VANTAGE POINT, No. 4. Reading the Rebels in Misurata, Libya.

By C.J. CHIVERS
 
One pair of questions often asked about the war in Libya have been these: Just who are the rebels who have taken up arms against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s government, and how do they fight?

A video recorded this spring by an independent photographer in Misurata, if watched closely, offers a set of answers to these questions, and raises many others.

Earlier this year, this blog began the Vantage Point series, presenting raw and often uncut video from Afghanistan. (You can watch earlier segments here, here or here.) The series took a necessary pause as many of us were called away from months in the field in Libya and elsewhere. The video posted here now, which rates a warning for graphic content, provides a chance to revive the feature and to explore important questions about Libya’s armed uprising and the men participating in it.

First, watch the raw video, below, which shows a group of rebels pressing an attack against a group of pro-Qaddafi soldiers they had surrounded in a small residential compound near Tripoli Street, which was the area of some of the most intensive fighting during the siege. (Note: This is actually two video files stitched together. There was a break of about one minute after the man most prominently featured was wounded. During this time, the videographer, who was using a digital camera that also shoots video, took several still images before switching back to the camera’s video mode.)


To the untrained eye, this might seem a mad blur of urban combat, a scramble within a storm of confusion and gunfire. But with a little guidance, it can start to make sense.

Like this: Rebels mass and mill about in an alley as several of them prepare a truck-mounted M40 recoilless rifle to fire. Nearby is the wall of a small compound, within which the surrounded Qaddafi soldiers have been trapped. Rebels fire rifles to suppress the Qaddafi soldiers. Then one of them fires the heavy weapon, which causes an explosion as the round strikes the face of the compound wall. One of the rebels — his name is Hamid Shwaili — falls. He calls for help. Other rebels at a nearby building fire machine guns into the compound as the wounded man’s friends drag him back up the alley, to what appears to have been a small garage, where doctors try to administer immediate aid. Near death, Mr. Shwaili is soon rushed to an ambulance, bound for a hospital, no doubt. If you watch very closely — note the dark puddle that becomes visible the moment Mr. Shwaili is first moved from the dusty ground, and note as well the stained clothing of the doctor who carries him into the ambulance — you will see his blood loss has been extreme.

Even this does not do justice to all that is happening, or capture the intensity of the gunfire as Mr. Shwaili’s friends try to save him. So now watch an edited, narrated version of much of the same footage, for a fuller analysis.

The video was shot by Andre Liohn, an independent photographer and videographer who spent much of April and May in Misurata, during some of the most pitched fighting in the siege. Mr. Liohn was working on a video project for the International Committee of the Red Cross about medical care in the conflict. He gained much of his access by riding to the front several times each day with ambulance crews.

As he reviewed his footage, Mr. Liohn realized he had captured something that fell outside his primary subject. What he had here, he knew, was a visual document of who many of Libya’s rebels are. And he was taken by Mr. Shwaili’s fate. At one point he tried to find his family and friends, to learn more of the man. Mr. Shwaili, it seems, was an unemployed mechanic caught up in the turmoil for Libya’s future, and met his end holding a rifle in a battle for Misurata’s once quiet streets.

Those who have spent time among Libya’s rebels will recognize these scenes and the type of young men in them. These men were not professional soldiers when their war began. Rather, they became almost accidental gunmen. They were civilians who, after public demonstrations against Colonel Qaddafi slipped into war, found themselves fighting against their nation’s own army for control of their home city. Sometimes — as here — that fight was carried out house by house.

Not all of these men have proved to be brave; in eastern Libya, journalists watched as many of them fled under fire, again and again. But Misurata was different than eastern Libya; in the main, the men in this city took to their fight. Mr. Liohn’s footage captured both their courage and their inexperience, and also showed, in subtle ways, that in a matter of weeks many of them had learned old lessons of urban war. After this particular fight, we walked the ground, and saw telltale signs that weeks of exposure to modern street-by-street combat had impressed upon the rebels ways to fight, and to survive.

This image, for example, was taken in the same room where Mr. Shwaili had first been dragged and treated.
C.J. Chivers/The New York Times

It shows hastily made firing ports for rebels who fired on the Qaddafi-held residential compound. These firing positions were not ideal, if only because a cinderblock wall will not stop many kinds of munitions in the Qaddafi soldiers’ possession. But by this time the Qaddafi soldiers were withdrawing under pressure, and their supplies were short and many of their heavier weapons had been left behind. And in any event the wall offered more protection than standing in the open, as Mr. Shwaili had been when struck.

The next image shows a man-size hole cut in a rear interior wall, so that rebels could approach their enemies without exposing themselves to a dash across the open alley. This is an old technique. It could have been seen as well in the battles for Kiev, Warsaw or Stalingrad during the Second World War, in Hue City in Vietnam, or in Grozny, Chechnya or Ramadi, Iraq.
C.J. Chivers/The New York Times

The use of the M40 recoilless rifle is a more complicated subject. Have a look at the remains of the compound the rebels eventually overran.
C.J. Chivers/The New York Times

You can see multiple large holes where munitions have struck. Many of these holes were made by the impact of M40 recoilless rifle ammunition. The M40, an American-made weapon now largely out of service around the world, was among the heavy weapons the rebels had captured from former Qaddafi arsenals. Many of these big tubes, along with their ammunition, were seized in eastern Libya and then moved on tug boats and fishing vessels by sea from Benghazi to Misurata, as part of the rebel lifeline that allowed Misurata’s residents to survive the siege and turn back the pro-Qaddafi troops.
C.J. Chivers/The New York TimesM40 ammunition being offloaded from a tug in Misurata’s port.

