Libya rebel casualties mount in battle for Zliten
TRIPOLI (AFP) - Sixteen rebel fighters have been killed and another 126 wounded in two days of fierce fighting for control of Zliten, the last coastal city between insurgent-held Misrata and the capital, rebels said on Friday.
The news came amid reports that rebels had infiltrated Tripoli and as strongman Moamer Kadhafi again ruled out talks with them -- even as they boast gains in the east and in the west -- saying theirs is a "lost cause."
And in Madrid, Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero urged the rebel National Transitional Council to start preparing for a "new political era," in a meeting with senior NTC figure Mahmud Jibril.
"Sixteen of our fighters have fallen as martyrs and 126 more have been wounded in fighting with loyalist troops in Zliten," said a rebel statement, with clashes said to be particularly heavy in the suburb of Souk al-Thulatha.
The insurgents have been trying for several weeks to take Zliten, 200 kilometres (120 miles) from the capital.
An AFP correspondent who was among a group of foreign journalists taken on an escorted tour of Zliten, reported loud explosions on Thursday on the front line just to the east.
Columns of smoke were clearly visible from the town, 40 kilometres (25 miles) west of rebel-held Misrata.
In Zliten's hospital, journalists were shown around four wards in which a dozen people were receiving treatment for injuries they said they sustained in NATO-led air strikes targeting loyalist positions.
One member of the medical staff, Fraj Jamal, claimed 80 civilians had been wounded in NATO-led strikes on Thursday.
The rebels say they have chased the bulk of Kadhafi's forces from Brega in the east and are poised for advances towards the capital from Misrata and their other western enclave in the Nafusa Mountains, southwest of Tripoli.
The Nafusa campaign is focused on taking Asabah, gateway to the garrison town of Gharyan on the highway north into Tripoli.
An AFP correspondent embedded with rebels in Bir Ayad, in the plains below the mountains, said heavy winds on Thursday night and Friday brought exchanges of rocket fire to a halt.
A rebel commander, Nasser al-Aaib, said the Kadhafi troops "are not moving because they don't know the terrain; they are afraid of being ambushed by the rebels, who know every inch of it."
Before the storm began on Thursday night, Aaib said Kadhafi forces bombarded a rebel checkpoint a few hundred metres (yards) from the loyalist-held town of Bir Al-Ghanam. At least four rebel fighters were wounded, one seriously.
In a speech aired by state television late on Thursday, Kadhafi called the rebels' five-month-old uprising a "lost cause."
"The battle has been decided. It has been decided in favour of the masses and the people," he said.
"They cannot defeat us. They will be defeated and they will go home empty-handed.
"I will not talk to them. There will be no negotiations between me and them."
In a second speech aired by the channel, Kadhafi called on tribal leaders from Libya's third-largest city Misrata, one of two rebel-held enclaves in the west, to "march on the city to liberate it."
The rebels said they had infiltrated armed and trained operatives into Tripoli to conduct missions against loyalist targets.
"There are small groups, they are good fighters, trained in Benghazi," commander Fawzi Bukatif told reporters in the rebel bastion on Thursday.
"We have supplied them with weapons and grenades."
Since the revolution began in February, a number of Tripoli-based groups have broadcast videos purporting to show acts of civil disobedience in the heavily controlled capital.
But the revelation that rebels have infiltrated Kadhafi's stronghold raises the spectre of more serious acts of sabotage.
On Thursday, unconfirmed rumours swirled that rebels in Tripoli had tried to assassinate senior members of the Kadhafi regime that day.
Bukatif said he had no knowledge of any such operation but added: "We expect things like that to happen."
His comments turn the table on months of worry about a Kadhafi fifth column operating in the rebel-controlled east.
Several undetonated explosive devices have been found in Benghazi in the past few months, including a Semtex-loaded truck that failed to explode outside a busy hotel.
Another failed car bomb earlier targeted a senior NTC member, according to one well-placed security official.
In Madrid, Zapatero told Jibril that Spain supports the NTC "as the legitimate representative of the Libyan people," his office said.
Zapatero "encouraged him to strengthen his organisation and his operations so it is in a position to successfully address the new political era that Libya will have to confront.
"The internal reconciliation process and the process of constructing a new, stable, prosperous, sovereign and democratic society will be one of the key tasks of the future," Zapatero told Jibril.