The main commander of rebel forces in western Libya, Moktar Milad Fernana, says his troops are fighting just 70 kilometers from Tripoli and, if all goes as expected, will capture the Libyan capital in three weeks.
A former colonel in the Libyan army, who switched sides when the revolution began, says that in addition to controlling and advising the rebels in five towns in the mountainous Nafouz region, they have their own people in every town on the road to Tripoli.
In his headquarters in Zintana, Colonel Fernana told German state radio "Deutsche Vele" that their strategy is to first liberate all the cities under the control of Gaddafi's forces and thus surround the enemy.
"Gaddafi's strength is not in his weapons, but in the people he uses as human shields," he claims.
According to him, Gaddafi will do everything to defeat them.
"I am sure that in desperation he would turn to Al Qaeda extremists. Even when the war is over, the danger from Islamists will still be great," Fernana said, adding that the central task in the new Libya will be the protection of civilians from that danger.
Crime dropped, tribes banded together
Asked if there was an increase in crime after the Libyan transitional government distributed weapons to residents of the cities it controls, the colonel says that on the contrary, the crime rate has dropped by 80 percent since the beginning of the revolution.
"The situation is under control, because we are in close contact with the tribes in the region. So far, as far as we know, there has been no misuse of weapons or looting of abandoned houses - said Fernana, whose control is the area of the Nafuz mountain range, Tripoli and the territory between the main city and Tunisia.
According to him, Gaddafi tried for years to poison the relations between Arabs and Berbers in the Nafuza area, but today they are fighting side by side to overthrow him.
"In addition, some Arab tribes from the Nafuza region have always had better relations with the Berbers than with the neighboring Arab clans. Today, the Arabs and the Berbers are fighting together at the front. There are no problems between them," asserts Colonel Fernana.
He says they are in contact with the rebels' interim council in Benghazi via satellite phones because the landline network is down, but that the procedure for requesting that NATO bomb the positions they are attacking is "unfortunately slow, as is everything organized in Benghazi."
"Here in the west, they would prefer to negotiate everything directly with NATO," he says, adding that they even built an airstrip near the town of Jadu.
So far, they have tested it only once, an empty cargo plane tried it, but they have not yet received any shipments from Benghazi, asserts Colonel Fernana, who also says that the news that the French are dropping weapons on the rebels from the air is not true, at least when his region is in question.
"I often talk with the leaders of the rebel councils and so far I have not heard of a single case of them throwing weapons at us from the air. You can see that there is also an information war going on here," he said.
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