Eagle Guardian: The War of 2010

One Hundred and Seventy–Four

History would call it the Battle of Sirte. The vast majority of the fighting took place outside of that Libyan coastal city in the desert though there was some scattered fighting within Sirte. The Western media had a small presence there and Al Jazeera had a camera crew in Sirte too. Thus, it would be the ‘Battle of Sirte’ and not the ‘Fight on the Misrata-Benghazi Highway’.

Gaddafi sent his army down that highway after forces from the western half of the country had assembled in the Misrata area. They moved towards Sirte with Gaddafi’s firm instructions to his field commanders to retake his ‘home’ city. There were French troops there, maybe some Portuguese as well with both supported by the Americans out to sea and in the skies. Sirte would be liberated and those European neo-colonial invaders – he’d called them as such on Al Jazeera; hoping those words would reach far and wide – driven back into the sea or afterwards marched back across the desert to Tripoli in chains. After Sirte, it would to be Benghazi where Gaddafi’s army was meant to go, but Sirte was to be dealt with first.

The approach of Libya’s rag-tag army didn’t come as a surprise to no one. Gaddafi had boastfully announced its attack… though had been doing so repeatedly for several days beforehand. American and NATO reconnaissance assets monitored its gathering and the activities around Misrata it had undertaken before it started moving. The Libyans were attacked long before they started rolling. The gathering of strength there was a tempting target and its intention was known. However, when it started moving on Sirte, those distant attacks were increased. The Libyans were attempting to move under a rolling air defence screen to try to stop air and missile attacks. As the Russians had found to their sorrow in Poland, this was a difficult thing to do. Putin’s armies struggled: Gaddafi’s armies failed miserably. The Libyans were out in the open and away from civilian areas. Significant fire power was unleashed against them. The Americans had only one carrier involved today – the USS John C. Stennis had its aircraft in the sky though the USS Ronald Reagan was transiting the Suez Canal – but the French, the Italians, the Portuguese and the Spanish all had aircraft flying. The Egyptians, using F-16s and Mirage-Vs & -2000s, got in on the act too with their own attacks made. Mobile SAM-launchers and anti-aircraft guns were unable to do much when they came under direct attack themselves but more than that their whole rolling network of vehicles – radar vans, communications sets etc – were hit as well. As these were struck from above, so too was everything else moving.

Gaddafi had spent years equipping Libya with fancy military equipment. Much of it was Soviet-era gear though there were also some modern Russian pieces including a few Western-sourced armoured vehicles as well. Much of this spent its lifetime in Libyan service sitting unused. Libya didn’t have the manpower, trained or otherwise, to operate it all properly. Gaddafi’s army was always a paper tiger: Libya under him had for years used military threats, terror attacks and commando forces in the main in activities rather than all of its tanks, tracked armoured vehicles, self-propelled guns and such like. Now much of that had been removed from its long storage, crewed with regulars and reservists to be sent into a battle. The Libyan Army had never operated like this, even in exercises. The ‘Army of Liberation’ coming down from Misrata deserved its description of a rag-tag force. Among the organised battalions of armour, mechanised infantry and artillery there were many lighter forces. Libya’s commandos were mobile and so too were Gaddafi’s mercenaries. Back during the Cold War, he’d sent his Islamic Legion to war elsewhere in Africa though in recent years such a once much-used force had been drawn down. The Islamic Legion was back though, Gaddafi had declared to the world, and would fight for Sirte. It wasn’t formed of volunteers nor even real mercenaries. Instead, black Africans from across the continent had long been lured to Libya with the promises of riches for work: they were meant to send their money back home to families. Arab Libya exploited them and made them effective slaves. When the crisis erupted with the West in the summer of 2010, Gaddafi re-established the Islamic Legion. Labourers and servants from across the nation were handed rifles, cash and vehicles. They were promised more too as long as they fought. There was no other choice for them either. First out of Misrata were hundreds of pick-up trucks laden with lightly-armed men given no protection. As many as a dozen – a tight fit – were loaded into each these vehicles and sent out ahead. There were Libyan commandos (their operations led by one of Gaddafi’s sons) among them, hiding among the crazy columns, and it was they who would get to Sirte to fight there. As to the Islamic Legion, NATO and Coalition aircraft blew them apart.

The rest of the Libyan force was right behind. Seemingly hundreds of vehicles broke down and many others got lost when leaving the highway. Others came onwards, charging towards the French. Few of these men had ever fired the weapons mounted on their tanks & armoured vehicles while the infantry carried had never met a ‘real’ opponent. There were a lot of them though. Should they have crashed into the French and made a serious fight of it, a fair one too, they still would have lost but they would have killed many of them too. The Coalition didn’t want to see that happen.

Libyan commandos out ahead – those who weren’t blown up alongside the Islamic Legion – reported that the French were withdrawing from forward position and running back to Sirte. Chase them, came the orders, and take Sirte. That was only half done. The commandos raced ahead and appeared to open the way into Sirte for the juggernaut coming behind them. All that they had achieved though was to lead thousands of Libyan soldiers to their deaths.

