“I don’t want to fight to any more. I don’t want blood,” said one soldier who was wounded after rebels launched an offensive on Thursday on government-controlled towns and villages below Libya’s Western Mountains.
“But a senior officer looked me straight in the eye and warned me and other men in my unit. He said, ‘either you go to the front and stay there or we will kill you’.”
His story, told from his hospital bed in the rebel-held mountain town of Nalut, could not be independently verified but several other captured soldiers and pro-Gaddafi militiamen gave similar accounts of the state of the army.
“The army does not want this. The whole world is against the Libyan army. How can we win?” said another soldier named Hassan. Rebel fighters were in the hospital room while he talked, but did not appear to be monitoring the soldier’s conversation.
Blood dripped from a stump on Hassan’s forearm. His hand had been blown off in an attack during the offensive to try to capture the locally strategic town of Ghezaia, which has been held by Gaddafi throughout the five-month conflict.
It has been used as a base to shell towns like Nalut, some 300 km (180 miles) west of Tripoli, and the border post with Tunisia.
Reports of low army spirits could provide a morale boost for rebels who hold the western highlands of rocky desert terrain but are struggling to move closer to Gaddafi’s stronghold of Tripoli.