Wars, Tripoli | featured news

Explosions and gunfire rocked Tripoli overnight, after days of battlefield defeats left Muammar Gaddafi's government and troops penned ever more tightly in the besieged capital by a rebel advance.

As street battles raged on Friday just a half-hour’s drive from the Libyan capital, there were new signs in Tripoli that worried foreigners were urgently trying to leave.

Libyan rebels said on Monday they had seized a second strategic town near Tripoli within 24 hours, completing the encirclement of the capital in the boldest advances of their six-month-old uprising against Muammar Gaddafi.

NATO warplanes bombed three Libyan state TV satellite transmitters in Tripoli overnight, targeting facilities that have been used to incite violence and threaten civilians, the military alliance said Saturday. A series of loud explosions echoed across the capital before dawn. There was no immediate comment from Libyan officials on what had been hit, but state TV was still on the air in Tripoli as of Saturday morning.

Tripoli was rocked by a series of airstrikes by NATO forces in the early hours of the morning Sunday.

A Tripoli apartment building near a school is destroyed, killing 9 people and injuring 18 others. Libya blames NATO, which confirms that planes were operating above the city at the time of the alleged attack.

NATO bombs struck a Libyan government complex before dawn Saturday, damaging two buildings, just as Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi called for ...

Col. Muammar Qaddafi has gained the upper hand on the Libyan battlefield, even as British and other Western officials maintain that his regime is "crumbling" from the inside. Benefiting from a change in tactics, Colonel Qaddafi's forces have made significant gains against rebels with more nimble units that are harder for Western allies to target by air. Rebels, now lacking the curtain of airstrikes that paved their rapid westward advance last weekend, appear to be relinquishing their determination to battle Qaddafi's forces all the way to Tripoli.

A woman burst into the hotel housing the foreign press in Tripoli Saturday and fought off security forces as she told journalists that she had been raped and beaten by Qaddafi militia members.