Libyan Rebels

Fallout from the Libyan revolution blew across North Africa and the Middle East on Monday and boosted other popular uprisings in the region, most of which had seen their momentum stall since the exultant early days of the Arab Spring. In several Syrian cities, thousands of anti-government demonstrators defied a crackdown and warned that country's president, Bashar al-Assad, that he would meet the fate of Libyan ruler Moammar Gaddafi. "Gaddafi is gone," they chanted. "Now it's your turn, Bashar!"

TRIPOLI, Libya — The prison is a vast, unmarked complex of beige buildings, topped with sandbags and surrounded by high, wire-rimmed walls. Most of the guards wear their beards long and unkempt in the style associated with Islamists — exactly the kind of people that Moammar Gaddafi and his intelligence chief, Abdullah al-Senussi, used to keep locked up. But if ever there was a picture of poetic justice in post-Gaddafi Libya , this is...

French officials announced Wednesday that they had armed rebels in Libya, marking the first time a NATO country has said it was providing direct military aid to opponents of the government in a conflict that has lasted longer than many policymakers expected. France dropped light armaments, including guns and rocket-propelled grenades, in the Nafusa Mountains in western Libya in early June to help rebel forces who were "in a very deteriorating situation" under threat from the Libyan military, a French military spokeswoman said.

CAIRO — The hostage standoff at an Algerian gas field has thrown a fresh spotlight on the spillover unleashed by the 2011 war that toppled Moammar Gaddafi in Libya. Experts say the vast quantities of weapons and fighters that streamed out of Gaddafi's arsenals may have served as a catalyst for the region's expanding crisis. But the bold move on the gas complex near the Libyan border this week, coupled with the swift military successes of militants in Mali , have also raised questions about...

TRIPOLI, Libya — Libyan rebels staged an armed uprising against Moammar Gaddafi in the western city of Zlitan on Friday, a rebel spokesman said, adding that 22 of their fighters had been killed. The clashes, if confirmed, would mark the first significant rebel attempt to take control of a major city in western Libya since the early days of the uprising. Zlitan lies just over 100 miles east of Tripoli and about 30 miles west of the besieged rebel-held city of Misurata. A Libyan government spokesman could not be reached for...

KABAW, Libya — From the street, the operation run by a former army engineer known to the Libyan rebels as Rambo looks like an ordinary auto repair shop. Inside, a dozen of Omar Said's mechanics are busy turning pickup trucks into armored fighting vehicles, complete with aging anti-aircraft guns. What the Libyan rebels lack, they scavenge. Popular now: a portable launcher for firing an old Russian S-5 air-to-surface rocket from your shoulder. Components: four feet of drain pipe and a trigger made from a hair dryer.

BENGHAZI - NATO airstrikes destroyed tanks belonging to forces loyal to Moammar Gaddafi at the western gate of Ajdabiya on Sunday, as rebels reestablished control of the strategic eastern city. Rockets still landed inside the nearly deserted city on Sunday but a military official with the rebel council said they had complete control by Sunday afternoon. Meanwhile, members of the Transitional National Council, which governs the rebel-held east, met with Western diplomats in the temporary opposition capital of...

ZINTAN, Libya — Libya's rebel government announced Friday that its top military chief, Gen. Abdul Fattah Younis, was assassinated by its own rebel fighters , who dumped his bullet-ridden and burned body outside Benghazi. A brigade leader tasked with transporting Younis from the front line near the oil town of Brega to the rebel capital of Benghazi confessed that his lieutenants killed Younis and two aides Thursday, the rebels' oil and finance minister, Ali Tarhouni, said at a news conference Friday night.

ZINTAN, Libya — In the latest sign that a rebel advance on Tripoli may become slower and more chaotic, forces loyal to Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi on Wednesday recaptured a town in the mountains south of the capital that was taken with great fanfare by rebels one week ago. Early Wednesday, government troops surged from their positions in the fortified city of Gharyan and quickly retook the town of Qawalish in the barren pasturelands of the...

MISURATA, Libya — Outside Misurata, the rebel army is stuck. For weeks, the fighters opposed to Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi's government have been bogged down in the lightly wooded areas surrounding this besieged city, pounded by rockets, struggling to advance or even make gains of more than a few hundred yards. "We are just taking a defensive position now," said Suliman Mohamed Suliman, one of the commanders at the city's eastern front line. "We can't [advance] because we don't have heavy weapons, just...

