Colonel Gaddafi’s Hat. Alex Crawford

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СКАЧАТЬ now Stuart is on the Tunisian border with cameraman Richie Mockler and Martin Vowles, who is security for the team. I have worked with both in Pakistan. Martin is one of a very small number who have already slipped over the border under the eyes of the Libyan guards and back into Tunisia again. Richie and Martin are both former marines. Together with Stuart they are thinking through the options with military precision and planning. They are negotiating with their rebel contacts, appealing to them for help and discussing sending in a team of Opposition fighters who understand the area and know the back roads to try to smuggle us all out of Zawiya. They are also investigating a sea rescue – lining up a boat to enter Libyan waters and then transport us out of the country that way – again with the help of the rebels.

      We don’t realize at this point we are relatively close to the sea. Stuart, Richie and Martin V have the benefit of maps and satellite photographs showing our location. The only trouble is we have to somehow get to the port and at present we can’t even get out of the hospital. In between the plotting and planning, Stuart still finds time to text us some schoolboy jokes: ‘Have you heard the one about the bloke who walks into the doctor’s with a steering wheel around his dick? The doctor says: “What on earth is that?” The guy says: “I don’t know, but it’s driving me nuts.”’ It is stupendously incongruous, but it breaks the tension. And the doctors in the hospital roar with laughter. Tim writes back: ‘That’s the first time I have laughed in days!’

      Bill Neely from ITN is also texting from Tripoli. ‘I am in contact with a doctor in the Square,’ he tells us. ‘He says if you can get to him, he will help you, try to drive you out.’ Bill says the regime at the hotel is talking about taking the media based at the Rixos on a chaperoned trip to Zawiya to show how it is ‘liberated’ and under their control. That is extremely unlikely right now, I am thinking. There’s still fighting here and nothing has been either ‘liberated’ or captured.

      Getting to Bill’s doctor contact should be easier for us, but even getting to the Square a few miles away is off limits right now and trawling around for an unknown medic just isn’t feasible when the sky is raining bullets. Besides – unknown to Bill – we are now out of the mosque and in a hospital full of people trying to help us.

      Bill himself is desperately trying to get into Zawiya. He is a formidable rival too. A lot of the journalists realize this is a story which needs covering. But getting inside Zawiya, which is now firmly under siege, is at least as difficult as getting out.

      Those in Tripoli, however, have the best chance of getting to the story as they are the closest to the area geographically. And Bill is generous with his information. He gets repeatedly arrested at the checkpoints trying to enter Zawiya and his equipment is repeatedly confiscated. At the same time, he continues to send snippets of vital information to us. ‘There is a string of tanks outside Zawiya on the east side,’ he texts, giving us locations and positions of the military vehicles he has seen. ‘They are from the Khamis Brigade.’ It helps us build a mental picture of what is going on outside the city in which we are trapped.

      The BBC’s Arabic Service team is another crew trying to get around the government restrictions and get inside Zawiya to find out just what is going on. We hear that they too are arrested but, instead of letting the three-man team go, the Gaddafi soldiers take them to a military barracks in Tripoli, blindfold them, handcuff them and beat them. They are hit with fists, knees and rifles and then subjected to mock executions. They also witness the torture of others who are being held with them. Many of those detained, whom they see likewise handcuffed and blindfolded, are from Zawiya. The three of them: correspondent Fera Killani, cameraman Goktay Koraltan, and Chris Cobb-Smith – who is there as the security expert – are held for twenty-one hours in total. It is a frightening, horrific experience. Once out of Libya, they tell how their interrogators questioned them about us, the Sky News team. The army wants to know how we got into Zawiya, who helped us and is continuing to help us, and where we are now.

      Tim tells me that John Ryley, my head of news at Sky, wants to talk. Tim has been on the telephone regularly with London, updating them on the situation and talking to them about options. I am reluctant to speak because I don’t really know how to reassure John and I know he must be very worried. We’re in peril on his watch. ‘Hi, Alex,’ he starts, ‘how are you all coping? Are you getting enough food and water?’ I tell him the doctors are looking after us and we couldn’t be in better hands. It’s true. In a city which is now coming under almost constant attack, the hospital has got to be the safest place, relatively speaking.

      It’s late now. Dr M and his son have been constantly looking out for us. Dr M has been in and out of theatre, performing surgery. He is looking very, very tired. The man was just on a holiday visit to see family in Libya and didn’t even work here, yet right now he seems to be indispensable in the hospital. ‘Let’s get some sleep,’ he says. We are taken up to the children’s ward, which is now empty of patients. We have no luggage, no change of clothes, no toiletries, nothing. But we have a hospital bed to sleep on and a bathroom close by. It doesn’t take long before we are all asleep, exhausted by our experiences over the past twenty-four hours.

      Sunday, 6 March

      I wake early, before the others. In the few seconds before I really come to, all I can see is hospital paraphernalia – the beds lined up opposite mine in the ward, the emergency masks hanging above them, the oxygen tanks standing by. Where am I again? Then I turn over and see Martin and Tim curled up on the adjacent beds. OK, now I remember. I creep out quietly trying not to wake them. I go to the bathroom. There are already a few young medics up and working. One stops me. He’s friendly and curious and wants to talk – and I want to hear what he has to say about Libya and the Gaddafi family. He introduces himself as Dr Salah and tells me that although many of his age (he’s in his twenties) have long despaired of the Colonel, they had until very recently a lot of respect and much hope about Saif al-Islam, his most high-profile son. Until the start of the Libyan uprising, Saif had also been viewed by Western politicians as a possible successor to his father. He was educated at the London School of Economics, speaks English fluently, and was considered forward-thinking, almost liberal, and, most importantly, part of Muammar Gaddafi’s inner circle. A man the West could do business with.

      However, all those hopes disappeared at the end of February this year when Saif made a rambling television address as the protests first spread to Tripoli. The protests were brutally crushed with live ammunition, but there were few independent witnesses, with journalists having to rely on accounts from protesters who described indiscriminate firing into the crowd from snipers on rooftops around Green Square. One said he thought the snipers were using what sounded like machine-guns.

      ‘Libya is not Tunisia or Egypt,’ Saif al-Islam said in his television address, denouncing the protesters as ‘drunkards and thugs’. Troops had opened fire on the crowds because they were not trained to handle civil unrest, he said, and the casualties were not as many as was being reported. He finally lost swaths of supporters by declaring that the country was on the brink of civil war and this was being stoked by international media reports which were exaggerating the demonstrations and discontent.

      ‘We are so disappointed in Saif,’ says Dr Salah. This doctor is so young, I am thinking, young enough to be my child, but he is so brave, so strong emotionally. He continues: ‘I thought maybe, just maybe, he could lead us out of this, but not now.’ He talks about his hopes for his country, talks about the inequalities, the natural resources which most Libyans never see. He talks about how he has not known any other ruler than Colonel Gaddafi, how Zawiya was known previously for being exceptionally boring and conservative. ‘This was a very, very quiet town before,’ he says. ‘The most exciting, unexpected thing was a traffic accident. Now we have tanks all around attacking us. To us, this is unbelievable. It’s not happening to us. We cannot even believe it now.’

      Dr Salah is young but articulate and strikingly frank. ‘You don’t know the fear, Alex,’ he says. ‘People СКАЧАТЬ