inside the town – but they’re also furious.

‘Tell the world,’ one man says as we’re filming. ‘Please tell the world. We need help.’ ‘What help?’ I ask. ‘What do you want anyone to do?’ ‘We need the international community to help.’ Young boys are jumping up and down rather annoyingly in front of Martin’s camera lens. It’s an occupational hazard. There are children too here on this march but no women, no females at all except for me.

They are heading towards the Gaddafi tanks, which are parked beneath the underpass and blocking the exit to Tripoli. We drop back a little. We don’t want to be right at the front when they meet up with Gaddafi’s army. Several hundred marchers go past us. I notice an anti-aircraft gun mounted on the back of a pick-up truck which is driving along with us. ‘It’s one of ours,’ one of the men tells me. ‘We have had defections from the Gaddafi army and they brought some weapons.’

Then, suddenly, there is the familiar crackle of machine-gun fire. It’s coming from the direction of the Gaddafi tanks. At first the crowd don’t really react but, as the shooting continues, all of a sudden men are running back, running away from the firing which just keeps on going on and on. Men are being shot in the back as they’re scrambling to get away. They’re collapsing on the intersection; they’re dropping as bullets hit them on the concrete flyover which straddles the tanks underneath. There are so many of them sprinting away that we are in danger of being knocked down in this bull-run stampede.

We duck behind a wall which offers us a little protection as the crowds run past and the bullets follow. ‘Crawfie, we’ve got to get the fuck out of here,’ says Martin. He’s thinking, the tanks will be on us next, on us all. The soldiers will be coming on down this road, charging after the protesters. Then we have no chance. ‘Stay here, stay behind this wall.’ I’m panting. ‘We’ll just get caught up with the crowd if we run with them.’

We’re cowering behind our wall but Martin can see through his camera that the people on the bridge who are trying to recover their injured friends are being shot at. He’s giving me a running commentary. I can see several figures lying on the ground ahead but they are too far away to make out exactly what’s going on. ‘They’ve been hit,’ Martin says. ‘Other guys are trying to bring them here.’ There’s still so much shooting that they are crawling along the road to reach their friends, too scared to stand upright. Several times they are driven back by the shooting but they keep edging farther on their stomachs, determined to reach the still bodies. A car reverses at speed up the embankment to reach one of them and bundles him into the back and then tears down the road again towards us, bullets flying past it. Ambulances scream down the road to pick up more of the wounded and they are fired on as well. This is a massacre.

All over the place people are falling and being hit. The firing is indiscriminate and relentless, so relentless. Men are running for their lives, shoes scattering as they frantically try to escape the shooting. A few shout to us as they pass: ‘This is Gaddafi!’ and ‘Look what he does to us!’ Several are furious, yelling at us, anyone who will listen. Others seem to be in shock, scurrying past but with no real direction, constantly glancing over their shoulders at the tanks and soldiers behind, still firing. The rebel anti-aircraft weapon is driven up and fires towards the tanks. We’re both startled it’s actually shooting. It makes a tremendous noise because it’s so close. It fires off a volley of shots, but that almost immediately backfires dramatically. It just draws more fire from the Gaddafi lines. People are still running past us. We’re just watching, clinging to our wall, tucked in close to each other as this scene of mad, terrified panic goes on. With this amount of shooting, there must be many more casualties than those actually right in front of us. We can see several, but the flyover is obscuring our view and we don’t want to venture out into the middle of the road where the bullets are spitting.

Yet more cars are driving past, screeching past, bundling the injured inside and driving off. We have to get to the hospital. A man is staggering towards us, a bullet wound in his chest. He’s being held up and helped by two friends, one either side. They’re half dragging, half carrying him. An ambulance pulls up and Martin just follows the injured man, who is muttering, ‘Allahu Akbar’ (God is great). He climbs in and I pile in after him. I look back and see Tim on the pavement. ‘I’ll see you at the hospital,’ he shouts.

This is the first time we have seen any first-hand evidence of Gaddafi forces firing on predominantly unarmed civilians, the first time we have ourselves witnessed the cruelty of the regime. And it is cruel. It feels ugly and evil and very one-sided. I feel reluctant to mention (although I am duty-bound to do so) the very small number of weapons we have seen in a crowd of several thousand protesters because it seems to give the wrong impression. These were almost all unarmed, defenceless people, just marching, just shouting. What sort of a man, what sort of a leader, what sort of a regime orders the shooting of hundreds of his own countrymen, even children? This isn’t crowd control. This isn’t anything but shooting to kill and maim and injure and terrify. It’s difficult to feel anything but sympathy and fear for these defenceless people.

