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WaPoLibyan leader Moammar Gaddafi is largely relying on paramilitary forces, some of them bolstered by foreign mercenaries, to crush a popular uprising amid signs of schisms in the regular army, according to Libyan and military experts.
Reports emanating from Libya suggest that foreign mercenaries have been among the most brutal forces sweeping through the streets of Tripoli, the capital, and other cities. Foreigners continued to flow into Libya on Wednesday.
Many of the paramilitary units, which have been firing indiscriminately at civilian protesters, have long been part of Libya's internal security system and have helped as a check on any uprising by the army. Now they are bloodying civilians.
"You have the traditional army and you have a parallel army," said Noman Benotman, a senior analyst at Quilliam, a London counter-extremism think tank, and a former Libyan jihadist. "The army is weak, not a significant power. The parallel units are controlled by the most loyal people, not just to the regime, but to Colonel Gaddafi personally."
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/23/AR2011022306837.html
Among Libya's Prisoners: Interviews with MercenariesAt the Aruba School in the Mediterranean coastal town of Shehat, less than a mile from a grassy hillside covered in Roman ruins, a poster bearing Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's picture is being used as a doormat. School is not in session. But in the current state of limbo gripping eastern Libya, or "Free Libya," as some are now calling it, the Aruba School is currently serving a different function. It is a prison for nearly 200 suspected mercenaries of the Gaddafi regime.
Libyan soldiers who have defected from Gaddafi's ranks stand guard at the school's gates, draped in belts of ammunition and cradling machine guns — more to protect their hostages than to keep them from escaping, some locals whisper. A group of civilians from the nearby towns has gathered at the gate. They want to come in to get a glimpse of "the African mercenaries" who they say killed their families and neighbors last week. Shouting breaks out. The guards let them into the school's lobby and then hold them back. "They are scared that they will hurt the Africans," says Tawfik al-Shohiby, an activist and chemical engineer.
(See how Berlusconi went gaga for Gaddafi.)
The soldiers have good reason to be protective. Rumors abound in this restless region on Libya's eastern Mediterranean coast about the identity of the forces that fought the protesters for days before eastern Libya fell, as they say, "to the people." At the ransacked airport of Labrak, on the road between the towns of Darna and Beida where clashes were fierce, Gaddafi's government flew in two planes of foreign mercenaries on Wednesday night to fight the protesters, say the airport employees standing amid the wreckage.
The protesters accuse Gaddafi of sending foreigners — from Libya's southern neighbors of Chad and Niger — because they believe he had no one else to support him. They say the mercenaries were rounded up and paid to fight. And they've found ID cards from Niger and Chad to prove it. One activist displays a traveler's cheque for 15,000 Libyan Dinars alongside a matching national ID card from Chad, and a stack of several others.
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http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2053490,00.html#ixzz1ErdqQobS
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