A Busy Day in Libya.

Although they have yet to fully re-take the towns it would appear that Libyan government forces have been able to suppress the rebels in Zuwarah and Mistarah to the extent that they have been able to link up with forces in the government stronghold of Sirte. From there government forces have today (02/03/11) mounted an assault on the town of Brega. Initially government forces were able to re-take the town with little resistance but rebel fighters from Ajdabiya and Benghazi counter-attacked forcing the government troops to retreat leaving Brega in rebel hands at the time of writing. Today government aircraft have also launched multiple attacks against Ajdabiya which contains a very large weapons store. The Libyan government is focusing on attacking this military target because it's destruction would dramatically shorten Libya's civil war if not end it completely.

In a possibly related incident a 21 year old man from Kosovo has carried out a gun attack against a bus carrying US air force personnel at Frankfurt airport in Germany. Although details are a little hazy at the moment it appears that two people have been killed in the incident. The most probable explanation for the incident is that a mentally unstable man who grew up during the NATO intervention in Kosovo wrongly interpreted rather bellicose statements by the American political right as a sign that America is engineering the situation in Libya as prelude to a full scale NATO intervention. Therefore he has attacked USAF personnel who would potentially be involved in any such operation.

It is also possible that the German authorities had a hand in allowing the incident in order to promote a wide discussion about the 1986 bombing of a Berlin nightclub that killed two US servicemen. This incident was blamed on Qaddafi and prompted Ronald Reagan to order the bombing of Tripoli that killed 60 including Qaddafi's young daughter. The Lockerbie bombing is widely accepted as Qaddafi's vengeance for that attack. The shooting also provides the opportunity for a discreet discussion between Germany and the US over the motivations behind and the success of the NATO interventions in the former Yugoslavia and Kosovo.