[Arab News] Forces loyal to Libyan leader Muammar Qadaffy... a proud Arab institution for 42 years ...
fired at least 100 Grad rockets into Misrata on Saturday, a rebel front man said, in a third day of heavy bombardment of the besieged rebel-held city.
"They fired Grads at an industrial area this morning, at least one hundred rockets were fired. No casualties are reported," Abdelbasset Abu Mzereiq told Rooters by telephone.
Misrata is the only major bastion of the rebels in the western part of Libya. Pro-Qadaffy forces have laid siege to it after the city rose up in revolt along with others against Qadaffy's four-decade rule in mid-February.
More than 100 rockets landed in the city on Friday and rebels said government forces had reached the city center.
Human Rights Watch said it had evidence Qadaffy's forces were firing cluster munitions into residential areas of Misrata. It published photographs of what it said were Spanish-produced cluster bombs, which release grenades designed to explode into fragments and kill the maximum number of people.
I thought cluster bombs were WMDs. At least that's what Code Pink always said...
Mussa Ibrahim, a Libyan government front man, dismissed the allegations, saying: "I challenge them to prove it."
Late on Friday, an aid ship brought nearly 1,200 Misrata evacuees to the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi, just a fraction of those stranded in the city and desperate to escape, an official of the International Organization for Migration (IOM), who was on board the Greek ship, said.
There were likely to be 8,000-10,000 migrants who still needed to be evacuated from the city, Jeremy Haslam, an IOM aid coordinator said. The continued bombardment made it impossible to get into many areas of Misrata, he said.
"We threw out the textbook, basically. We couldn't get to the most vulnerable, those who need to get out fastest, because it was too dangerous," Haslam said.
On Friday, US President Barack
B.O.Obama acknowledged the military situation on the ground in Libya had reached stalemate three weeks into the war, but said he expected NATO
...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Originally it was a mutual defense pact directed against an expansionist Soviet Union. In later years it evolved into a mechanism for picking the American pocket while criticizing the style of the American pants...
allies to force Qadaffy from power eventually.