Once the ambulance doors shut, it’s quiet. All we can hear is the sound of the injured man’s harsh breathing and his gasps of ‘Allahu Akbar’. His friend is crouched over him, trying to lift his clothes to see the wound. We can all see a round, bloody hole where the bullet has entered his chest. There are no medics in the ambulance, only two or three protesters who are trying to calm the man and urging the driver to go faster, faster.

The doors are flung open and there is a wave of noise. We tumble out of the back of the ambulance into a big crowd outside the hospital entrance. Among them are medics who pull the man onto a stretcher and he is whisked along inside to the emergency room. I’m surprised at how many people are in the hospital, how they have managed to get here so quickly. It is packed, packed with the injured, packed with mourners. Everywhere Martin points his camera, there are men with bullet wounds, wounds all down their backs, bullet holes in their arms, in their chests. Some of them look like pellets. One man lying on his stomach has dozens of pellet holes all over his shoulders and his back. A nurse comes up to us. Another woman at last. ‘This is Gaddafi. Look how he treats his people. This is Gaddafi!’ she is shouting.

Men are crying, hugging each other. There is no room to move anywhere. There are so many people, either injured or tending to the injured, but also worried friends and relatives and volunteers who just want to help in whatever way they can. Everyone is in a state of shock. One doctor in particular starts talking to us, taking us from ward to ward, helping us communicate with the patients. ‘Look at these wounds,’ he says. He is furious. ‘This is a shoot-to-kill policy. They are not trying to frighten people. They are trying to kill them.’

It looks like that to us too. We’re taken all around the hospital to see the random casualties – a man who was going to work, a woman out shopping, a child sitting on the doorstep of his home – all sprayed with bullets, shot by snipers, hit by Gaddafi troops. The intensive care unit is full too. Many of the injured have been shot through the head.

The doctor who has been taking a keen interest in us asks where we are going to stay. He is reluctant to give us his full name and asks us to call him Dr M. He is not alone in feeling wary about being seen on television and being tracked down by the Libyan secret police or the military at some later date. ‘It’s too late to try to leave Zawiya now,’ he says. ‘Even I am not going to my home. You’ll never get through the checkpoints. Do you have transport?’ Oh my God, the taxi driver! Where is he? Tim has joined us at the hospital by now and has been asking around for the taxi driver. No one has seen him. There aren’t any taxis at all in town right now.

Everything is not good.

The doctor says there is a hotel where we can stay. A hotel? Really? ‘Yes, it’s quite good. It is four-star. You will be safe there.’ He tells us the Gaddafi forces sometimes come into the hospital to fetch their wounded and dead. We don’t like the sound of that. The hotel it is, then. He says we’ll be taken by some of the fighters. It sounds unbelievably appealing. By now a few of the rebel fighters have heard about the foreign journalists in the hospital and have made themselves known to us. One is a big lad who talks with a slight American accent but who is half Irish. He is only 19 but seems to be well connected with the rebel ‘leadership’. He says his name is Tareg. His father is Libyan and his mother Irish. He is Muslim and has been schooled at the International School of Martyrs in Tripoli. His family also has a home in Wales. He tells us they have set up a ten-man council in Zawiya, headed by men from the military who have defected. But so far I have not seen any soldiers. They all seem to be civilians, all ordinary people from Zawiya who have found themselves caught up in a civil war.

‘We will arrange an escort,’ says Dr M. He tells us he lives in Canada, works as a surgeon there and only came back to Libya for a break. He has a family home here just outside the centre of Zawiya but he came to the hospital to help out when he heard there were lots of casualties. Now he seems to be running the place and looking after us to boot. For him it has become the most intense of working holidays. He seems alert but mellow, very at ease here and totally unfazed. He is with his young son, who is about 17 and wants to be a doctor too.

We’re taken outside. In the hospital car park, for the first time, we see regulation soldiers. They are wearing uniforms – filthy dirty uniforms admittedly – and they’re carrying weapons. There are about three or four of them. OK, I’m thinking, now this looks like the rebel ‘army’ we’ve been hearing about. With our new escorts, we suddenly feel emboldened. They have vehicles arranged and we set off in convoy through the city centre towards Martyrs’ Square. The doctor is following with his son in their car. I am asking them how much control they have of Zawiya. ‘We control virtually the whole city,’ the driver says. ‘They [Gaddafi forces] are mostly on the outskirts.’

