Colonel Gaddafi’s Hat

Now, as we’re making our way through the hospital corridors, the staff are greeting us, nodding appreciatively, catching our eyes and occasionally saying things like: ‘Welcome, welcome,’ and ‘Thank you, Sky News.’ Everyone seems to know who we are.

The doctor’s tiny room has turned into our ‘office’. We’re brought thick, strong coffee, bread and butter, some juice in cartons. It sounds bland, but to us it’s a feast. A stream of doctors come in to say hello, talk, give us their views on the regime and offer advice on how to get the pictures out. Martin is getting increasingly concerned about battery power and about filling up his memory cards. Once they are full of pictures he has recorded, he will have to decide whether to record over earlier material – so erasing it for ever. The alternative is not filming anything further. But that’s no choice at all really. We aren’t there yet, though. Still, he has to be very selective now about what he films. We can’t afford to waste either battery power or space on our cards.

The ‘rebel’ we don’t trust is in the little room a lot too. He is doing much of the talking and handing out advice on what to do with our film cards. ‘Give the cards to me and I will try to smuggle them out,’ he tells us. ‘You are going to get stopped at the checkpoints because you are Westerners. I will find a way to get them out.’ My instant reaction is: ‘No way.’ I don’t want to hand over our cards – our gold dust – to anyone and certainly not to this young guy that we don’t know, who may or may not be a rebel. But I don’t say anything and neither does Martin. We just nod and listen to what he is saying.

We are constantly discussing what route we can use to get out. We still have no transport but we’re just investigating how, where, when – all prefaced by a very big if. It’s best to accentuate the positive. We just need some sort of plan, and planning means we have less time to think about how we don’t have a vehicle or anyone to take us anywhere just yet. Right now we are well and truly stuck in Zawiya. Everyone here is. And there’s no paddle.

I suggest trying to go out westwards through the Tunisian border – a long and difficult journey as the government still has control of the route. There have been constant battles between the Opposition fighters and the Gaddafi troops. The rebels are having sporadic success at best in securing control of the southern border post, only to lose it to the regime days – sometimes hours – later.

Tim is vehement that this is not a goer. He has just returned from covering the mass exodus of refugees streaming out of Libya via Tunisia. ‘It’s too difficult a journey and once we get to the border – if we get to the border – there are thousands and thousands of people trying to cross. I’m telling you, it’s a bad idea.’

The other way is to try to make our way out through the desert scrub towards the oil refinery just outside Zawiya. There’s been fighting there too but one of the doctors says he has a house nearby that we can stay in. No, no, I’m thinking, surely that area is going to be crawling with military, and even if we make it there, then what?

What about heading east towards Tripoli? It’s the shortest route and there is an airport, but Plan C is also fraught with problems. For a start there’s the headquarters of the Khamis Brigade to negotiate, the most notorious wing of the Libyan military regime. The 32nd Brigade is colloquially named after Gaddafi’s favoured son and the Colonel has made sure it has been well funded over the years. Its barracks are just outside Zawiya on the road to Tripoli. The brigade is feared throughout Libya for its ferocity and interrogation methods.

We’re also worried that the regime and its minders at the Rixos Hotel will be on the lookout for us. They know by now that there are three foreign journalists in Zawiya and they won’t like what we have to say about what’s being going on inside the city. They are already mounting a campaign of denial about my telephone reporting, saying it is lies and now out of date. But we have the first independent evidence that Gaddafi is attacking unarmed civilians. The regime knows it and will want to suppress it.

I am getting lots of texts now. A number of people and several news teams are urgently trying to get us out, help us or at the very least offer some moral support. The experienced journalists inside and outside Sky News realize we are in a desperately difficult position. Sky’s chief correspondent, Stuart Ramsay, who is a veteran of many wars and has been on the receiving end of attacks from a multitude of vicious military regimes, probably realizes the seriousness of our situation more than most. He is on the Tunisian border trying to smuggle himself and his team into Libya with the rebels, via the Nefusa mountains.

‘We are working on a plan,’ he writes. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll get you all out.’ It’s just what we want to hear, need to hear. It makes us all feel less isolated, and I, for one, have reason to feel cheered by what on the face of it appears to be wildly optimistic reassurance.

