Accounting of war

NATO is actively seeking a political solution to the situation in Libya

The NATO command, and soon the Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, admitted that on Thursday, as a result of air strikes on tanks near Brega, there could be casualties among those who oppose Gaddafi. “The situation on the ground in this area is very...

The NATO command, and soon the Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, admitted that on Thursday, as a result of air strikes on tanks near Brega, there could be casualties among those who oppose Gaddafi.

“The situation on the ground in this area is very volatile, Gaddafi’s troops and rebels are constantly moving in different directions, and it is very difficult for pilots to distinguish which of the warring parties owns military equipment,” British Rear Admiral Russell Harding explained at a briefing. “Until now, we did not know that the forces of the National Transitional Council were using tanks.”

The admiral said that the NATO command did not apologize to the National Transitional Council of Libya, because there is no reason to apologize. He explained this by the rapidly changing situation on earth.

Answering a direct question whether the NATO military could hit the rebels if they were firing at populated areas, he shortly answered: "Yes." Earlier briefings dismissed such questions as "purely hypothetical."

NATO officials are hinting to the leadership of the rebels, who are inclined to see NATO aviation as "their own", that NATO's mission is to protect the civilian population in accordance with the UN Security Council resolution.

Rear Admiral Harding reaffirmed that there would be no NATO "occupation forces" in Libya, but dismissed the suggestion that the war had reached a balance of power and had reached a stalemate.

The day before, one of the American generals spoke about "balance" and "dead end", and this version is being discussed more and more by experts. By destroying the military potential of Gaddafi, NATO de facto not only protected the civilian population, but also changed the balance of power in the civil war. You have to get out of this situation somehow.

The official representative of the alliance, Oana Lungescu, stressed that Brussels is actively looking for a political solution in Libya, since there can be no military one. Secretary General Rasmussen is consulting with interested countries and this week will fly to a meeting of the contact group on Libya in the Qatari capital Doha.

As for the accounting of the war, according to Admiral Harding, within 48 hours, NATO aircraft made 318 sorties and attacked 23 targets in Libya. Since the beginning of the transition of the operation into the hands of the alliance (in 8 days), more than 1,500 sorties have been carried out. The strikes were carried out on Gaddafi's surface-to-air missile batteries, T-72 tanks and ammunition depots. Among the targets were also the positions of Gaddafi's troops besieging the city of Misrata.

For the first time since the 1999 Kosovo campaign, the Alliance resumed the practice of showing video footage of missile attacks on ground targets. Cameras are installed either on aircraft or directly on the produced ammunition. The journalists, in particular, were shown a video footage taken from an aircraft. First, you can see how the tank opened fire on the settlement, then for some time it is at gunpoint and, finally, takes off in a cloud of explosion. The footage is dated "this week".