Who lost Syria? Comments of some U.S. senators , analysts and journalists, including the editorial board of this newspaper , suggest there is no doubt: Bashar al-Assad and his thugocracy are primarily responsible for the killings, but the tragedy of Syria is also a direct result of a terrible failure of leadership on the part of the international community, and of the United States in particular. Syria, it is charged, is Barack Obama's Rwanda. Don't believe it. The idea that Syria was anyone's to win or lose, or...

AL-BAB, Syria — As the Arab world's bloodiest revolt continues to maim, kill and ravage lives on an ever-escalating scale, anti-American sentiments are hardening among those struggling to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad, in ways that could have profound consequences for the country and the region in a post-Assad era. America, once regarded by the Syrian opposition as a natural friend in its struggle for greater freedoms against a regime long...

R. Jeffrey Smith is managing editor for national security at the  Center for Public Integrity , a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to producing original investigative journalism on issues of public concern. Lynch reported from the United Nations. Staff writer Alice Fordham in Tripoli contributed to this report. The Obama administration is investigating whether Iran supplied the Libyan government of Moammar Gaddafi with hundreds of special artillery shells for chemical weapons that Libya kept...

It finally looks like Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill are ready to agree on something related to the uprising in Libya. All it took was for the revolt to succeed, longtime dictator Moammar Gaddafi to be captured and killed and American involvement to end. On Tuesday, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is to consider a resolution, sponsored by Chairman John Kerry (D-Mass.), along with Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.), applauding...

Afternoon sunlight streamed through the front door of a Baltimore rowhouse where a gaunt man sat before an open suitcase filled with mementos of war and solitude. Bits of shrapnel. Ragged green flags with burn marks. An Italian-made lock that had secured the door of a one-man prison cell. Now, in his childhood home, Matthew VanDyke held each one up. A tattered empty milk carton had provided him reading material in solitary confinement. "This is the best milk box I ever got," he said.

Eight months after he disappeared into the black hole of Libya's civil war, and in defiance of predictions that he was dead in the desert, Matthew VanDyke touched down Saturday night at the airport near his Baltimore home. VanDyke, 32, had been a freelance journalist and filmmaker, but he said Saturday night that he had gone to Libya to become a freedom fighter. "Victory!" he said, holding up a new Libyan flag at Baltimore- Washington International Marshall Airport....

BENGHAZI, Libya — The men were armed and wore black ski masks. In broad daylight, they grabbed Adil Ali el-Aghouri from in front of his house last month, beat him, took him to a rebel military base and threw him in a prison cell. Ever since, his relatives say, Aghouri has been held without charge or access to a lawyer. His only crime, they say, was to serve in the feared internal security police under Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi; they insist that he committed no atrocities. "He's in prison not because he broke any laws, but by...

TRIPOLI, Libya — Libyan rebels met fierce resistance from Moammar Gaddafi's last remaining stronghold in the capital Thursday and said they suspected they might even be closing in on the former leader or his sons. But as rebels flocked to the neighborhood to join the assault, Gaddafi, ever defiant, appealed to his supporters in an audio message to march on Tripoli and "purify it" of the rebels, whom he called "rats, crusaders and unbelievers. " His spokesman, Moussa Ibrahim, then called the Associated...

TRIPOLI, Libya — At 5:45 p.m. on March 19, three hours before the official start of the air campaign over Libya, four French Rafale jet fighters streaked across the Mediterranean coastline to attack a column of tanks heading toward the rebel city of Benghazi. The jets quickly obliterated their targets — and in doing so nearly upended the international alliance coming to Benghazi's rescue . France's head start on the air war infuriated Italy's prime minister, who accused Paris of upstaging...

Having lived three years in Tripoli, I believe that the caption on the photo above the fold of The Post's Oct. 21 front page unjustifiably identified the Libyan rebels depicted as "pro-democracy fighters" [ "For Gaddafi, a bloody end in Libya" ]. I would wager that the fighters in the picture would be hard put to describe "democracy" accurately. The fighters could well be proponents of an Islamic theocracy, or, admittedly less likely, supporters of the restitution of the tribal Senussi monarchy...