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NATO said on Friday that it would not apologize for the killing of at least four people in what Libyan rebels said was “likely” a mistaken attack on them by allied warplanes in the east of the country — the second case of friendly-fire deaths in a week.
The commander of the rebel army fighting to oust Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi said on Thursday that the target of what he called “a fierce attack” from the air was a column of tanks deployed to the front lines by the insurgents for the first time.
“It is likely it is NATO by mistake,” the commander, Gen. Abdul Fattah Younes, said, adding that the rebels had notified NATO well in advance that the tanks were headed to the battlefield.
But, at a news conference in Naples, where the alliance has its operational headquarters, Rear Adm. Russell Harding, the deputy commander of the NATO operation, said the alliance had not been informed that the rebels were using tanks at the time the attack took place. The military movements in the area where the attack took place were “very fluid” at the time, he said, according to news reports, with vehicles going backward and forward.
“I am not apologizing,” he said. “The situation on the ground was and remains extremely fluid, and until yesterday we did not have information” that the rebels planned to deploy tanks.
“Our role is to protect civilians,” he added, “and tanks have been used to threaten civilians” in other parts of Libya, notably the contested, western port of Misurata where loyalist forces have used tanks against Colonel Qaddafi’s opponents.
On Thursday, General Younes said he was still waiting for an apology from NATO. “It is not possible to make a mistake with 20 tanks advancing on a large patch of desert land,” he said. “We hope that such a mistake will not be repeated.”
He did not say how many tanks were destroyed, but a tank driver in the convoy said eight were damaged or destroyed.
Later in the day, artillery or rocket fire near the strategic city of Ajdabiya sent hundreds of cars fleeing the city in a panic north toward the relative safety of Benghazi. Doctors in Ajdabiya and Benghazi said the dead included a doctor who was in an ambulance near the scene of the air attack.
The episode served to underscore the lack of coordination between the Western alliance and the Libyan rebels during a war in which both sides drive similar vehicles as the front lines shift rapidly.
The strike, against 17 rebel tanks making their debut on the battlefield, was a particularly untimely setback for a campaign that had lost momentum in the past week and has withered before the pro-Qaddafi forces’ overwhelming advantage in equipment and heavy weapons. On Thursday, General Younes said that trainers from Qatar were teaching rebel fighters how to use antitank weapons.
The rebels have been hinting for several days that they would soon unveil a surprise at the front. Survivors of the attack said their convoy included equipment confiscated from Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi‘s military that in recent weeks had been refurbished and made road-worthy. They said it was being brought forward for a fresh attack against the oil town of Brega, which fell to the loyalists this week.
The convoy included T-55 and T-72 tanks, according to General Younes, who said that the rebels gave NATO frequent updates throughout the day on Thursday about the position of the convoy, which included buses and armored vehicles.
Shortly before the attack, about 30 miles southwest of Ajdabiya, the convoy stopped on the side of the road, said Alsounese Fazan, who was driving a jeep with the convoy. Mr. Fazan, who was being treated for minor injuries at Al Jalaa hospital in Benghazi, said the rebels heard the sound of what they thought were NATO aircraft in the morning.
“We shouted ‘God is great!’ and after that we heard nothing,” he said. “And then they bombed us.” He said that he saw four separate explosions, one of which was about 100 yards away.
Another wounded fighter, Amin Jaman, 32, said that all of the vehicles in the convoy were flying the bright, tricolor Libyan rebel flag. He said that he was standing on top of a stationary tank and never heard the sound of an airplane when the first ordnance exploded nearby.
This would be the second time in less than a week that NATO warplanes struck a rebel target. On Saturday, Western warplanes killed 13 rebels in the same region of eastern Libya, where the rebels have been fighting a seesaw battle for weeks with the better equipped and trained forces of Colonel Qaddafi.
That first mistake was brushed off by the rebels, but this one set off outrage among the troops, with some fighters shouting “Down With NATO” along the road from Brega to Ajdabiya, The Associated Press reported.
NATO has also been criticized by rebel leaders for what they say is its failure to keep up the pace of attacks on the loyalist forces that was established in the first two weeks of the conflict. NATO officials have rejected the criticism, saying that the alliance was flying more missions every day.
Ambulances near the scene rushed many of the wounded to the hospital in Ajdabiya, and then returned to the area of the front lines to retrieve more people. A doctor, Salah al-Awami, who drove in one of the ambulances, stopped to ask rebels where to find other wounded people, according to a colleague who was traveling with him, Dr. Ahmed Abdulrahman Zwei. At that moment, he said, an explosion in the desert nearby blew out the windows of the ambulance, and fatally wounded Dr. Awami.
“The shrapnel came from the desert and passed right through the vehicle,” Dr. Zwei said.
It was not immediately clear whether that blast was caused by an airstrike or an unrelated attack. At times during the past week, fire from the Qaddafi forces has reached the area where the ambulance was struck.
Two witnesses said they suspected that the ambulance might have been hit by reckless rebel fire. A contingent of rebels, known as the Darnah Brigade, has for several days been firing 57-millimeter air-to-ground rockets from the back of pickup trucks.
The rockets, carried in pods removed from confiscated government attack helicopters, fly wildly, and the brigade often fired them uselessly into the desert. Witnesses said the brigade was firing its rockets again in the vicinity of the convoy, at no apparent targets, and might have struck the ambulance with errant fire. General Younes said that after the airstrikes, Colonel Qaddafi’s forces attacked the rebels from three directions, forcing a retreat toward Ajdabiya.
Rebel fighters said that later in the afternoon, a half-dozen rockets or other munitions exploded at the western edge of the city. The explosions caused a mass panic, as civilians and rebels, including some with heavy weapons, briefly packed the highway north to Benghazi.
General Younes said that by Thursday night, the rebels had regained some of the ground they had lost, retaking “large sections” of the road toward Brega.
In Tripoli, a government spokesman said NATO airstrikes hit at least three military academies in the vicinity of the capital. The spokesman, Musa Ibrahim, said NATO had stepped up its attacks around the country, apparently in response to the rebel leaders’ criticism.
“It seems they felt sorry for these guys crying on TV and they had a wave of attacks,” Mr. Ibrahim said, adding that he thought NATO attacked during the day “to maximize the terror.”
NYT
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