Libya's New Regime: The Fight for Gaddafi's Hometown

Armed conflict rages between rebels and pro-Gaddafi forces

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Breaking News: Libya's Muammar Gaddafi Reported Captured, Killed; Tripoli Erupts in Celebration

Breaking News: Libya's Muammar Gaddafi Reported Captured, Killed; Tripoli Erupts in Celebration - TIME window.fbAsyncInit = function() { FB.init({ appId: "53177223193", cookie: true, // these two are not required for partners that status: true, // only rely on stk plugins and don't use connect xfbml: true });};(function() { var e = document.createElement('script'); e.async = true; e.src = document.location.protocol + '//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js'; document.getElementById('fb-root').appendChild(e);}()); Home TIME Magazine Photos Videos Specials Topics Subscribe Mobile AppsNewslettersRSS @TIME NewsFeed U.S. Politics World Business Money Tech Health Science Entertainment Opinion SEARCH TIME.COM Full Archive Covers Videos Main Global Spin Travel Intelligent Cities Videos Muammar Gaddafi Is Dead, Says Libya PM; Tripoli Celebrates By Vivienne Walt / Tripoli Thursday, Oct. 20, 2011 Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi speaks during a ceremony in Tripoli on June 12, 2010.

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Libyans exploded in excitement on Thursday afternoon at reports that Muammar Gaddafi had been captured in his home town of Sirt, where rebels have fought a grueling battle for weeks to crush his remaining armed loyalists.

As television broke on news that Sirt had finally fallen to the rebel forces, gunfire begun resounding around the capital. About 20 minutes later came the news, from a rebel commander in Sirt, that Gaddafi had been captured hiding in a hole in the coastal city, Gaddafi's home town about 230 miles east along the Mediterranean. In this city of two million people, thousands of people poured into the streets, firing guns in the air. The ships in Tripoli harbor blared their horns for more than an hour, and the mosques played prayers praising Allah, over the deafening noise of car horns. Crowds of people converged on the seafront to move towards Martyrs Square in the heart of the capital, where only two months ago, Gaddafi's supporters held continual demonstrations in support of the dictatorship. (See pictures of the fight for Gaddafi's hometown.)

By 2 p.m. Tripoli time, there was no authoritative confirmation of Gaddafi's capture or death. Indeed, a spokesman for the National Transitional Council (NTC), the interim government of Libya, insisted that the Colonel was dead, that they would have preferred him alive and brought to trial but that one "cannot go against God's will." The NTC has been notoriously inaccurate in the past about the capture and death of Gaddafi kin. Nevertheless, if Gaddafi has indeed been run to ground, Oct. 20 will be one of the most historic moments of Libya's history, the final demise of a 42-year dictator who transformed this oil-rich nation into a terrifying authoritarian state even as he modernized what had been a largely illiterate desert country into a regional economic force.

Exactly two months have passed since rebel forces stormed Tripoli and drove Gaddafi and his family from power. Yet while the rebels' NTC quickly assumed control over the capital, Gaddafi and his hugely powerful son Saif al-Islam vanished, slipping out of the city while Tripoli was still in turmoil. The International Criminal Court has indicted both men for crimes against humanity, for allegedly ordering the killing of unarmed civilians before the rebel force took up arms in mid-February.(See pictures of Gaddafi's 40 years in power.)

In the meantime, a well-armed group of loyalists in Sirt have held out, waging a grueling war of attrition against the rebel forces ? even though the rest of the country had fallen to Gaddafi's foes. With the war dragging on, NTC officials were increasingly hampered in administering their new country. Prime Minister Mahmoud Jibril told journalists on Wednesday evening that Libya could "move from a national struggle to chaos." He said he was particularly concerned about the convoys of heavy weaponry which slipped into the neighboring country of Niger in August, after Tripoli fell.

The rebels have said for weeks that they will be able to declare the war over when Sirt ? the last Gaddafi stronghold ? falls. And if indeed they have captured or killed Gaddafi himself, Libyan officials say, it will allow the country to finally move beyond the revolution, and begin rebuilding the country after months of war. "It means we will have a transitional government, then we will have an election in a few months," Mahmoud Shammam, the NTC's head of media, told the BBC on Thursday. (See why Libya's interim leader says he's quitting.)

If Gaddafi and Saif al-Islam are captured and alive, U.N. officials and some Western governments have said they would expect NTC officials to hand the two men over for trial in The Hague, where the ICC is based. But it is clear from interviews around Tripoli that many Libyans will be loath to do that. In Martyrs Square ? formerly Green Square ? on Wednesday, a group of young Libyans, some of them in combat fatigues and carrying Kalashnikov rifles, said they hoped Gaddafi would be killed if he was found in Sirt. "We hope they bring him to Martyrs Square and shoot him," said one young man. Shammam told the BBC on Thursday that the NTC hoped to "give him a fair trial, as he never gave his own people. We want very much to try him in Libya," he said. "We will do everything we can to have him face justice in Libya."