Stuart and I have worked together regularly on several joint ventures and investigations for Sky over many years, interviewing the Taliban in Afghanistan, exposing the militant insurgency in Pakistan, covering huge natural disasters such as the Burmese cyclone. He has got me out of some pretty tricky spots before, not least when cameraman Phil Hooper and I were illegally held and interrogated by Afghan intelligence agents in the country’s Laghman Province in May 2010.

We’d spent some days studying a militant insurgency group in the area, filming their training camp, living with them, observing their methods and finding out about their motives. We had finished our assignment and were travelling out of the militants’ territory when we were stopped by several car-loads of armed men. They bundled us into their vehicles at gunpoint and took us to the offices of the NDS, Afghan intelligence. Just before we were stripped of all our equipment and mobile phones, I managed to sneak out an emergency text to Stuart and Neville Lazarus, Sky’s Asia producer. The two of them were on their way to pick us up at a nearby safe house when they got my alert. At first they made their own preliminary enquiries, checking out the safe house, asking locals if they’d seen us. But both of them knew time was critical. The longer we were incommunicado, the longer we were away, the less chance there would be of finding us.

Stuart has done countless embeds with the British and American militaries and has pretty solid contacts with both, so, without hesitation, he and Neville walked onto the nearby US army base and raised the alarm. The Americans put out feelers, talking first to their local informants on the ground about whether they had seen any foreigners. The answer came back positive. Yes, two foreigners had been taken into the NDS offices and one was a woman. But when they contacted the NDS offices officially, they were told there were no foreigners there. No, the official insisted, no one had been arrested, no one had been taken in.

The Americans went further, asking their informants inside the NDS offices to locate and identify us after passing on descriptions of us from Stuart and Neville. Yes, came back the information from the NDS. There are two foreigners being interrogated right now. Then came the news that we were to be taken elsewhere. Not good. The Americans believed we were to be sold to the Taliban. We would fetch a hefty ransom for the corrupt officials and become a keen bargaining chip for the militants in any negotiations with the Karzai government in Afghanistan and maybe even the British government. They had to move quickly.

Just before we were due to be shifted, about four or five armoured personnel carriers full of armed US soldiers arrived at the NDS offices. Again they asked officially for the return of the two journalists they were convinced were there. Again, the officials denied everything: no foreigners and no journalists here, they said. The Americans refused to accept this, cocking their guns and eventually bursting into the room where Phil and I and our Afghan translator were being held. The first we knew of their arrival was when this huge, six-foot-plus soldier carrying a gun battered open the door. ‘Phil, Alex,’ he said, ‘you’re coming with us.’

I dread to think what might have happened had it not been for the quick reactions of Stuart and Neville. Their swift actions certainly saved at least the day for us.

Stuart and I work well together. We are good friends though fierce competitors, repeatedly trying to outwit and outthink each other on stories. Our rivalry is a standing joke in the newsroom. But there is no one who has more war experience or who has better journalistic nous and resourcefulness in extremely hostile environments than Ramsay. Knowing he is in the vicinity is some sort of comfort blanket.

Right now Stuart is on the Tunisian border with cameraman Richie Mockler and Martin Vowles, who is security for the team. I have worked with both in Pakistan. Martin is one of a very small number who have already slipped over the border under the eyes of the Libyan guards and back into Tunisia again. Richie and Martin are both former marines. Together with Stuart they are thinking through the options with military precision and planning. They are negotiating with their rebel contacts, appealing to them for help and discussing sending in a team of Opposition fighters who understand the area and know the back roads to try to smuggle us all out of Zawiya. They are also investigating a sea rescue – lining up a boat to enter Libyan waters and then transport us out of the country that way – again with the help of the rebels.

We don’t realize at this point we are relatively close to the sea. Stuart, Richie and Martin V have the benefit of maps and satellite photographs showing our location. The only trouble is we have to somehow get to the port and at present we can’t even get out of the hospital. In between the plotting and planning, Stuart still finds time to text us some schoolboy jokes: ‘Have you heard the one about the bloke who walks into the doctor’s with a steering wheel around his dick? The doctor says: “What on earth is that?” The guy says: “I don’t know, but it’s driving me nuts.”’ It is stupendously incongruous, but it breaks the tension. And the doctors in the hospital roar with laughter. Tim writes back: ‘That’s the first time I have laughed in days!’

