And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East (19 page)

We eventually made it to Tobruk, the scene of bitter fighting in World War II. Allied forces, mostly Australian, captured it in 1941, but Erwin Rommel, the famed Desert Fox, wrested it away for the Axis Powers the following year. I was reminded then of Rommel’s observation that fighting in the desert was like fighting at sea. There were no population centers or strategic points, distances didn’t mean much, and an army could gain or lose a hundred miles in a single battle. We saw this happen many times in the months ahead.

From Tobruk we traveled another 290 miles west to Benghazi, the second-largest city in Libya (pop. 700,000) and the rebels’ capital. En route we heard a speech by Gadhafi on state radio. In a weird cadence, sometimes excited, other times slurred, Gadhafi claimed bin Laden and the United States were in cahoots and slipping hallucinogenic drugs into the rebels’ Nescafé, making them crazy. (The Libyans, who were once colonized by the Italians, do amazing things with Nescafé. I became addicted to their sweet cappuccino served in plastic cups, but not because they had any drugs in them.) In my first report from Libya, I said Gadhafi “does not sound like a sane person.”

In Benghazi, we stayed at the Uzo Hotel, where a media center
had already been set up. The rebels had cleared the hotel of regular guests and allotted the rooms to military officers and journalists. A rebel office was downstairs, and if we wanted to go to the front lines, I only had to ask one of the commanders for a ride.

Most of the rebels were civilians, not trained soldiers, and they had captured Benghazi by acclamation of the populace, not in street-to-street battles with government forces. But like actors donning costumes, they immediately started dressing like Che Guevara—camouflage jackets, bandoliers, scarves, mirrored sunglasses, and, of course, berets. They swaggered around with guns, most of which hadn’t been fired in anger. They fired a lot in the air.

After a week with the rebels in Benghazi, I wanted to get to Tripoli, the capital and site of Gadhafi’s compound. But how? It was a 630-mile drive along the Mediterranean coast, roughly the distance between New York City and Detroit, but that was not the real problem. At the 350-mile mark lay Sirte, Gadhafi’s hometown, which we figured would be unfriendly to foreign journalists arriving from the rebels’ eastern enclave.

We considered crossing the Gulf of Sidra, a U-shaped body of water with Benghazi and Tripoli at opposite tips, but we couldn’t find a suitable boat. So we drove twenty-four hours back through Tobruk to Sallum and finally to Cairo, booking a flight from there to Tripoli even though we still lacked visas for Libya. When the plane landed in Tripoli to pick up new passengers, we grabbed our gear and purposely stranded ourselves. We told immigration officials that we were expected at the press center at the Rixos Hotel. This cock-and-bull story bought us some time. After several hours, an immigration official called me into his office and shook my hand, slipping me a piece of paper with his name and phone number on it, then stamped us in. He was clearly hedging
his bet on the regime, figuring a contact with an American journalist might come in handy later on.

When correspondents cover a civil war, they expect to live rough, but that was certainly not the case at the Rixos. This superluxurious hotel had indoor and outdoor swimming pools, a Turkish bath, a gym with thirty brand-spanking-new treadmills, and a nightly buffet with roast meats and chicken, fresh vegetables, and a dozen different desserts.

After using all our ingenuity to get to Tripoli, it soon became apparent that we had arrived too soon. “We’re in the eye of the storm,” I reported on March 2. I said the city was more ready for tourists than war. Restaurants and hotels were open, and the markets brimmed with Mediterranean produce.

The same was not true twenty-eight miles to the west in Zawiya, Libya’s fifth-largest city (pop. 200,000). When protests flared there, Gadhafi used airpower and dozens of tanks to pummel the city, leaving it in ruins. We tried to drive to Zawiya but were pulled off the road at a government checkpoint. As we waited to show our identification, I grabbed my BlackBerry and frantically deleted a hundred or so pictures I had taken of rebels in Benghazi, knowing they would probably have landed me in jail.

Pro-government demonstrations were staged every day in Green Square, adjacent to Tripoli’s medieval old city, whose large port gave way to narrow streets with beautiful homes and courtyards, many of which had been converted to restaurants or hotels. I reported that the government was proclaiming the capture of towns that were still controlled by the rebels. “So people in Tripoli are being told to celebrate victories that aren’t taking place.”