On two sides on land, off the coast and in the sky, the Coalition boxed the Libyans into a kill box. The air attacks increased. Naval shelling took place followed by land-based guns. The Libyans ran into anti-tank minefields and found that along the highway, there was a scattering of bobby-traps to bring vehicles to a fiery halt which blocked the way for everyone else. The Libyans came to a halt. At that moment, the air strikes lifted and in came a mass of opposing armour. The French had light armoured vehicles though had also brought in some heavier tanks too. The numbers of these were impressive but nothing on the scale that the Egyptians had brought to the fight. Egypt’s army was believed by Gaddafi to be at Ajdabiya, maybe Brega at best… at the very least a hundred miles away from Sirte. They’d crossed the desert though and formed the southern side of the kill box.

The massacre outside of Sirte would go on for almost two days. The Libyans wouldn’t officially surrender. Thousands deserted while others did surrender but many more didn’t. They fought on. The Coalition had believed that the Army of Liberation would crumble under such a barrage but continuing defensive fire came. That was responded to by overwhelming force by the Egyptians especially who had orders from Mubarak back in Cairo to destroy the Libyans for good. Sarkozy in Paris was in the same mood to see the same thing done though when detailed reports came back to him of the mass of Libyan casualties, so many of them the Islamic Legion ‘mercenaries’ but also Libyan conscripts from poor families, he baulked at the idea of carrying on. The Egyptians did though. They littered the desert with death. Portuguese forces inside Sirte were readied to go forward to help in rounding up prisoners but they were eventually held back too because walking into the amount of firepower being used would mean certain death for anyone caught by stray explosive rounds.

Finally, the barrage would cease. The Army of Liberation was no more. Gaddafi’s regime still boasted thousands more troops but this was their very best – a sorry show it had been – and it was no more.

Far from Sirte, Italian and Spanish forces around Benghazi worked with the Egyptians to aid the Libyan rebels in securing Cyrenaica. Eastern Libya was relatively ‘quiet’ in comparison. Gaddafi’s loyalists were hunted down aided by locals who wanted to join in the fight, including often trying to kill prisoners taken by their new allies from abroad. Airbases were worked on to get them operational through Cyrenaica and there was also the transport of many military stores too. The Coalition was building its rear base on the ground in Libya here with the logistical infrastructure to support a long campaign in the country. Gaddafi still held the west – Tripolitania – and Libya wasn’t yet beaten. While this rear area occupation continued, the NATO forces were becoming more and more uneasy. The Egyptians were rather blasé about the issue of so many armed and radical locals but the Italians and the Spanish weren’t. The French and Americans (both having non-combat units in the east) were becoming aware of the issue too. The radicalisation was continuing. Gaddafi’s rule had been thrown off but there were murmurs of discontent about ‘crusaders’. Governments back home in European capitals issued instructions for their forces not to provoke the locals though the opposite approach was taken in Washington.

The CIA and Green Berets undertook several raids against some of these locals. They tried to keep it quiet and only informed their allies after the fact, stating that they were hunting Al Qaeda. You couldn’t keep things like this quiet…not from anyone.


War still raged elsewhere in the Middle East. Lebanon remained a battlefield and so did much of southern Syria. Assad’s war with Israel had been lost while Hezbollah had fought Israel to a standstill – something hotly denied in Tel Aviv – as each of them engaged the other across the ruined nation which was Lebanon.

In a wider sense, nothing had changed in the past week. Israel was still trying to use Jordan as a conduit to get Assad to end the war and a return to the status quo ante. Biden, who was regretting more every day the decision to send American troops into Syria, kept the pressure up here on Netanyahu to force a solution though in Tel Aviv, Israel’s PM wanted the same thing despite the bluster of saying he wouldn’t be told what to do. Israeli casualties – the dead, injured and missing – were staggering and causing domestic problems for him. Israel wanted out of the war in Lebanon too. A deal with Hezbollah was considered impossible but to stop the fighting was desired. Iranian interference continued and Israel remained active in trying to stop prisoners being spirited away at the behest of Tehran. Turkey kept up the pretence of disinterest though its military forces remained on alert. Leaks from Ankara spoke of ‘Turkish peacekeepers’ in Lebanon: neither America, Israel nor the unofficial Coalition partner nations across the Middle East wanted to see that happen especially due the recently-increasing Turkish-Iranian relations. In Iraq, where there had been all that trouble since the Third World War started – some said it would have happened anyway; others strongly disagreed – there were still foreign fighters crossing into Syria than no one had yet been able to stop.

Assad was waited upon to give a reply to the Jordanians about ending the fighting in his country. In Amman, the waited. They waited in Tel Aviv and Washington too. No reply came though.

It started to become clear why. As had been seen in Libya, the regime was coming under attack from within. News had been slow to come out and when it did it was all initially fragmented, which alone looked like not much, but a wider picture was being seen. Syria had its own rebels. Some were anti-Assad, other were Jihadists. They were fighting Assad’s security forces and Syria’s leader, the only figure who could conceivably bring an end to the war here, had his attention fully on that now. His regime wouldn’t be the house of cards like Libya was though, not by a long shot.