Bill Neely from ITN is also texting from Tripoli. ‘I am in contact with a doctor in the Square,’ he tells us. ‘He says if you can get to him, he will help you, try to drive you out.’ Bill says the regime at the hotel is talking about taking the media based at the Rixos on a chaperoned trip to Zawiya to show how it is ‘liberated’ and under their control. That is extremely unlikely right now, I am thinking. There’s still fighting here and nothing has been either ‘liberated’ or captured.

Getting to Bill’s doctor contact should be easier for us, but even getting to the Square a few miles away is off limits right now and trawling around for an unknown medic just isn’t feasible when the sky is raining bullets. Besides – unknown to Bill – we are now out of the mosque and in a hospital full of people trying to help us.

Bill himself is desperately trying to get into Zawiya. He is a formidable rival too. A lot of the journalists realize this is a story which needs covering. But getting inside Zawiya, which is now firmly under siege, is at least as difficult as getting out.

Those in Tripoli, however, have the best chance of getting to the story as they are the closest to the area geographically. And Bill is generous with his information. He gets repeatedly arrested at the checkpoints trying to enter Zawiya and his equipment is repeatedly confiscated. At the same time, he continues to send snippets of vital information to us. ‘There is a string of tanks outside Zawiya on the east side,’ he texts, giving us locations and positions of the military vehicles he has seen. ‘They are from the Khamis Brigade.’ It helps us build a mental picture of what is going on outside the city in which we are trapped.

The BBC’s Arabic Service team is another crew trying to get around the government restrictions and get inside Zawiya to find out just what is going on. We hear that they too are arrested but, instead of letting the three-man team go, the Gaddafi soldiers take them to a military barracks in Tripoli, blindfold them, handcuff them and beat them. They are hit with fists, knees and rifles and then subjected to mock executions. They also witness the torture of others who are being held with them. Many of those detained, whom they see likewise handcuffed and blindfolded, are from Zawiya. The three of them: correspondent Fera Killani, cameraman Goktay Koraltan, and Chris Cobb-Smith – who is there as the security expert – are held for twenty-one hours in total. It is a frightening, horrific experience. Once out of Libya, they tell how their interrogators questioned them about us, the Sky News team. The army wants to know how we got into Zawiya, who helped us and is continuing to help us, and where we are now.

Tim tells me that John Ryley, my head of news at Sky, wants to talk. Tim has been on the telephone regularly with London, updating them on the situation and talking to them about options. I am reluctant to speak because I don’t really know how to reassure John and I know he must be very worried. We’re in peril on his watch. ‘Hi, Alex,’ he starts, ‘how are you all coping? Are you getting enough food and water?’ I tell him the doctors are looking after us and we couldn’t be in better hands. It’s true. In a city which is now coming under almost constant attack, the hospital has got to be the safest place, relatively speaking.

It’s late now. Dr M and his son have been constantly looking out for us. Dr M has been in and out of theatre, performing surgery. He is looking very, very tired. The man was just on a holiday visit to see family in Libya and didn’t even work here, yet right now he seems to be indispensable in the hospital. ‘Let’s get some sleep,’ he says. We are taken up to the children’s ward, which is now empty of patients. We have no luggage, no change of clothes, no toiletries, nothing. But we have a hospital bed to sleep on and a bathroom close by. It doesn’t take long before we are all asleep, exhausted by our experiences over the past twenty-four hours.

Sunday, 6 March

I wake early, before the others. In the few seconds before I really come to, all I can see is hospital paraphernalia – the beds lined up opposite mine in the ward, the emergency masks hanging above them, the oxygen tanks standing by. Where am I again? Then I turn over and see Martin and Tim curled up on the adjacent beds. OK, now I remember. I creep out quietly trying not to wake them. I go to the bathroom. There are already a few young medics up and working. One stops me. He’s friendly and curious and wants to talk – and I want to hear what he has to say about Libya and the Gaddafi family. He introduces himself as Dr Salah and tells me that although many of his age (he’s in his twenties) have long despaired of the Colonel, they had until very recently a lot of respect and much hope about Saif al-Islam, his most high-profile son. Until the start of the Libyan uprising, Saif had also been viewed by Western politicians as a possible successor to his father. He was educated at the London School of Economics, speaks English fluently, and was considered forward-thinking, almost liberal, and, most importantly, part of Muammar Gaddafi’s inner circle. A man the West could do business with.

