More Gore.

For my sins I've been watching more videos from Libya. Most are too short and too low quality to be of any use. However there are four that I've seen so far that are interesting.

The first was filmed on a coastal road in Benghazi on the "Day of Rage", February 15th. It shows a large group of mainly young, unarmed protesters wandering about in the road. What I think has happened is that they been part of a protest march that has been turned back by an unseen police/army roadblock and are gradually making their way back from the way they've come. Then semi-automatic rifle shots can be heard and a figure in the crowd falls to the ground. As the camera operator moves closer you can see that it is a young man who has been shot through the head. Unfortunately you can't see whether the shot has come from the roadblock or from a sniper hiding in one of the surrounding buildings. However if I had to guess I would say that it is an aimed shot from the roadblock.

The second video also comes from February 15th and was filmed in a built up area that I assume was Benghazi. Again it shows a crowd of young people wandering around in the road. After the sound of gun shots the camera operator runs up to a young man who is lying on the ground after being shot in the shoulder. Amid the panic the man is given basic first aid before being bundled (alive) into a car and driven away. As this video doesn't show the moment the man was shot it is impossible to tell where it was fired from let alone who fired it. Based on the wound though my guess would be that it was fired by someone in the crowd, on ground level with a handgun. However it is impossible to say who that person was.

The third video is very short at only around 30 seconds long. It was filmed later in the week, February 17/18th and appears to be from Darnah. It shows two young men, teenagers really, armed with a semi-automatic pistol and a small sub-machine gun. They are hiding in an alleyway as they exchange fire with an unseen gunman hiding in the window of a near-by building. The video is too short to see how the exchange of fire ends.

The fourth video was filmed in the courtyard of a house in what I assume is Darnah on or around February 17/18th. It shows a group of five or six men examining the corpse of a sub-Saharan man who appears to have been one of the infamous mercenary snipers. As the man has been disarmed before being beaten/hacked to death by a mob I don't think he was a particularly well trained soldier if he received any military training at all. He is though wearing blue camouflage fatigues. These are Russian military surplus and have swamped the sub-Saharan market because they are dirt cheap. As they are urban pattern camouflage designed for use in the north-Caucasus they tend to be favoured by the police and armed security guards who work in towns and on industrial sites. By contrast Qaddafi's mercenaries tend to be better trained, drilled into conventional military units and better equipped with desert pattern camouflage. Therefore I would say that this guy was employed as an armed security guard for an oil company and had been shipped into Darnah by his company from either a Libyan oil field or from an oil field in a neighbouring country like Niger. Obviously it would have been nice to interview him or one of his colleagues but there are a lot of rumours about the rebels killing their prisoners and dumping their bodies in unmarked graves.


Meanwhile the United Nations are locked into a marathon session to debate a British and, to a lesser extent, French proposal for targeted economic sanctions, weapon import bans and no-fly zones against Libya. Although this sounds like a warm and cuddly attempt to keep the peace the British are really trying to make sure that Libya turns into a Democratic Republic of Congo style nightmare. The idea is that because British oil companies still have control of oil drilling sites in Libya they will be able to continue to pump oil out of the country amid the carnage.