The fish-bombers of Benghazi

[splashhopper]

BREGA, LIBYA—It may not be the most noble of occupations, making one’s living throwing homemade bombs into the sea and waiting for the daily catch to float to the surface dead.

 

That’s what Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi reduced these four Benghazi men to over the course of his 42 years in power.

 

Yet it has been nearly a month since they last set off bombs in the Mediterranean. Since then, these men have been standing tall, turning their homemade bombs on the Gadhafi regime itself.

 

A Toronto Star team found these weary rebels on the weekend under a tree in the desert east of Brega, preparing some lamb over an open fire next to their Toyota pickup with an anti-aircraft gun mounted on the back.

 

It was a picnic between withering battles that now have the rebels on the run, Gadhafi’s army drives deep into eastern Libya.

 

They acknowledged the revolution is struggling but they insisted proudly they would fight on. They don’t want their children to end up fish-bombers. They want a better future than Qadhafi can offer and vow to fight for it to the death, if it comes to that.

 

“To fish properly in Libya using a boat, you need connections with Gadhafi’s revolutionary committees. And then you had to register with the secret police,” said Hussein Musrati, 34.

 

“This was not possible. And so there are many of us who had no choice. Many people come here to the desert where nobody lives and blow up fish from the shoreline. It is not much of a living, but it is all we could do.”

 

Hafed Khashini, 37, showed the Star one of fish-bombs — what looks like a tunafish tin of TNT with a home-fashioned fuse sticking out the side. And on the end, a few wooden matches wrapped with tape.

 

Their proudest day, the men said, came as the Feb. 17 uprising entered its volcanic phase. They and others converged in the city’s much-loathed Katibah compound, the Gadhafi regime’s military stronghold, and used their fish-bombs to blast down the walls. Rebels stormed inside and set the place ablaze, chasing away Gadhafi loyalists and looting its arsenal to better equip themselves for the fight to come.

 

“With each victory, we were able to take what we found and gather better weapons. When you have nothing to lose, you are not afraid of the consequences,” said Khashini.

 

For nearly an hour they told of their contempt for the regime that held them down from their earliest memories, citing the paucity of education opportunities that set them on a path to bombing the seas to scrape by. Only one of the four has saved enough to marry; the rest are bachelors. One trained as an air conditioning serviceman but after a fruitless job search he has never worked a day in the trade.

 

Khashini says he was “taken to fight in Chad” during his compulsory military service for what he calls “another of Gadhafi’s pointless wars.” When the fighters returned, he said that “the wounded were thrown out of the aircraft into the sea,” perishing on the regime’s orders.

 

But the rebel momentum hit a wall two hours west of where they were picnicking this day. All four were there late Thursday when the battle for the oil port of Ras Lanuf raged fiercest. They claim Gadhafi spies pretending to be rebels were their undoing.

 

“A man in one of the rebel cars shouted, ‘This way, follow me.’ And we all drove behind, heading to the shoreline,” said Jammal Ammari, 43.

 

“Then suddenly we saw gunboats and they started shelling us. And then Gadhafi’s tanks came in from behind and we were trapped. The car that led us there vanished in the chaos and we are sure these were Gadhafi collaborators who arranged a trap.”

 

The fish-bombers managed to escape. And they insist that however grim these past few days, Gadhafi’s advances are about to meet a far steelier defence as the fighting approaches the eastern city of Ajdabiya.

 

“These desert towns of Ras Lanuf and Brega, they are small. But Ajdabiya, this is the heartland of the east and Gadhafi’s men will much stronger resistance here. People will not retreat from their own homes,” said Musrati.

 

“The problem for us now is the planes. They are flying so high we can no longer see them, we can only hear them and feel the bombs. If the world will push his planes out of the air, the Libyan people can do the rest.”

 

But either way, the fish-bombers say they will keep on fighting, whatever the odds.

 

“We don’t want to fight around the oil refineries because this is Libya’s wealth and we don’t want it destroyed. So we are happy to pull back to protect our future,” said Ammari.

 

“But we have more fight left. We will not let him go beyond Ajdabiya.”