However, all those hopes disappeared at the end of February this year when Saif made a rambling television address as the protests first spread to Tripoli. The protests were brutally crushed with live ammunition, but there were few independent witnesses, with journalists having to rely on accounts from protesters who described indiscriminate firing into the crowd from snipers on rooftops around Green Square. One said he thought the snipers were using what sounded like machine-guns.

‘Libya is not Tunisia or Egypt,’ Saif al-Islam said in his television address, denouncing the protesters as ‘drunkards and thugs’. Troops had opened fire on the crowds because they were not trained to handle civil unrest, he said, and the casualties were not as many as was being reported. He finally lost swaths of supporters by declaring that the country was on the brink of civil war and this was being stoked by international media reports which were exaggerating the demonstrations and discontent.

‘We are so disappointed in Saif,’ says Dr Salah. This doctor is so young, I am thinking, young enough to be my child, but he is so brave, so strong emotionally. He continues: ‘I thought maybe, just maybe, he could lead us out of this, but not now.’ He talks about his hopes for his country, talks about the inequalities, the natural resources which most Libyans never see. He talks about how he has not known any other ruler than Colonel Gaddafi, how Zawiya was known previously for being exceptionally boring and conservative. ‘This was a very, very quiet town before,’ he says. ‘The most exciting, unexpected thing was a traffic accident. Now we have tanks all around attacking us. To us, this is unbelievable. It’s not happening to us. We cannot even believe it now.’

Dr Salah is young but articulate and strikingly frank. ‘You don’t know the fear, Alex,’ he says. ‘People have been so afraid, too frightened to speak out, to disagree, to protest. But now there is a strong feeling. They won’t put up with it for any longer. Everyone wants Gaddafi to go.’ He wonders why the West is not helping. ‘How can we do this on our own?’ It’s a question I can’t answer.

He knows all about Lockerbie and the bombing of the Pan Am jet which ended up killing all on board and landing fatally on the Scottish town. He is ashamed at the link with Libya. ‘Do they all hate us where you come from?’ he asks. ‘What do they think of Libya in the UK?’ I can’t tell him anything too heart-warming and say most of our perceptions are based on Colonel Gaddafi and he has given the world a fairly solid impression of himself as an erratic dictator who is both crazed with power and with keeping it.

Dr Salah is both charming and determined. He was diagnosed with leukaemia a short while ago but has had treatment and believes he is in remission. Now this young doctor is facing down Gaddafi and his military machine and he isn’t afraid. He has already beaten worse than them.

Young female nurses come up to us while we are chatting and offer us tea or coffee. I accept the coffee gratefully. Tim and Martin are stirring now and come and join the chat. It’s still early and we have another day of trying to escape from Zawiya. We need to start, and the earlier the better. It’s only when we try to make our early-morning call to London that we realize we have no mobile phone signal. At first I think it’s just my phone or maybe we are in an area of the hospital where there is poor reception. But it’s more serious than that. The network has been cut. The regime is turning the screw.

One of the kindly nurses turns to me. ‘Don’t worry, my friend,’ she says, ‘it will be OK, inshallah.’ I haven’t said anything to her. She has just read the look on my face. ‘Do you want to come into our room, maybe get a coffee?’ I accept, slightly embarrassed by my unguarded expression. She leads me down the corridor with wards on either side to a door which is locked. She knocks. ‘Nabila, open up, it’s just me.’ It takes several knocks and much coaxing before the door is opened by a younger woman. She looks as though she has been crying and she is wiping her eyes with the hijab she is wearing over her head. ‘Come in,’ the first woman says while she hugs her teary friend. ‘You can take off your hijab here,’ she says to me.

There are just three other women in the room. I have been wearing a scarf over my head as I go through the hospital. I don’t want to upset any of these people by appearing to be disrespectful of their religion or their feelings.

When I enter, the mood lifts. I can feel it. Now they have a foreigner in their midst and I am their guest. There’s a rush to find coffee grains and milk powder and, oh my goodness, the foreigner wants sugar. Please don’t worry, I will take it as it is, I say, but they will hear none of it. The wish appears to be to maintain a very Libyan stiff upper lip, but all the same they are friendly and curious.

We’re all worried, all scared, but in this room, just for a few minutes, we can talk and get to know each other a little. It’s brief but we talk about families and our children, exchanging names and ages and anecdotes. We’re not so different after all. I remember Martin and Tim and feel guilty about sipping a much-needed coffee without them.