After eight days in Tripoli, we flew back to Cairo. When you’re covering a story like this, you always want to get to the
next place. The grass is always greener. In Benghazi, you report on the rebels, you go to the front lines, you follow the ebbs and flows of the battle, and pretty soon you feel as if you’re doing the same story over and over. Then you jump to Tripoli and find you’re caught in a bubble. You turn on the television and see the competition getting good pictures of the fighting. So you say to yourself, “This battle is serious. Tripoli isn’t cooking. I can hop over to Benghazi, catch some of the fight, and still get back to Tripoli if necessary.”

We got to Cairo and made the long drive to Sallum to cross back into Libya. Our team was completely frazzled. On March 11, 2011, as we prepared to cross the border, a tsunami devastated Japan, killing fifteen thousand, destroying hundreds of thousands of homes, and causing meltdowns at three nuclear power plants. We knew that story would dominate the news for days, and we wouldn’t be able to get our stuff on the air. So after a heart-to-heart talk, we decided to take a week’s break.

When we finally returned to Tobruk, US and NATO planes had joined the rebel effort, and just in time. They knocked out government armored vehicles and artillery streaming toward Benghazi. If the heavy weaponry had reached its destination, the city would have fallen and the revolution would probably have come to an abrupt halt. President Obama had committed the US military to protect the rebels and the civilians around them from an advancing army. President Obama became a hero to the Arab street. First he refused to back Mubarak. Now he was saving Benghazi. Perhaps Bahrain where Washington failed to act was an anomaly. It was certainly overshadowed by Libya, where Washington and its European allies took direct action, sending jets in to support the rebels. It was dramatic, cheered by Arab television, and raised
expectations among rebels and reformers all around the world, especially in Syria, where they would be bitterly disappointed.

We hung back in Tobruk to see how the US/NATO air campaign played out. Once we felt it was safe, we returned to Benghazi, passing destroyed armored columns by the side of the road. Gadhafi’s forces had come within two miles of the rebel capital.

We found the rebel forces buoyed by the help from the air. Each day we would venture out from Benghazi and drive to villages along the ever-advancing front. The battle for Ajdabiya, a city of seventy thousand about 125 miles south of Benghazi, was considered crucial because it was the first test of the rebels’ strength since the beginning of the Western air campaign. On March 24, my team and I were doing interviews with a rebel unit about five miles outside Ajdabiya when I encountered a fighter armed with a plastic toy pistol. I never got a chance to learn why. As I was describing the gun on camera, three incoming tank or artillery rounds exploded fifty yards away. We took cover behind a concrete block while the rebels scattered.

The next day government and rebel forces were fighting inside Ajdabiya. Ordinarily we stayed behind the rebels’ front line, advancing only when they did, but this time we decided to risk moving forward while the battle was in flux.

Western airstrikes proved more effective than the rebels expected, obliterating dozens of Gadhafi’s tanks and armored personnel carriers and creating a corridor of destruction that cleared the way for ground advances. By March 28 the rebels had followed it west for 340 miles, almost equal to the distance separating San Francisco and Los Angeles. They were more than two-thirds of the way to Tripoli, but they got bogged down at Sirte, Gadhafi’s hometown and military bulwark.

Even with their successes, the rebels were still a ragtag army. They had virtually no lines of communication, and their commanders were woefully inexperienced. What they had were weapons—artillery, mortars, even surface-to-surface missiles. Unfortunately, they often had no idea how to use them. We were with a rebel unit outside Ajdabiya on March 30 when they were preparing to fire a rocket from a huge launcher. We set up our cameras to film the launch because this was the most advanced weaponry we had seen in rebel hands. When they fired it, the rocket went backward, landing not far from a hotel. By some miracle, no one was hurt.

Meanwhile, one of the longest and bloodiest battles of the war was intensifying in Misrata, Libya’s third-largest city (pop. 500,000). Misrata’s location—500 miles west of Benghazi (about 150 miles past Sirte) and only 115 miles east of Tripoli—made it strategically vital. The rebels had taken control of the city in late February, holding it even as Gadhafi solidified his control of the western part of the country all around it. On March 6, the government moved to reclaim Misrata, ultimately laying siege to the city by cutting off access to it by land, leaving its Mediterranean port the only way in and out. It was sometimes called Libya’s Stalingrad because of the intensity of the fighting and the hardships endured by civilians.

