GCC seeks no-fly zone as Libya battle rages
"(The foreign ministers)...called on the ... (UN) Security Council to protect Libyan civilians, including through a no-fly zone," said a statement issued after the ministers' meeting, read by Abdulrahman Al-Attiyah, secretary-general of the Gulf Cooperation Council which groups regional countries.
The ministers also called for an urgent Arab League meeting to discuss Libya.
Meanwhile, Libya's army fought rebels for control of a key eastern oil port on Monday and a rebel official said Muammar Qaddafi could attack oil fields like a "wounded wolf" if the West did not stop him with airstrikes.
The rebels had punched through government forces in the oil towns of Brega and Ras Lanouf, then Bin Jawad and Al-Nawfaliyeh on their way west to Sirte, a Qaddafi stronghold, but made the mistake of leaving Bin Jawad, west of Ras Lanouf, undefended.
Qaddafi's forces then counter-attacked by land and air, advancing eastward before digging in tanks to defend Bin Jawad, 525 km east of Tripoli. Rebels said there were only 5 km between the two forces.
"We heard our positions would be bombed, so we took our weapons away," one rebel said on the windswept highway outside Ras Lanouf, where camel herders occasionally appear from desert scrub. Another said: "We took them out into the desert." The eastern fighting zone is the scene of attack and counter-attack by the loose-knit group of young rebel volunteers and defectors and the armed forces in a barren landscape between west and east Libya. A Libyan opposition spokesman based across the border in Tunisia told Arab News that he and his colleagues had "lost contact with our people in Zawiyah".
Misrata was quiet yesterday according to local residents contacted by Arab News. They reported that Sunday had seen intense fighting in which they had managed to repulse Qaddafi's forces who used tanks but no aircraft. Twenty-one people died and 92 were injured, they said.
Radio Misrata, he said, was still in opposition hands and broadcasting. The hospital was ready to receive fresh casualties but there were shortages of medicines and supplies.
People wounded in fighting over the city are being treated on hospital floors because of a catastrophic shortage of medical facilities in the besieged city, a resident said on Monday. The largely inexperienced rebels lack their enemy's firepower. But their agility, often fairly chaotic at the front, has given them a degree of protection from Qaddafi's forces, who have proved more effective at quashing the rebellion in the west around the Libyan leader's Tripoli power base.
President Barack Obama said the US and its NATO allies are still considering a military response to violence in Libya, arrording to AP.
Obama said the US will stand with the Libyan people as they face "unacceptable" violence. He said he has authorized millions of dollars in humanitarian aid. Kazinform cites Arab News. See www.arabnews.com