‘I don’t suppose you have two other cups of coffee for my colleagues, do you?’ I ask timidly. Of course, of course, is the answer. I am just walking out with cups in hand when Martin comes into view. A couple of the women seem to physically withdraw. To them he’s a stranger and a non-Muslim one at that. But Martin is soon getting them to giggle and laugh over their coffee-making abilities.

I find Dr Salah again and tell him I need to go and see the Square. I want to know what is happening there, if anyone has survived. I have to know if the rebels have been beaten into submission or not. I just don’t know what is happening there this morning and we have no communication with anyone. Remarkably, he agrees to take us. His car is in the hospital car park. He knows the routes through the rebel checkpoints and the safest way.

The doctor takes us along several small roads and through a number of barricades manned by rebels who recognize him as someone from Zawiya. Then we can go no farther. Opposition fighters stop us, there’s a small discussion, and we are asked to get into a small, battered people carrier. It takes us down one of the main roads leading to the Square. As we get closer there are signs of battle everywhere, smouldering ashes, broken barricades, burnt-out cars, debris littering the streets. There are holes punched into the walls from shells and rockets and the buildings are peppered with machine-gun pock-marks. We are all stunned. What a battle. What destruction.

As we enter the Square the tanks we had seen the day before have been removed and so have the dead bodies of the Gaddafi soldiers lying close to the caterpillar tracks. Where have they gone? Who has taken them? The military convoy we saw entering the Square repeatedly on Saturday afternoon has been in and retrieved its dead, its injured, and its broken military machinery. It wants to leave no evidence of this one-sided battle, this pitiless massacre.

I am stunned, reeling from this news. There is a small crowd still in the Square and they greet us noisily but wearily as they see us pull up. I fire questions at them. Where did the tanks go? Where are the injured soldiers? What happened the afternoon before, after we left the Square? They reply quickly – the army kept coming back, there was more fighting, more bloodshed, they took their people and their machines and they left.

Dr Salah has gone into the mosque to try to find out the whereabouts of someone he knows, when another doctor approaches our vehicle. ‘You must leave,’ he says. ‘Leave now. We have word the army is coming back. It is dangerous for you here. Go. Go now.’ We don’t need telling twice. We bolt back into the vehicle. ‘Let’s go, let’s go.’ But we are a man down. Dr Salah is still in the mosque. We can’t leave without him.

We shout for him: ‘Come on! Come on!’ I am filled with fear at the thought of being caught here in the Square again by the regime’s army but appalled at the idea of leaving behind our lovely new young friend to the mercy of the Gaddafi security forces. He only drove us here because I asked him and now we might be abandoning him. No. We can’t go. But, for God’s sake, Dr Salah, hurry up, please hurry up. We’re screaming now. We’re all anxious, very anxious. We don’t want to get caught in the middle of the fighting here again. As the seconds go by, I wonder what we will decide to do if he doesn’t come back soon. Will we be brave enough to stay or will we leave him? He has no way out of here if we go.

But the decision is taken for us. Dr Salah appears. Relief. Huge relief. He jumps in and we rush to his car and head back to the hospital, hearts pumping.

I am not sure how long it takes, but it feels like a horribly short time. We are hardly back in the hospital when we hear the noises we have become so familiar with. It’s the dreaded rumble of a large convoy of military vehicles and tanks heading back towards the Square. There are a lot of them – about fifteen or twenty vehicles. Some are trucks just packed with soldiers and, as they are driving along, some are shooting their weapons, spraying bullets along the side of the road. We can’t see what they are shooting at but we soon see the results of the indiscriminate firing. I think about the people still there that we saw just a short time ago and how they will be fighting for their lives now – again. And I think how accurate their warning was to us. How lucky we have been once again. How did they know? Spotters? A tip-off? Instinct?

We know that many of the rebels have been worried about Gaddafi agents being in their midst, worried about informers posing as Opposition fighters so they can better glean information about battle plans and insurrection which they can then pass on to the regime. If the rebels have been infiltrated, could the Gaddafi military machine also have sympathizers inside its ranks who might be doing some tipping off too? It has certainly worked that way in other conflicts. In Afghanistan the newly trained army and police are constantly being infiltrated by Taliban and militants who use their positions – and training – to turn on their trainers, mentors and ‘colleagues’.