Most of Gadhafi Compound Destroyed in Latest Escalation
TRIPOLI, Libya — In a sudden, sharp escalation of NATO’s air campaign over Libya, warplanes dropped more than 80 bombs on targets in Tripoli in an assault that began Tuesday morning and continued into the predawn hours of Wednesday, obliterating large areas of Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi’s Bab al-Aziziya command compound and what NATO identified as other military targets around the capital. In response, Colonel Qaddafi posted an audio recording on Libyan state television vowing never to surrender or accept defeat. “We welcome death,” he said. “Martyrdom is a million times better.” The unusual daylight raids, the most intense on the Libyan capital since the aerial campaign started more than 11 weeks ago, began in midmorning and continued well past midnight — fulfilling NATO commanders’ recent warnings of an impending rise in the intensity of attacks. What appeared to be bunker-busting bombs laid waste to an area of about two acres in one corner of the compound, destroying six or seven major buildings and leaving a smoking mass of steel and concrete. A Libyan official said Tuesday night that the attacks had killed 31 people and wounded dozens more, many of them security guards and “totally innocent civilians.” That number could not be confirmed. Earlier, officials said that 10 to 15 people lay buried in the ruins of one building alone, though the only casualty seen by Western reporters who were bused to the scene was a man who was pulled from the rubble while they were there, identified by officials as a cleaner. In the absence of any visible rescue operations, the man’s body had been spotted by an American television crew, then laid out beneath a green sheet on a rubble-strewn roadway while an ambulance was summoned. Officials said the extent of the devastation made it impossible for the heavy machinery needed to search for bodies to reach the area. In a city grown accustomed to the NATO raids, the attacks caused a heightened level of alarm, partly because they began so early in the day, when this capital of 2.5 million people was busy with its daily routines. Most of the nearly 4,000 strike sorties flown by NATO since the air war began in March have been carried out deep into the night, partly, NATO officials have said, to minimize the risk of civilian casualties. But Tuesday’s daylight raids emptied much of the city of traffic, with stores in large areas of the city shuttered and the few people out hurrying to complete their business and find shelter. Colonel Qaddafi’s nine-minute audio message was his first public pronouncement in nearly four weeks, when he spoke after an earlier NATO attack on the Tripoli command compound. That message, also delivered in a recorded radio address, struck a defiant posture, telling NATO that he was “in a place where you can’t reach me — in the hearts of my people.” On Tuesday, the words seemed to aim at the morale-boosting tone of Winston Churchill’s speeches when Britain faced the threat of German invasion in 1940. “The Libyan people right now are living hours of glory of which future generations will be proud,” Colonel Qaddafi said. “Our children and our grandchildren will be proud of us and of our resilience and courage today. We shall defeat the enemy; our fate does not matter.” Addressing NATO, he went on: “You are setting fire to the sea, you are setting fire to the desert, you are chasing a mirage. What do you want? What do you want? Did we cross the sea and attack you? Why this consistent bombing? Are you trying to force us into submission? You will not; we will never submit.” With the repeated bombing of his Tripoli compound, Colonel Qaddafi has become a fugitive in his own capital, so NATO and people in the rebel underground in Tripoli have said, forced to stay constantly on the move. His isolation has been compounded by signs that support for him has ebbed in wide areas of Tripoli, and growing numbers of high-level defections, from the top ranks of the government and the army. On Tuesday, Libya’s labor minister, Al-Amin Manfur, added his name to the growing exodus, declaring at a meeting in Geneva of the International Labor Organization that he was now supporting the rebel government, the National Transitional Council, Agence France-Presse reported. But Western leaders have been cautious, renewing warnings in recent days that it could still take weeks or months to topple the Libyan leader. The warnings have come with vows to intensify the airstrikes and to assist the rebels in breaking a stalemate in eastern Libya. A senior NATO diplomat said on Tuesday that the daytime barrage was consistent with the steady escalation of attacks in and around Tripoli by allied warplanes, missile-firing drones and, more recently, armed helicopters, with the majority of the strikes carried out by British and French aircraft. “It’s a continuing sign that the pressure is increasing all the time,” said the diplomat. “There’s a psychological aspect to the campaign, and we’re sending a clear message: There is only one way out, and that is to go.” The intensified campaign comes in advance of a NATO ministerial meeting in Brussels on Wednesday, where NATO officials are hoping to get more countries involved in Libya. In Washington, President Obama promised an increase in the punishing NATO effort against the Libyan leader’s government until Colonel Qaddafi left office. “I think it is just a matter of time before Qaddafi goes,” Mr. Obama said. “What you’re seeing across the country is an inexorable trend of the regime forces being pushed back, being incapacitated.” Mr. Obama’s comments, delivered in a news conference with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, came as Mrs. Merkel joined the growing chorus calling for Colonel Qaddafi to step down. While Germany is not part of the NATO bombing mission, Mrs. Merkel said that her country would try to help once Colonel Qaddafi left. On the evidence seen by Western reporters who went to the Qaddafi command compound on Tuesday, it is unlikely that he or his top political and military associates could still be operating there. Officials led reporters through a landscape of total destruction, pointing to a couple of buildings they said were for administration, one of them a three-story structure where the cleaner’s body was found. Beside it was a building said to have provided emergency power to the compound. A few hundred feet away, more vast rubble piles were all that remained of buildings that the officials said had included a reception center and conference hall, and a V.I.P. guesthouse. Amid the rubble, all was still, the only sound that of water pumping from fractured hydrants and garden hoses.