As we near the Square, we can see roadblocks have been built by the rebels. There are military vehicles being used as obstacles along the road. There are a few armed men manning the checkpoints but, as soon as they see the rebel soldiers, we are waved through. In the Square there are many more men, some of them chanting. There are a few soldiers among them. The crowd we were with earlier must have retreated here. There is also a small mosque in the Square and the mosque’s loudspeakers are being used to rally the crowd and fill them with courage. Some people are holding hand-written messages scribbled on cardboard which say: ‘No Al Kayda here.’ It is in response to Gaddafi’s claim that the rebellion is promoted by Al Qaeda fighters high on what he called hallucinogenic drugs.

At the far corner of the Square there is an eight-storey building with barricades around it and armed men at the two side entrances. ‘The hotel?’ I ask with a sinking feeling. Yes, it’s the hotel. But the Zawiya Jewel Hotel has been taken over by the rebels and now it’s not so much a hotel as the rebels’ military headquarters. This is not good. We might not have been all that safe at the hospital but we’re going to be staying in the one place that Gaddafi’s soldiers will be pointing their tanks and guns at.

The hotel feels largely empty. There are lots of dark corridors and there seems to be very little electricity. We’re taken up to the seventh floor. They’ve opened up all the interconnecting doors so the rooms melt into one. The balcony overlooks the Square, with the mosque on the left. One of the soldiers closes the curtains and tells us to keep them closed if we are going to use any lights at all. ‘Snipers,’ he says. Tim and I decide we have to find out where the exits are. We need to know how to get out in a hurry if the Gaddafi forces attack. We need to know where to run to, how to disappear if we have to; that’s if we get a chance.

It’s dark now and even Dr M is looking worried. ‘I think we go as soon as it is light in the morning. You can come with me,’ he says. ‘I will take you to my house.’ Thank you. Thank you, good doctor. That sounds like the only plan.

Tim and I go downstairs to familiarize ourselves with the layout of the hotel. When we get to the basement we find the only back door is locked and, worse still, in the room next to the exit there is a man lying on a stretcher. He is attached to a drip but is being guarded by another man who is armed with an AK-47. The man lying down is wearing the green fatigues of the Gaddafi military. I think this is what they call the worst-case scenario: we are not only in the rebels’ headquarters but they have prisoners here too, prisoners whom the Gaddafi regime may well want to try to rescue. Or eliminate. The captive is not responding to questions anyway. I ask where he is from, how he came to be taken prisoner and what he was doing. But no, he will only reply there has been a mistake, he is not a sniper, he was only trying to defend himself. The rebel guarding him is pretty exasperated with the answers too. ‘He just keeps saying the same thing over and over,’ he tells me. ‘He is a liar.’ I quickly take a picture of him on my BlackBerry but the rebels are unhappy at this so I stop.

We go back upstairs and tell Martin the news. Little fazes Martin. He is a six-foot-three Irishman from a large family, brought up in County Down during the quaintly titled ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland. He grew up in a mixed area where Protestants and Catholics jostled each other and even children were accustomed to the place being mortared and were not surprised by the attempts to blow up the British Army stationed there. Martin is bursting with natural charm and has a keen sense of humour. He’s a seasoned cameraman who has been to a host of war zones, including Sudan, Zimbabwe, Iraq, Bosnia, Georgia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and many others. At this very moment he’s more worried about power. He has a limited amount of juice in his camera’s battery, and we haven’t brought chargers for our ‘day’ trip. No batteries mean no camera and no pictures – and we don’t want that. But he downloads the pictures he has already taken onto the laptop we have brought with us. His memory cards are now ready to be refilled with fresh pictures.

The doctor tells us the rebels are organizing food for us. Great. We haven’t eaten all day. We sit talking to them. It is difficult to get a sense of how many rebels there are as we stay in one room and people keep coming in and out – mostly to rubberneck the foreign journalists. They express their gratitude to us for being with them and talk about the battle. The men are all defectors, and most have been in the Gaddafi army for at least ten years. They seem to be around early to mid-thirties. I ask to see ID just out of interest and they produce their army identification cards with photos. They are Libyans and an example of the defectors we’ve heard about. I take pictures of them on my BlackBerry as we don’t want to run down our camera batteries. Also there is very little light and Martin doesn’t think any pictures he takes on his camera will be very clear. At this stage we are just thinking ‘conserve energy’. We have no idea what’s around the corner. The men seem friendly enough. Their clothes are grubby and worn, though. Most are wearing what look like very old army uniforms which haven’t seen a decent wash in quite some time. Their hair is straggly and, overall, they look like they have been living rough for a while. But they’re chirpy enough, answering my questions with good humour.

