Gaddafi's forces kill 22 rebels in Libyan city Misrata as conflict escalates

Source: The Guardian

Muammar Gaddafi has raised the stakes in the conflict with Nato, responding to air strikes by Apache helicopters with the heaviest bombardment of the besieged rebel enclave of Misrata in two months.

Rockets and mortar shells rained down on opposition positions around the ruined village of Dafniya, leaving 22 rebels dead, the highest toll since they took control of the city in mid-April.

A stream of ambulances brought the dead and wounded to the city's Hikma hospital. Bodies arrived with limbs missing, accompanied by the shouts of medics, the thud of Grad rockets and the wail of prayers from mosques. "The frontline is like hell," said Feras Mohammed, a 20-year-old medic who accompanied a badly injured soldier in an ambulance.

On the frontline, trees were set on fire by the constant stream of grads and rockets. Gaddafi's forces launched an infantry attack supported by four tanks which was repulsed by rebel fighters, who then pushed on into Gaddafi-held territory for six miles. "We attacked them and caught two tanks which we destroyed," said a fighter, Mohamed Khalid.

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jun/10/gaddafi-forces-kill-22-rebels-nato

Must've killed a few more.

Early on I said that they'd start by imposing the no fly zone.

Then they'd move on to stopping Qaddhafi around Benghazi and a few other towns.

Then they'd take out more munitions, because, well, they could. They might be used for offensive operations that might eventually involve the capture of Benghazi.

We'd start putting in advisors. At some point we'd have to get choppers and other stuff in really close to the ground, in an escalation as the goal shifted from immediate protection to thinking that when it comes to Qaddhafi and freedom, neither can live while the other survives. Of course we can't root for Voldemort.

Eventually the mere fact that Qaddhafi's troops defend themselves would constitute hostility to civilians--esp. those armed civilian combatants, who must be protected because, well, they're armed civilian combatants engaged in offensive operations to take land in what would normally be judge military actions, but now are deemed kinetic civilian operations. In a just war, it's unfair to expect the good civilians to defend the grounds that was taken in a peacetime armed kinetic civilian offensive of non-hostility-based killing using lead slugs of tolerance and joy, as well as rocket propelled rockets of beneficence and mercy. Not to mention the holy hand grenades.

Meanwhile, moving a jeep from one depot in Tripoli to another is a direct threat to elderly widows in Benghazi.

Don't like Qaddhafi. But the humanitarian disaster produced in the avoidance of a smaller humanitarian disaster, accompanied by other humanitarian disasters that aren't deemed disastrous enough to notice, coupled with the soul-corrupting obfuscation and sophistry is enough to make me think that Qaddhafi might be the lesser of two evils.