Taken from The Highchair Analyst
The fighting in Misurata, now made famous, or rather infamous, by the deaths of twooutstanding journalists, has been some of the most intense in Libya's civil war. Responding to CJ Chivers' dispatch from the city, exposing both the fighting and adaptive resourcefulness of the Misurata rebels,I tweeted, in a somewhat throwaway blurb, that, "if this war is taken to [Tripoli] it will be thanks to the real world experiences and training of misurata's rebels."
But the more I think about it, the more I realize that this is probably close to the truth. Learning how to successfully fight a guerrilla war in an urban environment is the key to winning for Libya's rebels. From the LA Times:
The bands, each with a commander, have quickly evolved, coordinating the supply of weapons and trucks, defending Misurata's rebel-held neighborhoods and answering emergency battle calls. In their David-vs.-Goliath fight, they have shown aplomb and ingenuity, sneaking up on a tank and attaching a bomb to its bottom or side, ambushing soldiers from rooftops with heavy machine guns, even burning small buildings with Kadafi's snipers lurking inside.
While desert and highway fighting has seen relatively little successes for the rebels, the urban environment, with its familiar streets, ambush and escape routes, and concrete cover, offers opportunities both for a prolonged resistance and the combat experience necessary to turn the rebels into an effective fighting force moving forward. As Chivers reports,
War can be a ruthless teacher, and in Misurata the rebels have also learned something that the rebels of eastern Libya mostly have not: that dirt is their friend.
Throughout the neighborhoods, rebels have piled up sand to block roadways and to force the Qaddafi forces’ armored vehicles to slow down or change course.
The rebels have also parked lines of dump trucks heavy with sand at exposed intersections, to impede the movement of pro-Qaddafi armored patrols and to provide cover from snipers.
Although the lack of armaments has hampered the rebels, their largest obstacle in developing a capable military organization has been a lack of training. And while
foreign military advisers have been sent to eastern Libya to provide this absent training, it will likely be the men of this western city whose learning has been done in the daily grind of Misurata--in the crucible that is war--that will prove to be pivotal if there is a chance at breaking this stalemate.