http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-13138102April 19, 2011.

Libya conflict: Rebels accused of reneging on mines vowBy Stuart Hughes

Human rights campaigners have accused rebels in Libya of failing to honour a pledge not to use land-mines in their fight against Muammar Gaddafi.

The BBC filmed rebels planting anti-vehicle mines near the key town of Ajdabiya at the weekend.

Human Rights Watch researchers said mines had been laid despite rebel assurances they would not be used. The organisation has already gathered evidence of use of mines and cluster munitions by Col Gaddafi's forces.

Devices filmed by the BBC at the weekend have been identified as PRB-M3 anti-tank mines produced in Belgium during the 1970s and 1980s.

Tens of thousands of the mines, which are cased in plastic and contain almost 7kg (15lb) of explosives, have been found stockpiled in depots in the rebel stronghold of Benghazi in eastern Libya.

'Used without precautions'

"Despite their promises not to use any kind of mines, the video footage clearly shows rebel fighters laying anti-vehicle mines on the outskirts of Ajdabiya," Peter Bouckaert, emergencies director at Human Rights Watch (HRW), told BBC News.

"We call on the rebel authorities to formalise their pledge not to use mines, to clearly command their forces not to use any type of mines, and to clear and secure any remaining mines."

The weapons used by the rebels fall outside the 1997 Ottawa Treaty, which bans anti-personnel but not anti-vehicle land-mines. Libya has not signed the treaty. However, campaigners say mines such as the PRB-M3 are often deployed in violation of international humanitarian law.

HRW says the use of PRB-M3 mines and the manner in which they have been laid in Libya make them particularly dangerous to non-combatants. Because they are made of plastic, it is hard for de-mining teams to detect them. Areas mined by the rebels appear not to have been marked or mapped, making any future clearance efforts more difficult.

Variants of the weapon held in rebel stockpiles can also be booby-trapped or fitted with a sensitive fuse. Although the devices are designed to be triggered by the weight of a vehicle, the pressure caused by stepping on a device fitted with a sensitive fuse can be enough to cause an explosion. Campaigners say this, in effect, makes the weapon an anti-personnel landmine.

The BBC saw rebels laying mines

The rebels have access to tens of thousands of mines in eastern depots

"While not specifically banned, these anti-vehicle mines are being used by the rebels without any precautions to avoid civilian casualties and that violates their obligations under international law," said Mr Bouckaert. "The rebels should immediately cease the use of all types of mines if they want to avoid civilian casualties as they have pledged," he added.

: Сукоб уЛибији Побуњеници оптужени да су погазили обећање о некоришћењумина

Стјуарт Хјугс

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http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/07/world/africa/07libya.htmlMay 06, 2011.

Land Mines Descend on Misurata’s Port, Endangering Libyan City’s Supply Route

By C. J. Chivers

MISURATA, Libya — Military forces loyal to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi scattered antitank land mines on the port of this besieged city late Thursday night, threatening once more to close the city’s only route for evacuation and supplies, according to accounts of witnesses, photographs and physical evidence collected on the ground.

One mine exploded under a truck, wounding Faisal el-Mahrougi(Bryan Denton for The New York Times)

The land mines were delivered by a Chinese-made variant of a Grad rocket that opens in flight and drops mines to the ground below, each slowed slightly and oriented for arming by a small green parachute, according to an identification of the sub-munitions by specialists who were provided photographs and dimensions of the weapons.

The mines hit the port at 9 or 10 p.m. Thursday, after rockets were heard being fired on the city from the southeast. A short while later, a truck driven by rebels who

were patrolling the harbor struck two of them. Both men inside were wounded, according to a port supervisor and one of the victims, Faisal el-Mahrougi, the driver.

Remnants of the parachutes attached to the mines (Bryan Denton for The New York Times)

Officials and guards said more than 20 mines were distributed in the attack, and remains of at least 13 were observed firsthand. It was not possible to verify an exact number, as many had been destroyed by rebels who, to clear the mines, shot them with rifles, causing them to explode. By nightfall on Friday, the port appeared to have been cleared.

The use of mine-distributing rockets echoed the documented use of cluster bombs here, and underscored anew the Qaddafi government’s efforts to deny the use of the port to the rebels and to international aid organizations. Regarded as highly indiscriminate weapons, land mines are widely banned by the international community, though several nations, including the United States and Libya, have not signed the international convention prohibiting their production and use, and they retain land mines in their arsenals. The convention covers antipersonnel land mines, not land mines designed to destroy vehicles. However, the mine used in this attack, a Chinese Type 84 Model A, shares many of the indiscriminate characteristics of many banned mines.

The use of such mines also introduces a new menace to the city. The Type 84 Model A is fired by a mobile multiple-rocket launcher system that can carry up to 24 rockets containing 8 mines each. The system’s range is slightly more than four miles, according to a publication of Jane’s Information Group.

