UNDER A slate-grey sky that soon begins to spit rain, dozens of young men troop in the gate of a secondary school in Benghazi, Libya’s second largest city and cradle of the uprising that has swept along its eastern flank and west toward the capital Tripoli.
Some are dressed in hooded sweatshirts and jeans, others flip flops and thin cotton T-shirts with chequered scarves known as keffiyehs around their necks. A small number wear scraps of what look like box-fresh military fatigues.
They come here, not for classes in maths or Arabic, but training for the battle they hope will bring an end to the 42-year dictatorship of Muammar Gadafy. At the back of the green-painted school, located next to a small former military base, there are sports fields and courts where army personnel who have defected to the opposition show the gangly youths how to handle a gun.
“Every day the shabab [young men] are coming,” says Rafaa al-Ghawarsha, who spent 10 years in the Libyan army. “Most days, there at least 1,000 here. They want to protect Benghazi and help us liberate Tripoli. They are hungry to win against Gadafy.”
Mohammed Ali Hussein, a 31-year-old artist, said he was moved to act after seeing young protesters dying on the streets of Benghazi and then hearing Gadafy deny in a televised speech that it had happened. “Does he take us as fools? Does he really think he can persuade the Libyan people that all of us are wrong and he is right?
“We have suffered too much under Gadafy. We would prefer to die with dignity than live under his rule.”
Mohammed tells how he shares one room in his family home with four of his brothers. “We are all educated, some of my brothers are engineers, yet we are reduced to living this way. Gadafy has cheated the Libyan people of a good life for more than four decades.” A group of youths pass by, several of whom raise their fists in the air and shout “Allahu Akbar ”.
Raed Ahmed (20), an intense-looking man who was a member of one of the regime’s local security forces until he quit to join the protest that prompted the uprising, speaks passionately about his loathing of Gadafy.
“Every day I worked for him I hated it because I hated him, and there were so many others like me,” he says. “We feel that now we have our dignity back as a people, before this we had none. I want to fight to honour all those who died for our freedom in the demonstrations. When we see Gadafy on TV, calling us cockroaches and dogs, we say ‘we are the people and we will liberate Libya from this ignorant person’.”
Another man approaches. His name is Mohammed Umran. He was born in the north of England to parents who were Libyan exiles. He says his grandfather was Libya’s last foreign minister under King Idris, the monarch Gadafy overthrew in a 1969 military coup. In a Leeds accent, Mohammed (24) explains that he travelled to Libya with an aid convoy after the east fell to the opposition. “This is my first time here,” he says. “I have always longed to see my country.”
He has been shown how to use a Kalashnikov since arriving in Benghazi. “If the call comes to fight, I will fight. We can’t lose this opportunity. If we waste this chance to get rid of Gadafy, we will never have it again. Everyone has to learn how to pick up a weapon. The time for peaceful protest is over.”
Mohammed says another Briton of Libyan descent was killed this week during fighting between Gadafy forces and the opposition in Brega, a town some 160km south of Benghazi which is also home to an oil terminal. “The problem is there are not enough weapons to go around. People are exposed and they have little to defend themselves.”
Rafaa al-Ghawarsha acknowledges that the ragtag band of untrained young volunteers, armed with guns seized from desserted military compounds, is no match for the sophisticated weaponry of Gadafy’s forces. “What we have is determination to win,” he says. “When we started this revolution we had nothing more than sticks and stones and look at what we managed to achieve so far.”