At a news conference in Naples, Italy, where NATO has its operational headquarters, Rear Adm. Russell Harding, the British deputy commander of the air campaign, said the alliance had not been forewarned that the rebels were using tanks at the time the attack took place, contradicting what the rebels’ commander, Gen. Abdul Fattah Younes, contended on Thursday.
The military movements in the area where the attack took place were also “very fluid” at the time, Admiral Harding said, with vehicles going backward and forward.
“I’m not apologizing,” he said of the episode, the second case of friendly fire deaths in a week. “The situation on the ground, as I said, was extremely fluid and remains extremely fluid, and up until yesterday we had no information” that the rebels planned to deploy tanks.
But later the secretary general of NATO, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, expressed his remorse over the mix-up. “This is a very unfortunate incident,” he said at NATO headquarters in Brussels. “I strongly regret the loss of life.”
Admiral Harding said that, in the past 48 hours, NATO warplanes had flown 318 sorties and struck 23 targets in several parts of Libya. That brought the total since the alliance assumed overall command of the operation from the United States last week to more than 1,500 sorties, striking antiaircraft missile defenses, tanks, munitions dumps and loyalist forces seeking to advance into Misurata, he said.
On Thursday, General Younes said he could not understand how NATO could continue to confuse the rebels and the loyalist forces, particularly in this latest mix-up. “It is not possible to make a mistake with 20 tanks advancing on a large patch of desert land,” he said. “We hope that such a mistake will not be repeated.”
The error left some analysts wondering whether NATO and the Europeans were up to a task that had previously been carried out by the United States military. NATO seemingly stood by while Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s forces counterattacked over the past week, driving east from his stronghold of Surt and retaking the oil towns of Ras Lanuf and Brega. Then loyalist forces reasserted control temporarily over the vital port at Misurata, which United States warplanes had previously opened to shipping.
“We haven’t had a significant military operation in which the Americans have taken a back seat for quite some time,” said Malcolm Chalmers, a professor of defense at King’s College London, according to The Associated Press. “It really is unclear whether the Europeans can rise to that challenge.”
For weeks, rebel leaders — from military commanders to civilian officials — have spoken of their communications with the allies attacking Colonel Qaddafi. On several occasions, the rebels have said they have given the allies coordinates for airstrikes.
Last week, Wahid Bugaighis, the leader of the rebel oil company, said NATO had been supplied with the coordinates of a cluster of Qaddafi fighters threatening an oil facility in eastern Libya. Mr. Bugaighis said he believed that in that instance NATO warplanes had attacked the forces.
On Thursday, General Younes said he had repeatedly warned NATO about the deployment of tanks to the front lines. “We informed them at the time the tanks were leaving Benghazi, and when they arrived at Ajdabiya,” he said. “We informed them that in the early morning they would be advancing on Brega. We gave them all the information concerning their number, and that they would be carried on tank transports, and their direction.”
General Younes did not specify who on the rebel side had communicated with NATO, with whom they had spoken or the method that had been used to pass on the information.
Rebels in the hotly contested area between Brega and Ajdabiya in eastern Libya said that henceforth they would paint the tops of their vehicles pink to help avoid future friendly fire accidents. As the conflict has evolved, however, Colonel Qaddafi’s forces have proved adept at mixing in with civilian populations and mimicking the rebels’ vehicles, to sow confusion and deter allied airstrikes.
Despite General Younes’s contention that his fighters had recovered from the NATO attack and regained ground, a rebel-held checkpoint on the western edge of Ajdabiya was shelled by Colonel Qaddafi’s forces around 2:45 p.m. on Friday, suggesting they were still within striking distance of the city.
A small contingent of rebels gathered at a checkpoint there on Friday, passing the hours peering nervously westward in anticipation of another advance by pro-Qaddafi forces. The rebels were an ill-disciplined sight, sometimes firing long bursts of machine-gun fire high in the air, and at one point devolving into a long rebel-on-rebel shoving-and-shouting match.
Ben Curtis/Associated Press
Other fighters and civilians fled the city, fearful of artillery fire. More Photos »
Interactive map of the major clashes in Libya, day by day.
The immediate question was no longer whether the Forces of Free Libya, as they are called, would be able to retake the oil town of Brega, from which they were ousted this week. It was whether they could hold on to Ajdabiya, which is the next city to the northeast and sits at the strategic junction of the major roads to the north, to Benghazi, and the east, to Tobruk and the Egyptian border.
By morning, pro-Qaddafi forces had moved close enough to Ajdabiya to ambush vehicles on the road less than five miles from the western checkpoint. And by midafternoon, the checkpoint was subjected to enemy fire, either artillery or rockets.
The contingent of rebels and milling civilians there, perhaps 200 people in all, fled en masse when a barrage of at least six high-explosive rounds burst beside them. As the smoke and dust rose, the rebels ran, many climbing into other people’s cars and trucks as they sped past.
Within minutes, the checkpoint was abandoned. The entrance to the city was unguarded.
Since the Qaddafi forces withdrew from the city last month under NATO air pressure, the rebels have controlled the city’s entrance. But they have yet to fortify the position in any way, or to move communications equipment to it, or to dig trenches for their ever accumulating waste, or to provide it and its environs with any sense of order.
And by late Friday afternoon, at least for a short time, they had abandoned it outright.
Whether the loyalists want to recapture Ajdabiya or have been creating a buffer between rebel-held territory and the oil infrastructure at Brega and Ras Lanuf was not known. But there seemed to be no armed rebel presence between the pro-Qaddafi vanguard and Ajdabiya, a city largely deserted by its population and available for the taking from the jittery rebels.
In Misurata in the west, Mohamed, a resident of the city whose last name was withheld for his protection, said in an Internet interview that rebels had begun an offensive on Friday to retake the central Tripoli Avenue, successfully bisecting the pro-Qaddafi forces at either end. A group of foreign journalists taken to the periphery of the city said they had encountered gunfire and were forced to retreat.
A United Nations panel on mercenaries said in a statement on Friday that foreign fighters from Africa and Belarus were being employed by both sides in the Libya fight and might be involved in “serious human rights violations,” The A.P. reported.
“We examined several sources of information that indicate Qaddafi has used mercenaries and is using mercenaries against the population of Libya,” the head of the panel, José Luis Gómez del Prado, told The A.P. “There was some information that there were snipers that were contracted at least by Colonel Qaddafi and possibly also by the opposition.”
C . J. Chivers reported from Ajdabiya, and Kareem Fahim from Benghazi, Libya. David D. Kirkpatrick contributed reporting from Tripoli, Libya, and Alan Cowell from Paris.
A version of this article appeared in print on April 9, 2011, on page A8 of the New York edition.
Backfiring tactics?
