JADU, Libya — As armed rebellions go, the enthusiastic revolutionaries here in Libya’s western mountains are amateurs, many schooled in battle from playing video games. They confess they sometimes fire their rifles over the heads of their enemies because they don’t like the sight of blood.
But being bad at war might turn out to be a good thing for Libya.
As a few thousand poorly armed, barely trained young rebels wearing flip-flops and soccer jerseys advance and retreat against the loyalist forces of Moammar Gaddafi, a quiet but perhaps equally important revolution is taking place here behind the front lines, where people are reassembling a society after four decades of dictatorship, trying to hammer concepts such as democracy onto ancient tribal ways.
At a checkpoint near the front lines in the town of al-Qualish, as the two sides lobbed rockets at each other, a young rebel fighter with a rifle dating from the Italian occupation in the first half of the 20th century shouted to a reporter, “Thomas Jefferson good!”
Where once there was the paranoid silence of state censorship, now there are over-caffeinated “media centers” with satellite Internet and lots of ashtrays, staffed by eager young volunteers speaking bits of Manchester English, obsessed with this brand-new thing called free Internet access.
At the Wazin border crossing with Tunisia, where the charred remains of a couple of tanks line the empty roads, the Free Libya passport control officer demanded, “Hey, friend me!”
Each of the uprisings of the Arab Spring has its own narrative and personality, and here in the mountains south of Tripoli, where Berber shepherds still tend flocks beside the crumbling walls of thousand-year-old granaries, the vibe is eager, confident, hopeful.
The rebels want to take Tripoli, they want to remove Gaddafi and his sons, but they don’t want to slaughter a lot of people to do it. That is, at least, what they say now.
“Because later, we will have to make a country together,” said Ibrahim Taher, a teacher who commands 130 men.
Members of the new city councils are as likely to quote Martin Luther King Jr. as the Koran. Rebel military commanders say they wish they didn’t have to shoot at fellow Libyans. They are slightly less squeamish about shooting at foreign fighters dragged into the conflict from poor nations such as Mali and Niger.
A common reason given for the slowness of the advance toward Tripoli?
“There are too many families in the way,” said Jamu Ibrahim, a top rebel leader in Zintan.
Whether this attitude will persist if fighting becomes more intense is hard to predict. But there are few calls for revenge or bloodletting. It is not unusual for rebel commanders to have been officers in Gaddafi’s military. Their troops accept them.
“Who knows Gaddafi best but the ones who served him? If they leave his army with pure hearts, we can use their help,” said Muftah Fitoure, a teacher who mans an antiaircraft gun, mounted in the bed of a pickup truck and repurposed to shoot horizontally. He says the first time he fired it was in battle.
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