Back to the front-lines

It was with a lot of trepidation that we drove back down to Ras Lanuf this morning. I was hitching a ride with an agency photographer, and there was some debate about whether we could cross through the rebel checkpoint around fifty kilometres east of Ras Lanuf.

The rebels’ technicals were racing past us in the opposite direction, and nobody was sure of what lay ahead. Yesterday’s bombings were still very fresh in my mind.

After much debate and coercion, we arrived back at the checkpoint where I had spent the previous day. There seemed much fewer rebels on the ground, with fighting at the front-line several kilometres beyond this position.

“You have to wait for the general” we were told when trying to advance further. In this rag-tag group of fighters, the idea of such a formal commander seemed a world away.

When a jet was heard overhead, my heart was in my mouth. I tried to rationalise the situation, and whichever way I did it, things looked worse.

Perhaps the loyalist pilots intended to miss us yesterday. They didn’t want to kill their countrymen, they just wanted to scare them. Today they would be forced to bomb closer. Less than one hundred metres separated me from the explosions yesterday, and I wasn’t keen to experience it more intimately.

Or perhaps it was just poor targeting. These were dumb bombs, after all, dropped from great altitude and at very high speeds. Yesterday was rather windy, maybe they just missed. Well today there was little wind.

I was keen to advance from this target. And besides, I couldn’t get any different images to what I got yesterday.

Eventually, the mysterious general arrived, and we could advance, away from the bombs. Perhaps.

On the desert highway just before Bin Jawad & Es Sidr, a mass of rebel pick-ups was assembled on the dune to our right. Regular, incoming shelling could be seen in the distance. A man stood with his back to it all, his boots between his legs as he prayed.

Our car could go no further. I clambered up the sandy hill to a group of rebels having what seemed to be a picnic. As they sat around eating sandwiches, the Mediterranean lapped the shore just behind them to the north.

But to the west, columns of sand and smoke were rising. Cracks of gunfire would ring out from the rebels below us. We seemed to be out of range of the Qaddafi shells but we were well aware that the loyalist troops’ weapons had a greater range than those of the rebels.

Suddenly, the rebels started firing volleys of their grad rockets towards the Qaddafi position. Rocket after rocket would rip into the sky, the sound of the first stopping my heart.

As I grasped the situation, I moved towards them, trying to capture the intensity of what was happening, whilst also trying to comprehend that I was in the middle of covering a conflict.

And then the incoming shells started ripping up the desert right at the bottom of this dune. Perhaps we weren’t quite as out of range as I believed.

Our driver called out saying he was leaving, and my colleague was in no mood to argue. As I ran down the hill towards the road, a shell zipped over my head, exploding to my left right on our escape route.

My heart was pounding as I sprinted, holding my two cameras and leaping over ditches. For a brief second, my mind was back in the French Alps, trail-running down the mountains of Haute Savoie.

As the car started moving, I dived into the rear seat. His foot to the floor, our driver weaved through the rebels who also fled. It was carnage, perhaps the most danger came from being bumper to bumper with these panicked, erratic fighters as we all vied to escape.

Parked at Ras Lanuf, I walked back towards the front-line along with a group of rebels. Huge, black columns of smoke rose from the oil-depots there as a jet flew over us. Again, the thundering rounds from the guns ripped into the sky. Again, the jet flew on, unhindered.

Today I Got Bombed

Yesterday, I had seen the aftermath of an air-strike by Qaddafi jets on the rebels’ position outside Ras Lanuf. Today, I was in the middle of them.

Ras Lanuf is a small town on the Libyan coast in the Bay of Sirte, which prior to this conflict caused little interest, unless you were in the oil business. It is now splashed across the news as the front-line of the Libyan conflict.

The rebels man a checkpoint at the refinery, and another on the edge of the town. Several anti-aircraft guns are stationed at the intersection, along with a large contingent of the rebels, and the international press. We must have been around twenty, stood there on the edge of the desert.

The checkpoint also attracted the eye of the Qaddafi forces: they flew four sorties over us today, each one dropping two bombs.

Our only warning was the sound of their engines. They flew so high, and so fast, that the rebels spotters had little use in locating them. As the roar of the jets reached us, the atmosphere got tense.

Anti-aircraft guns started to open up into the skies above, useless against fighters at that altitude, but morale boosting. The din was deafening, as the hot casings of the bullets spewed out onto the roadside. Crise of “Alluha akbar” (“God is greatest”) would erupt from the rebels around me.

