Misrata – On the outskirts of Misrata, Libya's ravaged western port city, volunteers line up, single file, and begin streaming toward a concrete wall defining the perimeter of a school turned into a training center.
The recruits – a few dozen young men in civilian clothes respond to a commander's orders in unison, somewhat awkwardly but with fervor. They scale a barrier and pull themselves across a rope strung between the wall and a tattered basketball hoop.
The exercises are a daily routine at the makeshift Martyrs of 17 February Howla Training Center, which provides volunteers with seven to ten days' worth of training before they start work as rebel fighters or security personnel.
More than 12,000 people have graduated from three main rebel training camps so far, and they continue to churn out an estimated 500 recruits each program period.
"They are being trained to keep the peace," says Captain Hussein Mir Doghmar, an instructor and spokeperson for the center. "Many more people, like thugs, have weapons now. And of course, there's no more civilian police."
The priorities at Howla show a rising trend within Libyan rebel ranks. Authorities in the primary western rebel stronghold are shifting the focus of their resistance campaign to improving safety in Misrata rather than flooding the front lines with ill-prepared fighters.
With meager or poor resources, they’re training everything from “elite” battalions to technicians to teams designed to secure sites of vital interest, such as the city’s ports and electricity facilities.
“In the beginning we were restricted on time,” says Doghmar. “First they were just able to load and reload a gun. Now we have much more time to give detailed instruction.”
As Misrata’s youths train for various security roles in the recently liberated but still vulnerable city, Libyan leader Muammar Qadhafi’s GRAD missiles hit the ground roughly 15 km west of the city, filling the sky with the thunderous sounds of impact.
Misrata's residents and rebel fighters are used to this ominous symphony. It’s the shift from urban fighting to relatively distant clashes that’s unfamiliar.
The revolutionaries have only recently managed to forcibly expel Qadhafi’s tanks and purge the city of the last remnants of sniper cells.
“In the early days, for the first two and a half months, we sent 80 percent to the front lines,” says Mohamed Mohamed Ali, a retired infantry general under Qadhafi and the warden of Howla. “No real soldier can be trained in ten days. It's much easier to train to defend ourselves.”
Ali says rebel authorities in the embattled city are now putting only 40 percent of volunteers on stand-by for front-line service, with few actually seeing combat. The move fits with the rebel-embraced strategy in recent weeks of ensuring control over an area before advancing.
Early in the conflict, those seeking Qadhafi’s ouster stretched themselves perilously thin on Libya’s eastern front, west of Ajdabiya, and were forced to launch a massive retreat with loyalist forces on their heels.
It also perhaps contradicts reports from the entrenched front line to Misrata’s west, 20 km from the city center in Dafneya, that suggest plans for an imminent push towards Zlitan, the next city in line toward the capital Tripoli.
“It’s all up to NATO. They tell us if we can get past a certain point,” says Ali. “Its much easier to defend the city. With all the desert and open environment around us it’s very, very difficult to advance. It would require heavy artillery and ammunition.”
The facility, and the rebel forces in Misrata as a whole, lack impressive material resources – as a modified anti-aircraft gun fastened to a wheelbarrow at Howla indicates – but there is no dearth of personnel or zeal.
“The things I saw in the first days [of the siege] … the houses attacked and women humiliated,” says Emad Omar Moussa, a 21-year-old former engineer student who is now training to become part of a team geared to secure vital sites. “I want to defend my brothers and sisters in Islam. I want to fight.”
The concentration of security appears to be having an impact on the city. Shops are beginning to open, and every day more people return to the streets of Misrata to assess the damage of Qadhafi’s sustained assault.
Ibrahim Sowaieb owns a once-posh, now badly-damaged coffee shop just one block from the notorious Tripoli Street, which is still cordoned off for fear of unexploded ordnance. He reopened the shop on Sunday after being closed for two and a half months.
“Now we are more relaxed, with the increasing number of checkpoints and patrols,” says Sowaieb. “Aside from the threats from Qadhafi troops, I don’t perceive any problems. I feel safe. The checkpoints are making the city secure.”
The main six-block stretch of the city’s primary downtown thoroughfare, one end adjacent to Sowaieb’s coffee shop, is devastated. Every building has been reduced to rubble and ruin. Every standing façade is riddled with bullet holes, some several inches in diameter.
Burned out tanks and cars litter the ground, and both broken glass and shrapnel mark nearly every foot of the street for half a kilometer. This is where the most horrific, indiscriminate shelling and sniper attacks took place.
But the products of training camps such as Howla, young men rarely older than 20, station themselves around Tripoli Street and throughout Misrata 24 hours a day to ensure the city does not degenerate into lawlessness.
Hassan Omar Assoudi, 20, mans a checkpoint at the southern end of the street’s insurance building, an infamous bird’s nest position for Qadhafi’s professional snipers.
“There is no immediate or direct threat now but everything is still expected,” says Assoudi, adding that he and his fellow security personnel are now acting as protectors of the revolution. “We add more checkpoints as necessary according to the demand.”
Clashes continue to rage west of Misrata with at least one reported rebel death Sunday, evidencing Qadhafi’s unwillingness to quit. Fighters returning from the front said sniper fire during a rebel reconnaissance mission caused the fatality. Medical sources at a Hikma clinic confirmed the death.
Despite rebel claims that Qadhafi's forces cannot breach the city, and coordinated efforts to usher life in Misrata back to normality, the amassed loyalist force near Zlitan will undoubtedly ensure lingering disquiet.
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