ARRUJBAN: Forces loyal to Muammar Gaddafi have cut electricity supplies to much of the Western Mountains, threatening water supplies and stepping up a war of attrition with rebels who hold the plateau. The blackout, which began five days ago, has coincided with an increase in shelling of the rebel command center of Zintan and the town of Arrujban. A Reuters reporter in Zintan heard about a dozen rockets strike the outskirts of the town on Sunday. He said they did not appear to have landed in a populated area and there were no reports of casualties. Rebels are scrambling to bring in generators through the border crossing they hold with Tunisia to restore wells that supply most of the water to this arid region. Temperatures have soared with the onset of summer. The electricity stations lie in the desert plains, where pro-Gaddafi forces are positioned. At night, Zintan is bathed in darkness, but lights are on in the nearby Gaddafi-held village of Ryayna. Some Gaddafi positions are near the electricity stations themselves, possibly to dissuade NATO from bombing for fear of damaging the power supply. “Because of the power cuts, we can't pump the water,” said Abu Bakr, a senior rebel in Arrujban. “The wells are too deep to pump manually.” He said rebels were working to bring a large generator from neighbouring Tunisia to pump water from the main well, known as Khartoum, which supplies Arrujban. There are water reserves in tanks, he said, that could last another 10 days. The town has two large generators, one of which is supplying power to the medical clinic. The western front of the Libyan war amounts to a chain of towns running more than 200 km from the Tunisian border across the bleak mountain plateau to Zintan, some 150 km southwest of the Libyan capital. Gaddafi's forces hold the desert plains and, at their closest point, are level with Zintan in Ryayna, some 10-15 km from the town center. With their planes grounded by NATO, forces loyal to Gaddafi are struggling to retake the high ground from the rebels. But the rebels' isolation, and their limited means to resupply through the Tunisian border, will work against them the longer the conflict drags on. Rebels have cleared a stretch of the main rebel-held road as a landing strip, saying they hope NATO will give clearance for aid and possibly weapons to be flown in from the de facto rebel capital Benghazi in eastern Libya. Rebels in Arrujban say pro-Gaddafi forces some 20 km away in the plains have stepped up late-night shelling over the past five days. Similarly in Zintan, the town center has been hit by rockets at least four times over the past week, forcing the evacuation of medical aid agency Doctors Without Borders. ‘No oil production until fields safe' The Libyan rebels' finance minister says the oil fields located in the eastern half of the country under opposition control will not resume production until it's safe to send workers to the fields. Ali Tarhouni says the rebels are “working day and night to ensure that we have that protection” and as soon as he feels “there's a minimum level of security, we'll start the oil fields”. He cautioned Sunday that “it won't be a matter of a week,” and “it's going to take some time”. Before the uprising against Muammar Gaddafi's regime, Libya produced about 1.6 million barrels per day.