For them the turning point, they tell us, was when they were ordered to fire on civilians, fellow Libyans. They have little love for Gaddafi, whom they seem to think is quite mad, deranged. They ask about us, about Sky News. They assume I must be married to either Tim or Martin and are a little shocked when I say neither. But what does your husband think? How on earth does he feel about you working with men who are not even relatives? This would raise eyebrows among much of the Muslim population. Does he mind you going away so much? Have you children? Who looks after them? It is all a foreign world to them.

The food is taking so long and we are shattered. I think I am going to try to get some sleep because I know we will be up in a few hours and on the move again. I excuse myself and take off to the adjoining room and the big, double bed waiting there. I say to Martin and Tim: ‘There’s plenty of room. Please don’t sleep on the floor.’ Tim has absolutely no intention of sleeping on the floor, but it’s going to be very cosy with three of us on the bed. Martin decides to bite the bullet and take his chances with the rebels. He ends up in another room with a bed all to himself. Lucky devil. What our hosts make of this arrangement is anybody’s guess.

Later the doctor wakes us up when the food arrives. It’s past midnight. None of us feels much like eating now but the doctor is insistent. The rebels have gone to a lot of trouble. No is not an option. We struggle up and sleepily eat our way through a bowl full of rice and a red mixture with chunks of meat and pasta floating in it. It’s actually quite delicious. I never really got a clear explanation how they managed to rustle this up but it seemed to involve a bit of a journey and a fair amount of preparation given the time it took. We flop back to sleep as soon as we have bolted our food.

The rebels fire rockets throughout the night. It seems to be a message to the Gaddafi forces sitting outside the town – we’re not asleep and we’re not going anywhere. Don’t even think about attacking us.

Chapter Two

DAWN ATTACK

We’re woken before first light. The doctor is anxious to go. ‘We should start to make a move,’ he says. I am standing on the balcony of our room just waiting for the others when I see the red tracers of machine-gun fire on the horizon. I call Martin to get the camera. We’re all watching as there’s more – and then the explosion of a tanker. We see huge clouds of smoke rising from the resultant fire. The cloud is only about two to three miles away. ‘That’s near the hospital,’ the doctor says. ‘They are coming inside the town.’

I ring the office in London. ‘The Gaddafi forces are beginning an attack on Zawiya,’ I tell Kasia, the young news desk editor on duty. ‘Are you all right?’ she asks. Her voice is very concerned.

We need to get to ground level and out of here. We are fair-ground ducks here on the hotel’s seventh floor. We all run downstairs. In the foyer, we can see there is barely controlled panic. There are all sorts of men here. Some look like soldiers. Others are obviously civilians, wearing jeans and T-shirts.

We watch aghast as they rush around desperately preparing for battle. One offers me a flak jacket and a helmet. I put the helmet on, then realize it isn’t a spare one. It is his. I give it back. I can’t take his only protection and, besides, I don’t want to be mistaken for a rebel. The men are busy getting out weapons, unwrapping them and putting them together. There is such pandemonium that grenades are being dropped and rockets are rolling across the floor.

One man is busy giving a quick demonstration on how to fire an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade). He is bending down on one knee, holding the RPG launcher on his shoulder. He moves it around, then shows how to pull the trigger. The youngster who has been listening intently has straggly, curly hair and glasses. He is one of many who look like university students. It’s a lads’ army. The pupil says, ‘Allahu Akbar’, takes hold of the weapon and runs off to fight.

There is already firing outside and we can hear the tanks getting closer and closer. Some men are dragging anti-aircraft guns away, others are positioning machine-guns on the corner of the hotel. ‘Do you want to go to the mosque?’ one fighter asks us. I turn to Martin. ‘What do you think?’ He says: ‘Crawfie, Gaddafi’s troops aren’t going to respect a mosque.’ I know he’s right. We have reported on the Pakistan army storming a mosque and killing militants inside the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. ‘But we are definitely going to be hit if we stay here,’ I reply. It seems like the least worst option.