For months the port in Misurata, on the Mediterranean Sea at the city’s eastern edge, has been essential to the survival of the city. It has been the sole means of resupply and the only point of evacuation for migrant workers and hospital patients, who have been carried to safety by ships, tugs and fishing vessels that have dared enter its channel, at risk of facing a gantlet of fire.

The introduction of what are known as scatterable land mines also marked a fresh escalation of the munitions used by the Qaddafi forces in this siege.

Last month, during the ferocious urban battle for one the city’s main boulevards, the loyalists repeatedly struck the city with Spanish-made cluster munitions. And the city has been pounded by mortar shells, artillery and ground-to-ground rockets throughout.

Rebels have repeatedly spoken of their fears that through shelling or ground attack the loyalists will seize the harbor and try to strangle the city.

This newest threat from Chinese-made mines had not been seen before in this war.

After being released from a cargo canister while the rocket carrying them is in flight, these mines, each weighing roughly seven pounds, fall from the air with legs that extend and join underneath each mine’s body like a spike. This is designed to drive the mine into the soil and stand it roughly vertically — with a shaped charge facing upright.

Each mine has a magnetic proximity fuse set to blast the charge upward into the bottom of any metallic vehicle that passes over it. Each also has an anti-handling device, to prevent removal, and time fuse that causes the mine to self-destruct up to three days after being armed.

The identification was made using a photograph of one of the unexploded mines, along with images of parts of the remnants of several others that were destroyed either by detonating against the truck or by being struck by the rebels’ bullets.

These images were shared with several private organizations, including Human Rights Watch, and with a private-sector ordnance specialist who distributed the photographs to a network of colleagues, who confirmed the munitions’ identification.

The rebels who discovered them said they initially did not know what they were, and they said the mines had been hard to see at night, with their dark green paint. Mr. Mahrougi, the driver whose truck passed over two mines that had settled onto one of the port’s roads, does not remember seeing them as they exploded in rapid succession.

He emerged in stable condition from surgery Friday night for treatment of third-degree burns, a broken left foot and extensive fragmentation wounds to his left arm, leg, abdomen, chest and face.

Mr. Mahrougi had been examining the port’s warehouses and roads after an odd-sounding rocket strike, and amid reports that Qaddafi helicopters had been heard over the city.

“We saw some rockets, and our guards where checking,” a port supervisor said. “And then one of our trucks hit them.”

The official asked not to be identified to protect his relatives in Tripoli from retaliation from the Qaddafi government. According to the lot number stenciled in black paint on one of the mines, the munitions were manufactured in 2009.

Arms sales between China and Libya are not transparent. How and when the weapons were obtained was not immediately clear.

http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-world/libyan-rebels-in-brega-shift-focus-20110725-1hvuk.htmlJuly 25, 2011

Libyan rebels in Brega shift focus

Libyan rebels say demining efforts outside the eastern oil hub Barge are being hampered by a lack of specialised kit, and that fighting against Muammar Gaddafi's forces has lost some intensity.

"We have no choice. We have to clear the sand of mines," Mohammed Seaway, a spokesman for the Union of Revolutionary Forces in Addable, told AFP.

He said the mine problem has sapped some momentum from the campaign to clear Barge of loyalists, although the rebels said on Sunday they captured one soldier and sent scores more fleeing west to Abuser village on the road to Ras Laming.

Rebels have captured between 10 and 20 regime troops since they seized Barge on July 18, he said, adding that one prisoner claimed loyalist fighters had sown "over 45,000 mines" around the Mediterranean town.

Zawawi said the rebels have so far cleared some 200 mines in the Barge area, and that they do not know if the claim of 45,000 mines laid is an accurate representation of the scope of the problem or merely a scare tactic.

"We have no idea," Seaway said. "They had a lot and we've found a lot. We believe Gaddafi put mines inside the residential areas and oil facilities."

But military spokesman Colonel Ahmed Omar Bani said the insurgency's expert engineers calculate that more than "40,000" mines have indeed been spread at random in and around Barge.

He said rebels had so far received no international assistance in their demining effort, and that they have only "very old equipment" such as stick metal detectors to carry out the task.

"We are trying to clear all that area by ourselves. We are advancing slowly slowly because of the mines. If you move, you can lose your life," Bani said.

Seaway said Libyan experts are teaching rebels heading to the front how to clear the land, but that a shortage of gear means civilians-cum-fighters are struggling to defuse heavy anti-tank mines and plastic anti-personnel mines.

"We have some experts and tools to clear the land of mines, but a lot of our troops are doing it manually, without tools," he said.