We were stuck in Benghazi trying to find a boat that would take us there. Whenever we thought we had a way in, our editors back in New York thought it wasn’t safe enough. One time we came upon a craft that looked seaworthy, only to find that it was laden with explosives. We didn’t even mention it to the editors in New York because we knew the boat was a death trap. If someone dropped a cigarette, the boat would have been blown to smithereens.

But reporters from ITN, Al Jazeera, the BBC, the
Guardian
, the
Independent
, and, most gallingly, CNN did get into the city, usually on fishing boats. On March 29, CNN uploaded video of the horrific violence. Gadhafi units made daily forays into the city, stationing snipers in buildings. Then the main body of government soldiers would pull back so that heavy weapons—mortars, artillery, tanks, and truck-mounted rocket systems with forty launch tubes—could pound the city.

One of the problems about getting into Misrata was figuring out how to get back out. The fighting was not only heavy but, often, random. Hundreds, some claimed thousands, of people were killed, many of them noncombatants. The rebels would have been routed if it wasn’t for NATO jets, which destroyed tons of Gadhafi’s heavy weaponry and often kept his tanks at bay simply by flying overhead.

A government mortar attack on April 20 killed two journalists—British documentary filmmaker Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros, an American photographer whose work had been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Not long afterward, Gadhafi’s helicopters started dropping mines into Misrata’s harbor. We were shut out for good. The rebels finally regained full control of the city on May 15, 2011.

As the battle for Misrata raged, I reported on April 1 that rebel forces had dug trenches 120 miles east of Benghazi and were holding their line. They probably did so at the behest of NATO, which knew the rebels could not fight their way through Sirte, circumvent Gadhafi’s forces outside Misrata, and then mount a frontal assault on Tripoli.

What I had no way of knowing at the time was that yet another front was forming in Zintan, a city of fifty thousand in the
Nafusa Mountains, only eight-five miles southwest of Tripoli, not far from the Tunisian border. So now Gadhafi’s forces were stymied in the east, embroiled in Misrata, and trying to fend off Zintanis, who had the advantage of fighting on familiar mountainous terrain.

You never know how big and turbulent the world is until you try to cover it. While I was in Benghazi on May 2, monitoring the escalating NATO air campaign, I got a frantic call from NBC in New York: “Get in front of the camera. There’s going to be a presidential announcement coming up soon, and Obama is going to say bin Laden is dead.” My crew and I muttered, “My God, we’re in the middle of nowhere.” But I knew bin Laden’s history like the back of my hand and managed to put together a credible report from eastern Libya.

Benghazi became my watchtower on uprisings in Libya and Syria, where protests against Bashar al-Assad were turning bloody, and on the pincer movement beginning to threaten Tripoli.

All across the Middle East, events were now unfolding quickly and in completely interconnected ways. The uprising in Syria began while the war in Libya was still raging. All day long, people in Damascus, Aleppo, and Daraa watched NATO airstrikes on television. They saw Washington use its military might to defend those who went out in the streets to call for democracy. But already there were signs of what was to come. Egypt was starting to unravel. The protesters who overthrew Mubarak kept coming back to Tahrir Square. They returned with every grievance big or small. Egyptians found success once in Tahrir, and kept trying to repeat it, which made the country ungovernable. Egyptian protesters also expected the same amount of international interest and US support every time they started to cheer and hold up posters.
After Mubarak was overthrown, competing protests began, sometimes at the same time and in the same place. I was back in Cairo on July 15 reporting on a demonstration by one hundred thousand people in Tahrir Square who were protesting the hijacking of the Egyptian revolution by the military and Islamic groups. It was odd because some were standing against the growing influence of the military after Mubarak, while others were denouncing the military’s old enemy, the Muslim Brotherhood, which was also gunning for power. Others were protesting against both groups, claiming they were in an alliance together. I saw people protesting against Israel too, for good measure it seemed. The Muslim Brotherhood would ultimately win the first round after Mubarak.