TRIPOLI // Forces allied with Libya’s UN-brokered unity government said on Saturday they had recaptured the port in Sirte, advancing rapidly against ISIL fighters encircled inside the central city.
The fall of Sirte, the hometown of ousted dictator Muammar Qaddafi and ISIL’s main bastion in Libya, would be a major setback for the extremists who have also lost territory in Syria and Iraq.
Apart from the port, the Libyan forces also retook residential areas in eastern Sirte, said a spokesman for the forces, Rida Issa.
ISIL fighters are now surrounded in a densely populated area of around five square kilometres inside Sirte where they are laying booby traps.
Most of the city’s residents have fled but some 30,000 remain, Mr Issa added.
After a month-long operation to close in on Sirte, the rapid pace of the advance by forces allied to the Government of National Accord (GNA), who entered the city on Wednesday, has surprised Libyan authorities.
“The battle wasn’t as difficult as we thought it would be,” one government official said. “Maybe we exaggerated their (ISIL’s) numbers?”
The UN envoy to Libya, Martin Kobler, tweeted on Saturday that he was “impressed” by the “rapid progress” of pro-GNA forces.
But analysts have warned that the city’s fall would not spell the end of ISIL in Libya, where the group has fed on political and military divisions since the 2011 uprising that killed Qaddafi.
Foreign intelligence services estimate the extremist group has 5,000 fighters in the country, but its strength inside Sirte, which ISIL has held since June 2015, is unclear.
ISIL fighters tried to wrest back the port on Saturday in an attack that killed two members of the GNA forces, who repelled the assault.
A total of 137 pro-GNA forces have been killed and 500 wounded since the operation began on May 12, according to a medical official in the western city of Misurata.
The pro-GNA forces have fought fierce street battles with the extremists around a sprawling Qaddafi-era conference centre which once hosted international summits but now houses an ISIL command centre.
Fighters loyal to the unity government are using tanks, rocket launchers and artillery to attack the extremists, while ISIL is fighting back with machineguns, mortar rounds and sniper fire.
“We are fighting between houses, on the streets, and we won’t back down before we eliminate them,” said one pro-GNA combatant.
Warplanes have carried out air strikes around the conference centre and other ISIL positions inside the city, according to social media accounts belonging to the anti-extremist operation.
The operations command said extremist positions had been targeted by 150 air strikes since mid-May.
The GNA, which was formed under a UN-backed power-sharing deal agreed by some Libyan lawmakers in December, has been working to assert its authority but is yet to receive the official endorsement of the country’s elected parliament.
The pro-GNA forces are mostly made up of militias from western cities, notably Misurata, and the guards of oil installations that ISIL has repeatedly tried to seize.
In northern Syria, meanwhile, US-backed rebels on Saturday tightened their siege on the ISIL stronghold of Manbij, where tens of thousands of civilians are trapped by the fighting.
The Syria Democratic Forces (SDF), a predominantly Kurdish alliance, encircled the town after capturing dozens of villages and farms near the Turkish border.
“The push toward Manbij slowed down because of fear for civilians there,” said Mustafa Bali, a Syrian journalist who visited the front line. “All telecommunications with the town have been cut.”
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitoring group, said tens of thousands of civilians in the town fear bombardment of residential areas at a time when most bakeries have stopped working and food is running out.
It said airstrikes by the US-led coalition have killed 30 civilians, including 11 children, since the SDF began its offensive on May 31.
Manbij, one of ISIL’s largest strongholds in Syria’s northern Aleppo province, is a waypoint on a key supply line between the extremists’ de facto capital of Raqqa and the Turkish border.
* Agence France-Presse, Associated Press
