FRENCH ACTION:TO GET a sense of what Muammar Gadafy had in mind when he warned his forces would show "no mercy, no pity" as they advanced on rebel-held Benghazi last week, you need to take the road that slices through the desert flatlands south of the city.
Spread along a distance of more than 40km (25 miles) is the still-smoking wreckage of the fearsome armoured column which was heading for Benghazi on Saturday when it was bombarded by French fighter aircraft enforcing the UN Security Council resolution passed shortly after midnight on Thursday.
Among the scores of blackened vehicles, I counted more than 20 tanks, some 20 lorries, including several mounted with Grad rocket launchers, whose bunched cylinders are capable of firing 40 rockets simultaneously, and more than a dozen armoured personnel carriers.
Some of the tank turrets were still facing north, poised to rain fire on Benghazi. Others faced south, frozen in retreat.
Debris on the road out of Benghazi indicated that Gadafy’s forces had penetrated beyond the city’s hinterland into its inner reaches.
“Look at all this,” said Ali Maresh Shafae, who runs a mobile phone shop in the city, as he gestured at the incinerated vehicles, some of which were still smouldering.
“Benghazi would have been destroyed if the air strikes had not come at the last minute.”
Just a few dozen kilometres down the road lay the besieged town of Ajdabiya, where fierce fighting between rebels and regime forces continues.
But that failed to put Benghazians off the chance to crow over their narrow escape from the terrifying onslaught Gadafy had promised.
Thousands cruised down the highway to gape at the twisted vehicles and weaponry crushed by the French air strikes. Families posed for photographs next to upturned tanks or shot video on their mobile phones. Youths festooned mangled rocket launchers with the pre-Gadafy flag the rebels have adopted as their standard. Men hunted for charred souvenirs amid the clothing and personal effects belonging to Gadafy’s forces which were scattered in the sand by the force of the strikes.
The remains of Gadafy’s troops have already been removed to a city morgue, where they lie in green body bags in a separate, locked room.
Dozens of rebels sang songs of defiance as they clambered over a burnt-out truck which had been carrying a tank towards the city. “Move Gadafy, move . . . the Libyan people are coming,” they yelled before mocking his threats to quash the uprising “house by house, alley by alley”.
When the crowd milling around learned that two of my companions were French journalists, they whooped and cheered. “Thank you France, thank you France,” chanted one man. “You saved us from Gadafy.”
Someone had fixed a sheep’s head on the front of the truck. “We want to get the head of Gadafy like that,” laughed one youth.
Mohammed Abdul, an engineer from Benghazi, smiled as he looked on. “Without these machines, Gadafy is nothing,” he said. “All of us believe victory is ours if we fight him and his supporters man to man, face to face. I think he will not last more than two weeks.”
To do this, argued retiree Abdur Rahman Juma, the rebels need more foreign assistance in the form of arms.
“All the people are ready to give their last drop of blood to ensure this regime does not come back to control us like it did before,” he said.
“We need heavy weapons like tanks from the international community because right now we don’t have enough. If you don’t support us further, people will feel that you have betrayed our hopes.”
As he picked his way through the debris, Khalid Hammouda, a professor of engineering whose surgeon brother lives and works in Dublin, also called for further foreign help.
“We are capable of fighting on the ground but we need logistical support and weapons to complete our revolution,” he said.
“If we don’t get such assistance, it will take us a long time to achieve our goals and a lot of lives will be lost. Nobody here wants this. We have suffered enough already.”