Libya

Libyan Oil Minister Shukri Ghanem has defected from the Qaddafi regime and fled to Tunisia. This defection is a big deal. Ghanem had been at OPEC when Libya was under economic sanctions, and his return to Libya as prime minister and head of the ruling party in 2003 was intended to signal Muammar Qaddafi’s return […]

I received this press release from the Doha Debates (a member of the Qatar Foundation) by email. The results vis-a-vis Libya are not surprising, since Qaddafi is widely hated in the Arab world and everyone watched in horror as he had tank salvos and cluster bombs fired at non-combatants. But that last bit about being […]

Chairman of the Transitional National Council based in Benghazi, Mustafa Abdel Jalil, met Thursday in London with British Prime Minister David Cameron. Abdel Jalil said that the recent defense of the port of Misrata from deadly attacks by Qaddafi brigades was made possible by the arrival of light arms at the port, with which the […]

The Libyan struggle will likely go on for some time, but the so-called stalemate did witness some movement on Tuesday. Indeed, NATO announced the inauguration of a Phase 2 of the war. NATO jets hit further command and control sites in Tripoli, the capital. They also hit Qaddafi brigades positions in western Misrata. At the […]

I’m going to play skeptic on the Libyan government account of the NATO airstrike. The cover story is that Muammar Qaddafi and one of his wives was visiting son Saif al-Arab and the grandchildren and suddenly a dastardly NATO airstrike killed the son and three grandchildren but left Muammar and the wife unharmed. NATO says […]

CNN’s Ray Sayeh intrepidly reports from Misrata on the further shelling its port area took from Qaddafi brigades on Wednesday. Those loyalist brigades have been pushed out of the center of the town by the Free Libya forces, but they are still able to sit in the western suburbs and to target the port area. […]

The city of Misrata, a port and steel-making city and Libya’s third-largest urban center, was sentenced to death 7 weeks ago by the Qaddafi family, which sent its armored brigades and professional snipers in to punish the entire population for having dared throw off their fascist rule by ‘revolutionary committee.’ For seven weeks, the some […]