In the morning’s early hours, as the desert fog burned away under Libya’s rising sun, the road to the oil town of Brega stood quiet yesterday, empty of armed rebels or any vehicle.
But soon afterwards, as the first sleepy-looking insurgents arrived cautiously to take up the position they had left late Monday, artillery and gunfire met them, sending them racing in retreat.
Unlike the untrained rebels, Muammar Gaddafi’s forces had not vacated the battlefield for the night. Instead they had used the darkness to advance, to prepare their ambush.
The revolutionaries – most of them students or young professionals with no previous combat experience – had lost the initiative. It would cost them dearly.
They pulled back around five kilometres, to what they hoped was out of range of the incoming shells. There they massed, with most of the ragtag guerillas driving up leisurely at 10.00 a.m., looking gung-ho after a good night’s rest.
One fighter, Ahmed Falhala, explained that the rebels had vacated the battlefield as day broke because “it’s too early”.
“It’s like a supermarket,” he laughed, intimating that, for the insurgents at least, daily war was meant to start at a reasonable hour.
After a long lull with no firing, a big group of rebels moved forward to discover two imploded pick-ups destroyed by unseen airstrikes.
The military radios inside were evidence the vehicles had belonged to pro-Gaddafi fighters. There was no sign of any bodies inside, suggesting the occupants had fled as soon as they saw the Nato planes.
But there was little time to savour the “victory”. Again shells rained, pushing them back. And back again.
The rebels congregated in a desert area about 20 kilometres east of Brega where they had confidently camped out during the day for the past few days. But this time, they weren’t even safe there.
Col Gaddafi’s artillery moved forward, sending the rebels scattering.
Explosions of black cloud blossomed along a parallel desert road where the rebels’ better-equipped teams, using rocket launchers, had been positioned. Those weapons, and the vehicles stacked with ammunition for them, barrelled through the desert as blasts ripped up the ground next to them.
And back and back the rebels went. They would stop every few kilometres to see whether Col Gaddafi’s men were pausing, or whether Nato jets would beat them back. But each time they did, artillery shells exploded in the near distance, convincing them to run once more.
“Where is France? Where is Britain?” one fighter asked.
As the pro-regime force moved forward, the pace quickened. Some rebels took off for the nearest big town, Ajdabiya, which had been the scene of intense fighting and aerial bombardments just over a week ago.
“It’s a very bad day today,” said Mohammad Misrata, who came from Benghazi.
“They shoot from far and with the weapons that we have, we can’t reach them.”
The rebels were retreating, some in civilian cars and pick-up trucks, while some could be seen in columns of four pushing back at full speed.
Once again, the insurgents were looking to the skies for their salvation, hoping that Nato warplanes would do what they cannot.