Libyan rebels fight into city

BIR SHAEB, Libya – Libyan rebels fought their way into the strategic city of Zawiya west of Tripoli on Saturday in their most significant advance in months, battling snipers on rooftops and heavy shelling from Moammar Gadhafi’s forces.

Zawiya is a key target for rebels waging a new offensive launched from the mountains in the far west of Libya, an attempt to break the deadlock in combat between the two sides that has held for months in the center and east of the country.

A rebel force of about 200 fighters advancing from the south reached a bridge on Zawiya’s southwestern outskirts, and some rebels pushed farther into the city’s central main square. They tore down the green flag of Gadhafi’s regime from a mosque minaret and put up two rebel flags. An Associated Press reporter traveling with the rebels saw hundreds of residents rush into the streets, greeting the fighters with chants of “God is great.”

Gadhafi’s forces then counterattacked, unleashing rounds of shelling, and gunfire could be heard as rebels and government troops battled.

Regime snipers were firing down from rooftops on the rebels, said one resident, Abdel-Basset Abu Riyak, who joined to fight alongside the rebels when they entered the city. He said Gadhafi’s forces were holed up in several pockets in the city and that there were reports of reinforcements coming from Tripoli. He said NATO airstrikes had hit Libyan military positions near the city the night before.

Zawiya’s residents rose up and threw off regime control when Libya’s anti-Gadhafi revolt first began in February. But Gadhafi’s forces retaliated and crushed opposition in the city in a long and bloody siege in March.

Gadhafi is likely to fight hard to keep control of Zawiya. The city of about 200,000 people is key because it controls the main supply road to the capital from the Tunisian border and is the site of the sole remaining oil refineries in the west still under the regime’s control.