US President Barack Obama warned Libyan leader Muammar Qadhafi on Wednesday there would be 'no let up' in pressure on him to go, following a second successive night of heavy Nato bombing in Tripoli. Six loud explosions rocked Tripoli late on Tuesday within 10 minutes, following powerful strikes 24 hours earlier, including one on Qadhafi's compound that Libyan officials said killed 19 people.
-- US, Britain vow to press on against Qadhafi
Obama told a London news conference with British Prime Minister David Cameron he could not predict when Qadhafi, who is fighting a three-month-old insurgency, might be forced to go. "I absolutely agree that given the progress that has been made over the last several weeks that Qadhafi and his regime need to understand that there will not be a let-up in the pressure that we are applying."
"We have built enough momentum that as long as we sustain the course that we are on that he is ultimately going to step down," he said. "Ultimately this is going to be a slow, steady process in which we are able to wear down the regime."
Fighting between Qadhafi's forces and rebels has reached a stalemate, despite two months of Nato aerial support under a UN mandate intended to protect civilians. Qadhafi denies his troops target civilians and says rebels are criminals, religious extremists and members of al Qaeda.
Strikes drove back Qadhafi forces shortly after he pledged "no pity, no mercy" to rebels in their stronghold of Benghazi. Rebels have since proved unable to achieve any breakthrough against better-trained and equipped government troops.
Cameron echoed Obama's calls for the departure of Qadhafi, who denies targeting civilians and portrays the disparate rebel groups as religious extremists, mercenaries and criminals serving Western schemes to seize Libya's oil. "I believe we should be turning up that pressure and on Britain's part we will be looking at all the options of turning up that pressure," he said.
Such pressure will not include Nato troops, Obama said. "We cannot put boots in the ground in Libya," he said. "There are going to be some inherent limitations to our air strikes in Libya." French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said on Tuesday the Nato bombing should achieve its objectives within months.
British Foreign Secretary William Hague dismissed fears that Western states were being drawn into an Iraq-style conflict. "It's very different from Iraq because of course in the case of Iraq there were very large numbers of ground forces deployed from Western nations," Hague told BBC Radio.
Zuma headed an African Union mission to Tripoli in April but the bid to halt the civil war collapsed within hours. The AU does not have a good track record in brokering peace deals, having failed recently to end conflicts or disputes in Somalia, Madagascar and Ivory Coast.