The rebels in the mountains of the West takes control of a border crossing in the town of Wazen after a battle of the morning which sent a small number of Libyan soldiers fleeing the border, the official Tunisian news agency reported. The said press agency 13 of Libyan soldiers, including a colonel and two commanders, had been arrested, while a spokesman for rebels in the eastern city of Benghazi says that more than 100 had requested asylum.
As the fighting in the mountains have intensified over the past two weeks, UN aid workers say that more than 14,000 refugees Libyan - many of them, the members of the Berber minority, which is rampant in the region - have fled the border evenwith all 6,000 per day recently, through a spokesman for the United Nations Human Rights Commission said.
While it is not known that the rebels may contain Wazen, their success is the first crack in a major in the control of Colonel Kadhafi in the Western region, since it crushed the uprisings that erupted in Tripoli and many other towns and villages across the Libya when the insurrection erupted two months ago. It opens the possibility of the rebels to import weapons or aid and provides the slightest break in the stalemate which had settled in the Libyan civil war in recent weeks.
In a gesture which seemed to be to put an end to this impasse, the Pentagon said Thursday that President Obama had authorized the use of drones predator armed against the forces of Colonel Gaddafi, which partly avoided the air strikes by miscegenation with the populations civil and operating from vehicles not marked.
The US Army used the predator, an aircraft equipped with Hellfire missiles, to achieve targets in urban and rural areas in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and the Yemen.
In announcing the deployment, Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates describes the addition of predators armed as "a modest contribution" to the attack on the NATO mission. But approval of Mr. Obama of their deployment appeared to be another sign of gaps in the ability of NATO to carry out complicated, extended combat without American support continuous and important missions.
These gaps have become more apparent as to the United States transferred the command of the mission of the Libya of NATO, April 4 when the American army intervened in a supporting role. Despite this move, the American planes have dropped a significant number of bombs, more than any other country of the alliance.
In Misurata, the city of port held the rebels where rebels pleaded for the weeks of such weapons has beaten a head by the forces of Qathafi, a rebel spokesman said Thursday that recent shipments of airstrikes and aid had allowed rebel fighters to take the offensive. The spokesman, Mohamed, whose full name was retained for the protection of his family, declared that the rebels killed more than 100 that Qathafi soldiers Thursday and 51 Wednesday, when also captured 40 others. "People celebrate in Misurata", he said, speaking on an Internet connection, because most telephone service and electricity to the city has been cut.
Among other advances, he said that the rebels had led away snipers who had terrorized civilians along the Central Tripoli Avenue of the city.? "There is a pattern of collapse among Qathafi troops in and around Misurata," he said.
In Eastern stronghold of the rebels of Benghazi, colonel Ahmed Bani, a spokesman for the military rebels, said veterans anti-Qathafi attacked crossing the western border to the Wazen on several occasions in the past before succeed Thursday. "It is a supply line which connects us to the Tunisia", he said, adding that the rebel forces in Wazen had been communicating with the direction of Benghazi.
So far, the air strikes of NATO forces Qathafi helped the rebels retain control of Benghazi and a handful of cities in Eastern, Western commercial port of Misurata and, according to some reports, the towns of Nalut and Zintan Mountain West. But Qathafi forces have maintained a strict control of the Libyan capital, Tripoli and maintained a fierce siege on Misurata and other rebel held towns and rebel leaders are complaining bitterly about the relative rarity of the air strikes of NATO in recent weeks.
While great attention has focused on the cities of major port of Benghazi and Misurata, mountainous western region which extends from near Nalut Wazen and Zintan a simmer with the opposition to Gaddafi. The Berbers have long worn there under the Qathafi Government, which has sought to deny their status as minority culturally distinct.
After the rebels took control of Benghazi on 20 February, residents of Nalut and Zintan joined other Tripoli, Misurata, Zawiyah, Zawarah, Sabratha and other cities in taking to the streets to burn police stations and headquarters of the local Colonel Gaddafi. "revolutionary committees". However, in the following weeks, its security recovery forces a firm grip on Tripoli and gradually resumed most of the other cities, leaving Zintan and Misurata as the main Western resistance centres.
Faras Kaya, a spokesman for the United Nations Human Rights Commission, said many fleeing to the camps described the escalation of fighting in the mountains around Zintan and Nalut over the past two weeks, as Qathafi forces fired artillery to cities and the rebels attached to the rear. "The Western mountainous region was besieged for a month," said Mr. Kaya. "What is clear is that they have fled because of the intensification of violence."
Approximately a quarter of a million refugees fled Libya in Tunisia in the course of the last two months, he said. Other main crossing near the Mediterranean, most of those fleeing were foreign workers, he said, but the 14,000 who have fled through Wazen were Libyan families.
The deployment of predators following a few weeks when rebels complained of the lack of support from NATO after United States handed over leadership of the NATO air campaign. In announcing the addition of the new weapon, Mr. Gates has suggested that the United States was filling a gap in the other arsenals of other allies, which have no drones similar attack.
"The President said that, when we have a few unique features, it is willing to use those", Mr. Gates said at a Pentagon press conference, suggesting that the predators provide "precision capability some."
David d. Kirkpatrick reported from Cairo and Thom Shanker from Washington. Rod Nordland contributed reports of Benghazi (Libya) and Mona El Naggar in Cairo.
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