See pictures of Benghazi during wartime.

See pictures of Gaddafi's tent shelters.

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TIME Interviews Libya's Muammar Gaddafi

The Libyan leader spoke with TIME editors Michael Elliott and Romesh Ratnesar, and allowed a portion of the interview to be videotaped

In Tripoli, Libya's Interim Leader Says He Is Quitting

Libya's interim premier Mahmud Jibril in Tripoli October 19, 2011.

Marco Longari / AFP / Getty Images

Two months after rebel fighters stormed into Tripoli and drove Muammar Gaddafi from power, the man effectively running the country in his role as temporary prime minister warned on Wednesday night that Libya could turn to chaos unless the war ended soon. Mahmoud Jibril, a U.S.-educated economist who helped persuade NATO members to launch their Libya campaign last March, also announced in an interview with TIME that he was quitting — potentially leaving Libya in a perilous state of limbo.

Jibril, who heads the executive board of the rebels' National Transitional Council, did not say exactly when he would resign, but hinted that it could be as soon as Thursday, when a televised meeting of his group would detail what it had accomplished since Gaddafi's ouster, he said. In a grim assessment of Libya's current state, Jibril suggested that as the war dragged on, he had found governing the country was increasingly difficult. "We have moved into a political struggle with no boundaries," Jibril said, looking glum, rather than a man rejoicing liberation. "The political struggle requires finances, organization, arms and ideologies," he said. "I am afraid I don't have any of this." (See photos of the fight for Gaddafi's hometown.)

His warning underscores just how much Libya is now in limbo — and just how dangerous that might be. The exhilarating sense of victory, which gripped the world's attention when rebel columns rolled into Tripoli on Aug. 20, has largely dissipated. In its place is a sense of being in suspended animation, as men in battle fatigues move through Tripoli — a city of two million people — in pickup trucks topped with machine guns. The breezy Mediterranean harbor is all-but dormant, and those few ships which are in the dock are frozen in place. Cranes sit suspended over half-built construction sites, including one for a sprawling InterContinental hotel off the former Green Square (now called Martyrs Square) which has been frozen since the revolution began in February. And Tripoli's international airport remains closed. "Shoulder-fired missiles have gone AWOL, and all it takes is one of them to attack," says Sami Zaptia, a business consultant who recently helped form a Tripoli organization called the National Support Group, to pressure rebel leaders into forming democratic institutions. "There is very little business happening."

The country's paralysis, at least around Tripoli, is in part because Gaddafi and his powerful son, Saif al-Islam, are still on the run, with no idea among rebel leaders where they are. And although it has been only two months since Gaddafi's 42-year rule imploded, many assumed that by now Libya's war would long be over and a transitional government would be in place, especially since the eight-month revolution seemed to unfold at surprising speed. Instead, rebel fighters have been ground down for weeks in a protracted battle in Sirt, Gaddafi's home town 230 miles east along the coast, as they try to crush the dictatorship's last armed loyalists. (See a video on the youth in Libya beyond Gaddafi.)

Throughout Wednesday, Tripoli's old whitewashed mosques blared out prayers from the minarets, calling on Allah to protect the fighters on the front line. Yet in the city itself, the unity which appeared to hold through months of the revolution, has seriously frayed, as rival brigades lay claim to different territories around the capital, and as rebel fighters sharpen their allegiances to local commanders.

Jibril's words on Wednesday evening made it clear that Libya needed more than the prayers blasting out of the mosques, for the country to unite around a new democracy. He warned that the longer the fighting lasted, so the possibility increased for Libya turning "from a national struggle to chaos," and becoming a battleground for "all the foreign powers which have their own agendas towards Libya." Rebel leaders have said that once Sirt falls, they will declare the war over and announce a temporary government. The delay involves concrete complications, including the fact that governments cannot easily hand over billions of dollars of Gaddafi's money, which are frozen in foreign bank accounts, so long as there is no Libyan government to administer the money.

With the potential for the brigades turning into armed factions, Jibril said one urgent priority was to form a national army. He told the public meeting Wednesday night that the thousands of rebel fighters — most of whom joined the revolution with no military training — would be offered the chance to join the army, or to join the Interior Ministry, which oversees the police. A third option would be to form Libyan security companies, which would help guard companies and oil facilities — an alternative to the kind of foreign private contractors, which became a prominent feature of Iraq after Saddam Hussein's regime collapsed in 2003. That, Jibril said, "will facilitate many things in this country." Even if he may not be running it.

See "The Battle for Sirt: The Bloody Push for Gaddafi's Hometown."

See photos of life in Libya before Gaddafi.