And then came the whistle of the arriving bombs.

There was little cover, and so all one could do was hope. Hope it would not meet its target.

At around midday, two thundered into the desert just off the side of the road. They landed perhaps seventy-five metres from our position, the twin booms ripping through the air as columns of smoke and sand rose into the air. I managed to get off two frames as people ran towards me, just as they hit.

Still, the anti-aircraft guns filled the sky with bullets.

Almost exactly an hour later, the now familiar roar of jet engines returned, followed by the whistle of incoming explosives. They fell just the other side of our position, hitting one of the houses in the residential district just next to us. Again, only seventy-five metres or so separated us from their impact.

Again, a couple of frames of the impact as the yellow smoke billowed into the air. I ran, jumped over a wall and was at the impact site. The living room was exposed to the street, a large crater in front of the house. Luckily, the inhabitants of the house had already fled east.

Men with kalashnikovs stood in the crater, shouting against “the dog”, Qaddafi. A few metres away, this bomb’s sibling lay unexploded in the street.

Back at the rebel position, men knelt on the sidewalk for the lunch-time prayers.

“What am I doing?” crossed my mind several times that night.

To War

A column of smoke is rising on the horizon, separated from us by a stretch of the monotonous Libyan desert. We have passed through the vast checkpoints of Ajdabiya and Brega, guarded by groups of heavy machine guns and anti-aircraft guns, mounted onto the back of pick-up trucks. The Libyans seem to have taken lead from technicals that are ubiquitous from images of Somalia.

But my eyes are fixed on this column of smoke. It is fresh. Everyone in the car has their eyes fixed on the skies. That smoke is from a bomb dropped by Qaddafi aircraft, and our lone vehicle seems like a throbbing target, driving down this long, straight road through the desert.

For a week, I have been covering Libya’s revolution from the safety of Benghazi, focusing on the hospital and the stranded migrants for a couple of French publications.

Now the time has come to submit to my intrigue. How would I fare as a war photographer?

The technicals at the rebel position next to the oil refineries of Ras Lanuf surpass anything I have hitherto seen. The place is throbbing with young Libyans, some dressed in army fatigues, others in jeans and a jacket. They are all carrying Kalashnikovs, or other assault rifles presumably pilfered from the army depots since the revolution.

The source of the smoke kilometres is a just ahead, the shell of a pick-up truck, its glass spread over the road. Twenty metres away, rebels climb into the crater caused by the air-strike. A man is shouting, holding the shoe of a young child. A family were apparently in the car when it was hit.

“This is a war crime” shouts a young Libyan reporter, but the more seasoned heads around me start to analyse the situation. The car was not targeted, they postulate, just an unfortunate victim of a strike on what seems a valid target - the many, armed rebels centred here. And really, was this whole family killed as the angered men suggest? We need evidence.

I have a lot to learn. How easy it is to be subsumed by the shouting and emotions that throng. This is it. A few kilometres separate me from the front-line.

The next few days are going to be quite the education.

Revolution

The flag of the revolution is everywhere. Libyan nurse at the Benghazi Medical Centre.

The flag of the revolution is everywhere.

Libyan nurse at the Benghazi Medical Centre.

Hearts & Minds

When I crossed into Libya, the rebels manning the border were happy to see foreign journalists coming into the country. The armed men at the checkpoints would smile and give a “V for victory” salute as our car drove through their barricades, en-route to Benghazi.

Around the city, graffiti would thank Al-Jazeera, CNN, the BBC. Television screens had brought the plight of those in Benghazi to the world stage, as well as having offered inspiration from their coverage of the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions.

The rebels liked journalists.

In a burned out building on Benghazi’s corniche, over-looking the Mediterranean, a set of offices had been cleaned out and dedicated to the new national, and foreign, press. The “Media Centre of Rebels”.

They issued Heath-Robinson press cards, bearing the tricolour of the Sanussi-era flag. And more importantly, they could arrange drivers and translators. A willing little army of young, educated, English- and French-speaking volunteers was keen to get their first taste of The Press.

There was also another army of volunteers, surrounded by slogans in both Arabic and in English, claiming an end to Qaddafi’s rule, cataloguing his errors and his crimes. The building was filled with caricatures, political slogans and “fact-boxes”. Some of these posters and placards would later be out in the street, protesting against Qaddafi, and raising the morale of the Benghazians. And of course, splashed across the pages of the international press.