Monocle

On the windblown desert highway that wraps around Libya’s long Mediterranean coast, pick-up trucks filled with rebel fighters are bringing weapons and food supplies to one of the last bastions of support for Gaddafi left in this newly liberated country.

Sirte was Gaddafi’s birthplace and he made it his showpiece city, a pimped-up village (as one rebel commander put it) of hotels, conference centres, ministries and palaces where foreign presidents and prime ministers would come to visit the former leader.

Now it is one of the few places in Libya that are holding out against an otherwise triumphant rebel army. Leaders from the new government, the Transitional National Council (TNC), say that they will not implement a new constitution until all of Libya is under TNC control.

But despite ongoing aerial strikes by Nato warplanes and an increasingly well-equipped rebel army, this lonely last redoubt is stubbornly refusing to be subdued.

Fighters from the east and west of the country have congregated on the roads around it, the port and airport have been taken, but Gaddafi loyalists within the city continue to blast volleys of rocket fire at the rebel army gathered around it and to resist the offensives of the TNC’s army.

Part of the problem is the continuing presence of civilians within the city. Rebel fighters, many of them from Misrata, the city that saw some of the war’s worst fighting, are unwilling to inflict a savage siege on fellow Libyans.

The fighters outside the city are keen to ensure that civilians are all given every opportunity to leave and there have been a number of ceasefires called in order to give them time to do so.

Some are afraid. “They think we are militias”, says Omran al Awaib, a commander from Misrata, speaking of the civilians within the city who’d been swayed by state television. “They think we will kill women, we will kill children, we will eat people. He told them that.”

But for many inside the city, there is simply nowhere left to go. Gaddafi’s staunchest supporters are said to have fled to Sirte as rebels took the rest of the country. They face a stark choice: surrender to the rebels or fight to the death. Many, it appears, are opting for the latter.

At checkpoints on the roads leading out of the city, rebel fighters are checking the names of those departing against lists of former regime officials. For those who collaborated with Gaddafi’s rule, there is no way out.

Unlike in the town of Bani Walid, where representatives from the TNC have negotiated with local elders, there are no discussions about Sirte.

“They will keep fighting; they have nowhere else to go,” says Salah Al Jbou, one of the rebel commanders outside the city, “but time is working with us, not with them. This is our war, and we have to win it.”

Portia Walker is a Monocle contributor based in Libya