BENGHAZI: Fighter jets hit aircraft and a crossroads military base deep inside Libya Thursday and NATO sailors prepared to board suspect ships, blocking new weapons and foreign fighters from resupplying Muammar Gaddafi's depleted forces by land, sea and air. France set a time frame on the international action at days or weeks – not months. The possibility of a looming deadline raised pressure on rebel forces. So did the arms embargo, which keeps both Gaddafi and his outgunned opposition from getting more weapons. The rebels were so strapped Thursday that they handed out sneakers – and not guns – at one of their checkpoints. “We are facing cannons, T-72 and T-92 tanks, so what do we need? We need anti-tank weapons, things like that,” Col. Ahmed Omar Bani, a military spokesman told reporters in Benghazi, the de facto rebel capital. “We are preparing our army now. Before there was no army, from now there is an idea to prepare a new army with new armaments and new morals.” The Gaddafi regime appeared equally hard-pressed, asking international forces to spare its broadcast and communications infrastructure. “Communications, whether by phones or other uses, are civilian and for the good of the Libyan nation to help us provide information, knowledge and coordinate everyday life. If these civilian targets are hit, it will make life harder for millions of civilians around Libya,” Moussa Ibrahim, a government spokesman, told reporters in Tripoli. Representatives for the two sides were expected to attend an African Union meeting in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Friday, according to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who described it as a part of an effort to reach a ceasefire and political solution. Ban told the Security Council Thursday that the Libyan government troops are disregarding a UN ceasefire order despite heavy bombing of Gaddafi's forces by an international coalition. “Libyan authorities have repeatedly claimed they have instituted a ceasefire,” Ban said at UN headquarters in New York. “We see no evidence that that is the case. On the contrary, fierce battles have continued.” NATO appeared to move closer to assuming command of the military operation in Libya when Turkey's foreign minister was quoted as saying an agreement has been reached. Libyan state television showed blackened and mangled bodies that it said were victims of airstrikes in Tripoli. Rebels have accused Gaddafi's forces of taking bodies from the morgue and pretending they are civilian casualties. The French strikes hit a base about 250 km south of the Libyan coastline, as well as a Libyan combat plane that had just landed outside the strategic city of Misrata, France's military said. In Tripoli, Libyan Deputy Foreign Minister Khaled Kaim said that the “military compound at Juffra” was among the targets hit. Juffra is one of at least two air bases deep in Libya's interior, on main routes that lead from neighboring countries in the Sahara region that have been suppliers of arms and fighters for the Gaddafi regime. The town of Sabha, about 620 km south of Tripoli, has another air base and international airport and is a major transit point for the ethnic Tuareg fighters from Mali and Niger who have fought for Gaddafi for the past two decades. Malian officials say hundreds of Tuareg men have left to fight in Libya against the recent uprising. Abdel-Rahman Barkuli, a Libyan in exile originally from Sabha, said communications with his family there were abruptly cut Wednesday night and heavy security is preventing residents from moving in or out. He said residents in Sabha reported airstrikes before dawn: two targeted radars and one targeted a military camp. The airstrikes apparently bypassed a mountain facility that stores ammunition and heavy weaponry for the Gaddafi regime. UN human rights experts said hundreds of people have disappeared in Libya over the past few months, and said there were fears that those who vanished were taken to secret locations to be tortured or executed. Meanwhile, rebels trying to advance on Ajdabiyah came under intermittent shelling from Gaddafi forces. There appeared to be efforts to negotiate a deal to end the standoff in Ajdabiyah, but details were unclear and conflicting.