This high-risk demining effort and a desire to avoid casualties has slowed the rebel campaign in Barge to a snail's pace, but rebels still estimate that only small, negligible pockets of resistance remain within the town.

"We believe there are a few troops left in the area because they do not fight back and shoot as much as they did at first," Seaway said.

"We don't want to kill them. We want them to have a chance to withdraw... to either come over to our side or at least go all the way to Sirte," Gaddafi's home town and a loyalist stronghold on the coast road from Barge to Tripoli.

Seaway said intercepted radio chatter suggests that the morale of the embattled strongman's forces is sagging in the absence of an easy way out.

"We listen to all their conversations. Radio chatter suggests they are down, disappointed, and that they don't want to fight, but are sometimes forced to, because Gaddafi has sent troops to shoot anyone who retreats and left groups of fighters without cars so they can't get away."

Rebel military officials are currently preventing journalists from getting close to Barge for security reasons, making it difficult to verify claims of shifts in the balance of power there.

The insurgency is pushing a two-pronged offensive, supported by targeted NATO air strikes, from the east and from the southwest before the annual Muslim fasting month of Ramadan begins at the start of August.

On Saturday, NATO-led warplanes attacked a regime military storage facility, a multiple rocket-launcher and a command and control node in the Barge area, the alliance said.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle-east/libyan-rebels-take-it-slow-demining-fields/2011/07/23/gIQAgP1EaI_story.htmlJuly 26, 2011

Land mines slow Libyan rebels’ march toward Tripoli

By William Booth

KIKLAH, Libya — First Milad Saadi and his men pray. Then they walk into a minefield.

Saadi carries a poker; it looks like a car antenna. The sappers have an old metal detector, the kind used to look for lost coins at the beach, but they don’t use it much; the batteries are weak.

They wear no body armor, no helmets. They dig in the dust with their hands.

Twenty paces from the roadside, they find their first land mine, then a second, a third. They twist off the plungers that would trigger the devices and toss the bland, beige, deadly disks into a blue bucket. The mines are the size of a doughnut.

In less than an hour, they have found 125 Brazilian-made T-AB-1 antipersonnel mines.

“Stick around, we will find a thousand in this field today,” said Bashir Ghourish, a member of the seven-man de-mining team from nearby Zintan.

As rebels slowly press toward Tripoli, they are discovering ever more extensive minefields laid by forces loyal to Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi in and around civilian areas. The number of mines unearthed by the rebels is quickly growing from hundreds to thousands, as opposition fighters move into towns abandoned by retreating Gaddafi troops.

“Over the past weeks, NATO has witnessed an increase in indiscriminate mining and the escalating use of force by pro-Gaddafi forces” in both Brega, an oil port 482 miles east of Tripoli, and the western mountains, said a NATO official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of alliance ground rules.

Opposition forces battling to enter the oil refinery at Brega have been slowed by mines. Col. Ahmed Bani, a spokesman for the rebel army, told reporters that rebels deactivated thousands of land mines last week to secure a possible route into Brega.

Rebel military commanders at Kabaw in the western mountains say that five days ago they watched Gaddafi troops laying mines around the towns of Ghazaya, Tikut and Ruwas near the Tunisian border.

“It feels like there are reports of new fields every week now,” said Sidney Kwiram, a consultant for Human Rights Watch in Libya.

“In each of the front lines we have visited around the country, the Gaddafi forces have used land mines near their troop positions,” Kwiram said. “These minefields may be flanking troop positions one day, but the next day they are the reason that civilians cannot return home.”

So far, six people have been wounded in mine blasts here in the western mountains when the vehicles they were riding in struck one of the devices. Three have been hospitalized.

Sappers working here in the Kiklah area found 1,500 mines in one field, 196 in another. On Thursday, they returned to a grove of olive trees and shuffled through the dust, searching the ground for disturbed dirt that would signal a buried mine.

The Gaddafi forces were barracked in a boy scout camp nearby, and mine team leader Saadi said the government soldiers had laid the mines to protect themselves from attack.

In two hours here, they found more than 300 antipersonnel mines and 18 Chinese-made Type-72SP anti-vehicle mines.

“It is part of Gaddafi’s scorched-earth strategy,” Saadi said. “A kid might step on it, an old man, an animal. Anything that moves. It is an unimaginable thing. It’s a war crime.”

Saadi held up one of the antipersonnel mines. “You see it is plastic, with the explosive inside? It would last in the ground for centuries.”

Saadi and his team display little of the boisterous bravado of the younger rebels.

“This is a job for old men, quiet and careful,” said Abdul Hakim, who usually teaches high-school Arabic.

“It is my duty to clear out these fields, for the children, for people, no matter even if it is dangerous,” Hakim said. “You have to calm down and take a deep breath, go slow, because you know, here your first mistake is your last mistake.”