Also known as Sert, Serte, Surt….
A few weeks ago, I stressed the point that people will fight much harder when defending their home, than taking over someone else’s turf. Surt is Qadaffi’s home town, and his people.
There is a large distance between Ajdabiya and Surt – about 220 miles, and almost nothing in between except a couple Stuckey’s and lots of camels – and some oil installations. They’re important to the “end game”, but not the “Rebel Advances”.
Sirte / Ajdabiya highway
It looks like the US Military is following the Pat Lang script – see: Mission Creep
Use the airplanes to do “ground support”, blowing up one Libyan soldier at a time – and let a handful of “rebels” march into Tripoli and declare victory, having never actually done any of the fighting.
“Freedom has to be earned, it can’t be given.”
That plan may hit a snag in Surt. The “Rebels” have no supply infrastructure – they’re guys in pickup trucks with machine guns and RPGs who would be right at home in Somalia.
Ajdabiya was strategic only in the sense it was an obstacle on the way to Benghazi – a place to go around and just make sure you weren’t shot in the back. There was no compelling reason to go into the city and start fighting – just control the entrances so the fighters inside couldn’t get out.
So now the government troops are falling back to protect Surt. Let’s have a look at what they will be up against, relying only on their air support. It’s not likely they will find a receptive civilian population there waiting to be conquered (and killed). Part of the context of Libya is tribalism. This is Qadaffi’s tribe.
Lobbing in missiles in the middle of civilian population will look bad on Fox News. (Curiously, last night the radio news was erroneously reporting that Surt had already fallen – I’m sure that couldn’t have been Psyops disinformation…)
People in this city probably won’t flee. Ra’s Lanuf was where the Rebels got to originally before they were pushed back. They have retraced their steps already – leaving a hundred miles of flat road with no cover, knowing there are airplanes overhead (for now) to cover their moves.
So what does the city of Surt look like? Here is the map around the city:
The Obama Rebels could just skip the city if their objective is to “Conquer” Tripoli and kill Qadaffi. But going through the desert around Surt would leave them open to being caught in the middle and cut off from their support.
What is actually in Surt?
South of town, one really big air base:
You can tell it is a military base because of the clusters of hangars for storing the planes. It’s a pretty good guess there isn’t much of that left.
The city has a population of about 135,000. Surt has some similarity to Brasilia in Brazil. Both were built with the intention of creating a new capital of the country, starting from nothing – so most of the buildings are fairly recent construction.
Much of the construction is multi-level apartment style housing, rather than traditional middle eastern single family house surrounded by a wall.
One of the main features of the city is the Meeting Center and a University – last year, it hosted a meeting of Arab and African leaders to discuss Sudan, and Qadaffi has been active in the discussion about water rights on the Nile River.
