Samuel Aranda for The New York TimesYoung men atop a destroyed tank on Thursday near Rujban, Libya. More Photos ?
RUJBAN, Libya — The people fleeing Tripoli on Thursday said that several neighborhoods filled with the sound of gunfire every night. At checkpoints throughout the capital, they said, paramilitaries from the dreaded People’s Guard carried long lists of wanted men. The gas lines were five days long.
Rebels say the exodus is fueled by a sense of dread. More Photos ? The refugees say that Tripoli’s rebels defiantly paint their flags on anything that will spread their message, including pigeons, cats and balloons.
In the last week, hundreds of families fleeing Tripoli have arrived at a rebel checkpoint here in the middle of a winding mountain road, exhausted, relieved and willing to share their stories of a silenced city. Their numbers — more than a hundred families on a recent day alone — suggest a quickening exodus from the capital, fueled by a growing sense of dread, rebels say, and a willingness to brave a dangerous road in order to flee.
“Tripoli is not stable,” said Ali Mohammed Rahaybi, 44, who fled Janzur, on Tripoli’s western outskirts, to join relatives who live in the Nafusah Mountains. He said he saw signs of resistance to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s rule everywhere: in graffiti on schools, at occasional demonstrations, and in the flags drawn on neighborhood walls.
“The revolutionaries are doing their duty,” he said.
The sudden surge of traffic at this checkpoint comes as the Nafusah rebels try to consolidate their hold on towns in the region in battles on at least three fronts. On Thursday, rebel soldiers came under intense shelling in the abandoned town of Kiklah, which is controlled by Colonel Qaddafi’s opponents but is surrounded by his soldiers.
And outside Bir al-Ghanem, on a road that leads to the oil city of Zawiya, the rebels said they were kept from advancing on Thursday by barrages of enemy rocket fire. At a checkpoint in the nearby town of Bir Ayad, rebels guarding a checkpoint scanned radio frequencies for news, happening upon a message broadcast by NATO.
In English, an American voice said: “To the soldiers of the Libyan army: Qaddafi has lost the right to give you orders, having been accused by the International Criminal Court of crimes against humanity in Libya. This is a huge relief for you, as there is no legal or moral reason to obey his orders.” The message was also broadcast in Arabic.
The checkpoint in Rujban opened in early June after rebel fighters, mostly local men, routed Colonel Qaddafi’s soldiers in the town of Qasr al-Hajj, which sits at the foot of the mountain. Men with Kalashnikovs guard the checkpoint around the clock, sleeping in a white trailer equipped with thin mattresses in one room and a hot pot in another. They hide from the midday sun on a mat underneath the trailer.
They register the names of the refugees in a ledger that was once an electric company’s complaint book. Tuesday was the busiest day yet, with 130 families registered in the book. Fridays are also busy, and most mornings: those trying to escape Tripoli often leave at sunrise, hoping to catch checkpoint guards sleeping.
Not everyone who passes here is fleeing. Some families, including several from a mountain village that is still loyal to Colonel Qaddafi, travel back and forth to Tripoli regularly. As a red car went through the checkpoint, headed to the capital, the guards refused to greet the driver and his wife. “He’s with Qaddafi,” one of the rebels said.
By 10 a.m. on Thursday, there were 36 families registered in the logbook, almost all of them from Tripoli. Families arrived in taxis, the cabs of 18-wheelers and in a refrigerated truck, stocked with bread for the journey. Most were too afraid to give their full names, saying they worried for relatives still in Tripoli. Almost all said they had lied about where they were going, telling soldiers at checkpoints they were headed to towns controlled by government troops or loyal to Colonel Qaddafi, rather than to the rebellious mountaintop cities.
One man said that after bombings by NATO warplanes, people can often be heard whistling from the rooftops, taunting the Qaddafi soldiers. They respond with gunfire aimed toward the sky, he said.
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