Kadhafi playing tricks to divide tribes: rebels

BENGHAZI: Libyan strongman Moamer Kadhafi is playing "dirty games" and trying to divide tribes in the besieged western city of Misrata, a military official and rebels said on Sunday.

"Kadhafi is playing a really dirty game," the rebel Transitional National Council's military spokesman, Colonel Omar Bani, told AFP.

Salvos of Grad rockets and automatic weapons fire targeted Misrata on Sunday in an apparent contradiction of the regime's claims that its troops have halted operations in the port city to allow tribes to solve the conflict.

"It is a trick, they didn't go," Bani said.

"They have stayed a bit out of Tripoli Street but they are preparing themselves to attack again."

Much of Tripoli Street, one of the main arteries in Libya's third city, has been blasted into rubble by shelling and heavy fighting, say journalists and residents who have fled the violence.

Bani said Kadhafi was now putting prisoners plucked from eastern Libya and the western mountains of Misrata on the streets of the city, arming them with Kalashnikovs and other weapons but no ammunition.

"The people in Misrata will think they are the troops of Kadhafi," he said, adding: "If they don't kill them, the soldiers (of Kadhafi) will kill them from behind."

Bani said Kadhafi had used a similar strategy in earlier Misrata battles by mobilising students from the military academies "too young" to cope with or understand the politics of the violent conflict.

"We captured many of them. They were crying, saying 'we don't know anything about this war'," he said of troops captured by the rebels in Misrata, adding that they had been released and sent back to their families.

He said Kadhafi was trying to create a "huge problem between the tribes of Libya from east to west," and "trying to show the world" that the tribes of Misrata were still with him.

Kadhafi "wants to prove that it is a civil war between the tribes of Libya, but this is not the truth. It will never happen," said Bani.

"Do you think I would fight against my family? It is impossible." (AFP)