Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's hometown of Sirte paid a high price, as it sheltered him in the final days of fighting in the Libyan civil war.
Most of the Mediterranean city with boulevards lined with palm trees and luxurious villas was destroyed. Entire neighborhoods are uninhabited, with huge shell holes in houses blackened by fire and garages.
There is no electricity or water in the town. Streets full of rubble and dhubrets are flooded with water from burst pipes.
"This used to be a wonderful city, one of the most beautiful in Libya," university professor Zaruk Abdullah, 42, told AP, standing in front of his heavily damaged family home.
"Today, Sirte looks like Leningrad, Gaza or Beirut after the war," he says.
Only advanced with tanks
Sirte used to enjoy the privileges of the old regime in terms of investments and jobs. Today, after six weeks of fighting, many of its 140.000 residents believe it was wanton and deliberate destruction by vengeful rebels.
Although some blame Gaddafi for bringing the war to his hometown by hiding there in the final days, residents are now worried about rebuilding because they don't expect any help from Libya's transitional authorities.
Most of the dead seem to have been removed and hastily buried, but the lingering stench of rot and decay lingers over the city.
The battle for Sirte began in mid-September, about a month after the revolutionaries, as they called themselves, took control of most of Libya, including the capital Tripoli.
Sirte, about 400 kilometers southeast of Tripoli, was one of the last bastions of Gaddafi's resistance along with two other places controlled by his supporters.
The resistance in Sirte was fierce and after three weeks of fighting, the forces of the National Transitional Council advanced only a few hundred meters in the city.
With the intensification of fighting and the bringing in of heavy artillery and tanks by the revolutionaries, most of the inhabitants left the city and only the most staunch supporters of Gaddafi, who was not even known to have taken refuge there, remained in it. Most thought Gaddafi had fled deep into the desert in an effort to escape the country.
Mass executions by pro-Gaddafi forces
And Gaddafi was hiding in Sirte in those final days of the war, living in abandoned houses in district no. 2 with a small entourage of about twenty people, among whom was his son Moatasim.
When opponents surrounded the district, Gaddafi and his followers tried to escape in a convoy that was attacked by NATO planes on a highway in the suburbs. That's where Gaddafi met his end and the rest is history...
Fighters from the coastal city of Misrata led the fight for the liberation of Sirte and Gaddafi's arrest. They killed him and displayed his dead body in Misrata as a trophy.
The people of Sirte now think that the people of Misrata deliberately destroyed the city far more than it would have been destroyed in the fighting because they wanted to settle some scores of their own.
Over the past weekend, more than 50 bodies were found in the garden of the Mahari Hotel, which is located on the seashore. According to the findings of Human Rice Fruit investigators, the hotel was in the hands of the rebels during the fighting and at the time of the deaths of the city's residents.
Faraj al-Hemali, a resident of Sirte who was among those who discovered the bodies, said that more than 25 bodies had their hands and feet tied. Blood soaked the grass, indicating that they were all killed there. Most were civilians and Gaddafi sympathizers, and all were shot in the head or chest, he says.
Human Rights Watch called on the new authorities to investigate what it called an "apparent mass execution."
However, Ibrahim Beitelmal, a representative of Misrata's military council, denies that fighters from that city are responsible for the crime. He says he believes it was Gaddafi supporters who killed their comrades who refused to fight on. According to his claims, the destruction of Sirte was deliberately done by "Gaddafi's forces to tarnish the image of the rebels".
The real war is just beginning?
Zaruk Abdullah, a university professor, rejects such claims, accusing fighters from Misrata of killing his 34-year-old brother Hisham, who was a civilian whose only sin was staying behind to guard the house.
Abdullah says he fears settling the score. "The real war hasn't started yet. The real war will start on November 1 after NATO leaves," he says, apparently alluding to the end of the seven-month intervention by that military alliance.
"People are going to start coming together," Abdullah predicts, but like others he says he doesn't want any more bloodshed.
Gallery
Bonus video:
