Forces loyal to Col. Moammar Gadhafi battled through Tripoli's densely populated neighborhoods, attacking and defending patches of territory across the sprawling, and seemingly divided, capital.
Specific districts of Tripoli have become notorious for their antiregime protests during the six months of Libya's civil war, while other neighborhoods have remained forcibly allied with the leader—loyal men and families who owe their careers, tribal ties and social positions to Col. Gadhafi. These divisions have erupted in increasingly bloody street fighting this week, threatening a vacuum of power and a Balkanized break-up of this city of two million people.
Gunmen loyal to the Libyan leader appeared to rally around the unexpected appearance late Monday by Col. Gadhafi's son Seif el-Islam, at a hotel where the government is housing foreign journalists in Tripoli. Speaking at an impromptu news conference, the younger Gadhafi denied rebel reports that he had been arrested over the weekend when the opposition army rushed into the capital. Both he and his father, who are wanted on charges of war crimes at the International Criminal Court, were apparently still at large on Tuesday, with their whereabouts unknown.
The reappearance of Col. Gadhafi's son marks a major public relations debacle for the rebel leadership, who disseminated news of his arrest to Western allies. It remains unclear whether Seif el-Islam was apprehended and then escaped, or whether the rebel's facts were never confirmed. Videos of Seif el-Islam giving morale-boosting speeches to groups of armed men, apparently filmed Monday night, buzzed across Libyan-centered social media sites on Tuesday, adding to the embarrassment of the Benghazi leadership.
Rebels and forces loyal to the Libyan leader waged fierce street battles Tuesday, the Associated Press reported, a day after opposition fighters swept into the capital with relative ease and claimed to have most of it under their control.
Thick clouds of gray and white smoke filled the sky as heavy gunfire and explosions shook several districts of the city, the AP reported. Some of the heaviest fighting was around Col. Gadhafi's Bab al-Aziziya main compound and military barracks.
The compound, which had been heavily damaged by North Atlantic Treaty Organization air strikes, has emerged as one of the centers of government resistance since tanks rolled out Monday and began firing at rebels trying to get in, the AP reported.
A NATO spokesman said what is left of Col. Gadhafi's forces has shown "no sign of giving up their aggressive actions."
"The tensions are far from being over. The situation is dynamic and complex," said Col. Roland Lavoie.
While it is unclear how many Gadhafi loyalists are left in the capital, those conducting the street fighting are most likely the ideologically honed irregular forces that the leader has used to quell internal dissent and protect his regime for years. They are now squaring off with hastily trained fighters from Tripoli's far-flung districts who fled the capital earlier this year and have been recruited as part of the rebel vanguard to take the capital.
The rebels started organizing the so-called Tripoli Brigades in early June, choosing men with strong family and social ties from the city and then training them in the remote Western Mountains.
Mohammed Abu Sbeaa, a 21-year-old fighter in the Hamer Brigade, named after Tripoli's pre-revolutionary parliament building, said he went through six weeks of training after joining the unit in mid-July. On the same day he showed up at the brigade's barracks, he was issued a uniform and given a soldier identification number. They started training immediately, he said.
Each morning they woke up at 5:30 a.m., went for a 45-minute run, followed by stretching and calisthenics, he said. That was followed by daily drills in marching and formations, which Mr. Sbeaa said was intended to transform civilians with no military experience into soldiers accustomed to taking orders and working with discipline. "It got us used to listening to our commanders and put us in a military mind-set," he said.
The regime fighters still operating in Tripoli appear to be the well-trained paramilitary forces that comprised a parallel security structure in Col. Gadhafi's Libya and that have terrorized the capital while fighting has raged in other parts of the country.
Called "revolutionary committees," these irregular units have been the bastion of Col. Gadhafi's dictatorship over the past 40 years, existing parallel to the established military and the police. Their role has been to be both political commissars for the regime and security agents in local neighborhoods and districts. The members of these militias largely come from Col. Gadhafi's own clan, giving them great motivation to stick with the leader as his regime crumbles.
Recruitment into the revolutionary committees would take personal or family connections, and the men would be put through rigorous ideological tests. Under Col. Gadhafi's leadership, the rewards for service were immense: financial windfalls for lower-level committee members from the collection of security payments among neighborhood shopkeepers, and commercial partnerships for the commanders of these units.
Since the revolt in Libya erupted this spring, these armed revolutionary council militias have been deployed in heavy force across Tripoli. Brandishing automatic rifles, they screech through districts of the capital in Toyota Tundra pick-up trucks, swarming day or night like through neighborhoods known for defiance of Col. Gadhafi.
Residents say these plain-clothes gunmen are responsible for many of the mass arrests that have occurred in Tripoli over the past six months. In February and March, they were blamed for shooting unarmed protesters and raiding hospitals full of wounded demonstrators, taking them from operating wards.
Over the past few days, these same militias have been battling armed locals with mounted heavy machine guns on their trucks, according to residents. Some have also set up defensive perimeters around regime-friendly districts, they said.
Col. Gadhafi seized power in a military coup in 1969. Over the past two decades, he has consciously pulled resources away from the regular army and invested in the revolutionary committees, as a way to mitigate the possibility of a coup against him, according to diplomats and former Libyan military advisers.
In many ways, Col. Gadhafi's mistrust of his military appears to have been well placed. This week, with his capital under threat, the head of his presidential guard signed a secret deal with the rebels and didn't deploy his men to fight, according to rebel commanders. Meanwhile, the elite military brigade commanded by Col. Gadhafi's son Khamis pulled back from its defensive perimeter around Tripoli over the weekend, allowing the rebels to advance eastward into the capital.
The swift advance was a boon for the rebel-led Tripoli Brigade, whose fighters aren't very experienced. In their Western Mountains' training facility, recruits for the brigade attended afternoon classes on how to use the various weapons in the rebel arsenal, including AK-47 and FN assault rifles, heavy caliber antiaircraft machine guns, and antitank rockets. They also learned basic tactics, how to advance and retreat, and raid a building safely.
Their instructors were Libyan expatriates who had served in the Libyan military during its war with Chad in the 1980s. They fell out with Col. Gadhafi during the war and formed what is known as the Libyan Salvation Front, one of the oldest Libyan opposition groups. Many went to the U.S. in exile, and then returned to Libya after the uprising broke out in February, said Mr. Sbeaa, the rebel fighter.
Yussuf Mohammed, a senior coordinator for another Tripoli Brigade, the Qaqaa Brigade, said about 100 of his brigade's 600 fighters received an advanced three-week course in urban warfare tactics given by Qatari special forces.
When rebels in the Western Mountains attacked nearby Gadhafi-controlled villages in late July, the Tripoli brigades' fighters were dispatched to battle to give them a taste of real life combat.
In mid-August the Tripoli Brigades were joined together under a single division commander.
When Zawiya, the coastal city 30 miles east of Tripoli, fell earlier this month, the Tripoli Brigades were deployed forward to a town closer to the capital, where they nervously awaited the orders to attack. Those orders came on Sunday, with Tripoli's Qaqaa Brigade spearheading the assault from Zawiya. Mr. Sbeaa's brigade saw action the following morning, pushing into the capital through the southern suburb of Azzizziya to establish a bridge head for the rebel forces in central Tripoli.
But within 90 minutes of setting up that new headquarters, they came under attack and had to relocate. By Tuesday morning, violent battles were engulfing Tripoli, in what many predict will be a drawn out protracted and bloody struggle.
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