GUALISH: Libyan rebels on Thursday pulled back from an assault on a gateway to Tripoli and set their sights on the oil city of Brega, as NATO dismissed charges of having killed more than 1,100 civilians.
"Yesterday, we got to within six kilometres of Asabah, but most of our forces have returned" to Gualish, where rebels reversed a bid by loyalist forces on Wednesday to recapture the desert hamlet, said local commander Abdel Majid Salem.
Asabah is strategically located 80 kilometres south of the capital, serving as the last barrier between the rebels and the garrison town of Gharyan.
Salem said the bulk of the rebels had returned to "secure the area" around Gualish, some 17 kilometres further south, but that some fighters remained outside Asabah.
On Wednesday, soldiers loyal to Libyan leader Moamer Qadhafi caught rebels off guard and attacked Gualish, which the insurgents captured a week earlier, and seized most of it.
But reinforcements poured in from villages and drove the loyalists out, chasing them up the road toward Asabah.
At least eight rebels were killed and around 30 wounded in Wednesday's fighting, said doctors at the hospital in Zintan, the key rebel base in the mountains southwest of the capital.
The eight killed, all but one of them young men, were buried on Thursday in Zintan, an AFP correspondent said. Mourners loosed off Kalashnikov automatic weapons fire as the bodies were lowered into the graves.
In eastern Libya, rebels were poised to launch an offensive on the oil town of Brega, hoping to dislodge dug-in loyalist troops, rebel military sources told AFP.
One rebel fighter was killed and five more were wounded on Libya's eastern front line on Thursday, a doctor said in the rebel-held town of Ajdabiya, 80 kilometres from Brega.
"We are preparing to enter Brega. The attack will come soon," said one rebel official.
Brega, nestled at the south-eastern tip of the Gulf of Sirte, has changed hands multiple times during Libya's four-month-old civil war.
"We have been focused on the west of the country, but now we will move," said another rebel military source who also asked not to be named.
In a speech to boost morale, Qadhafi on Thursday urged his supporters to march on the rebel capital of Benghazi in eastern Libya and to liberate the city of "traitors."
"The hour of battle has sounded: prepare to march on Benghazi and on (rebel-held) Misrata, and on the mountains of the west," he said in a message relayed by loudspeaker to supporters in an eastern district of the capital.
"We are here and we will stay here on this ground. I will stay with my people until the last drop of my blood is spilled," a defiant Qadhafi said.
He also took a swipe at French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who he accused of being a "war criminal" who had stained his country's history and destroyed its ties with the Muslim world.
Qadhafi's regime said late on Wednesday that it was seeking to prosecute NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen in Libyan courts for "war crimes" over the alliance's air strikes since the end of March that had killed more than 1,100 civilians.
Rasmussen insisted great care was taken to avoid civilian casualties.
"I completely dismiss these accusations," he told journalists in The Hague. "We are extremely careful and cautious in identifying military targets and avoid civilian casualties."
On Thursday, the alliance reported that 50 strike sorties had been carried out the previous day, with key hits including command and control centres, storage facilities, tanks, artillery pieces, missile launchers and armed vehicles.
Qadhafi is wanted by The Hague-based International Criminal Court for atrocities committed in a crackdown by his forces on pro-democracy protests that erupted in mid-February.
On the economic and diplomatic fronts, the Libyan government announced a "total halt" on Thursday to cooperation with Italy, saying no future deals would be signed with energy group ENI because of Italy's participation in NATO raids.
However, Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini brushed off the announcement.
"We are the ones who do not want and cannot have contracts" (with Tripoli).They are embargoed," Frattini was reported to have told journalists during a visit to Croatia.
Copyright AFP (Agence France-Presse), 2011
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