The rebels’ sealift, made with NATO support, had brought them a weapon that helped tilt the fighting. We now know that the M40 was a decisive ground weapon in the siege. Flat-shooting, relatively easy to operate and very powerful, it allowed rebels to pound the buildings on Benghazi Street and Tripoli Street where the Qaddafi forces had taken up position, and gradually push back their foes, one shattered wall at a time. In short, by the time this video was recorded, the M40 had become a primary supporting arm for a crude and vicious form of close-in combat, a bloody grind in the most basic sense.
C.J. Chivers/The New York Times

When watching the video, however, it is clear that rebels fighting for some of the last buildings near Tripoli Street had an incomplete understanding of their weapon’s potency – again, as Mr. Liohn grasped, a sign that their commitment to the fight had outstripped their knowledge of how to fight smart.

We have seen two types of munitions in the Libyan war for the M40, which are shown below, in a photograph taken earlier in April in the fighting near Brega, in eastern Libya.
C.J. Chivers/The New York Times

The labels give them away. These munitions were armor-piercing High-Explosive Anti-Tank (or HEAT) rounds and High-Explosive Squash Head (or HESH) rounds. Most of the M40 rounds I have seen in Libya, and all of them in Misurata, have been of the HESH variety.

If the M40 that the rebels fired in this video was a HESH round – as it appeared to have been from the explosion and the damage visible later in the wall – then this carried consequences for people nearby. This is because a HESH round functions in a particular way. Upon striking a hard surface, the round does not instantly explode. Instead, it has been designed with both a relatively soft tip and a split-second delay in the detonation of the explosive charge within. In this way, the explosive paste carried by the round has an instant to spread over the struck surface, creating a flat, patty-like charge that then detonates. The intended result is a violent shock wave through the opposite side of the surface that has been struck. Another result is an explosive wave, and debris, that radiates back toward the M40. For this reason, when firing a HESH charge, an M40 crew requires even more standoff than normal to ensure its safety.

The need for standoff was ignored in this case. Look at the image below.
C.J. Chivers/The New York Times

The building in the background is the building that was under attack in the video. The open metal door on the right leads to the room where Mr. Shwaili was treated. The brush visible on the distant left marks the ditch from where Mr. Liohn’s video begins, and is directly beside where the M40 was fired and Mr. Shwaili was fatally wounded. This photograph was taken from roughly the distance that the rebels should have had when they fired that M40. Had they fired from here, with Mr. Shwaili beside them, then Mr. Shwaili would not have been wounded as he was.

For Mr. Liohn, the readily preventable death of Mr. Shwaili was part of the tragedy of what unfolded around him that day, and on many others, and was part of the story of the Libyan war. Because the measures of the rebels’ resolve and martial skills have been wildly unequal, more men have been lost than necessary. Taken together, the loss of these men is a sorrow that, no matter the outcome of this war, will haunt the country for years.

A few final notes bear mentioning. The near seamlessness of this video almost allows you to forget that it was shot by a man – Mr. Liohn, who put himself into the midst of the fighting to make this record. Don’t think this was easy. Listen to that outgoing gunfire, and the incoming rounds snapping past. Note the moment where the seamlessness hits a bump – as Mr. Liohn himself was struck by a bullet fragment after a round smacked the doorjamb. He was not seriously wounded; whatever hit him grazed and slightly burned the back of his neck. But it was enough to knock him to ground, which is why, at one point, you see Mr. Liohn’s feet and then, about five seconds later, hear him growl in pain. And he growled again later, too, trying to keep his bearing and composure as he worked. He kept shooting throughout.

But Mr. Liohn, whom I have written of before, does not want this post to be about him. There are more important themes to explore, including those raised by the photograph below. After the adrenaline subsided, and reflection was setting in, Mr. Liohn made this image from the same battle.
Andre Liohn

Inside the building that the rebels soon overran, the rebels had captured pro-Qaddafi soldiers, found many dead Qaddafi soldiers, and also found the burned remains shown above. It was the corpse of a person who appeared to have been a boy. Who he was, how and when he was killed, who was principally responsible for his death – these things are as yet unknown.

Was he a youthful forced conscript? A local child caught in the battle’s path? People can argue over that as they see fit. Their positions might reveal their stance on this war. As for many of the important facts, Mr. Liohn does not know them. And therein is a truth of covering war. It is often extraordinarily difficult, no matter the degree of dedication and risk, notwithstanding the sacrifice of energy and time, to reach a full understanding of everything that passes before your eyes. The rebel attack on this building was one part of a long, brutal fight, much of it out the world’s sight. This much we know: Mr. Liohn’s record of the events in and near this single alley showed the Libyan rebels in clear light. Humanizing and dehumanizing at once, it also captured war — stripped of its legends and slogans – for what it often is, and can cost.

Follow C.J. Chivers on Facebook, on Twitter at @cjchivers or on his personal blog, cjchivers.com, where many posts from At War are supplemented with more photographs and further information.from iht.com