By Derek Henry Flood
Nalut/Djerba- Well yesterday’s long promised rebel/NATO offensive against the nearby Qaddafists finally got underway and it was hell upon earth. The morning started out in a deadly quiet, still fog that obscured the Q controlled towns down on the plains below Nalut. Within hours it was like a baking hot Stalingrad. I have never heard nor encountered so much artillery in nearly a decade of war coverage. My driver and I visited a martyr’s graveyard in the middle of it all as I needed to make a diverse array of images for an upcoming photo essay when WHAM!!!, Grads starting falling in Nalut’s deserted center. I’ll have to save some of the juicier stuff for articles but what I can say is that I have experienced something like this since Takhar and Kunduz (remember the ‘Daisy Cutters’?) in November 2001. At one point we literally fled the town as rockets rained down, though plenty of aged Amazigh men seemed unfazed as they crouched in the shade, playing the odds, with nowhere to really go and the rest of their families in Tunisian refuge. We in the Nafusa had no clue about the death of Abdel Fattah Younes…and perhaps that was a good thing.
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Source: The War Diaries
Thoroughly enjoy your work. Can feel the atmosphere through your writing. Guess the “aged Amazigh men” are braver than you or perhaps they had had their breakfast. Photos are great too – could almost smell the diesel! Keep safe and let us feel what it really is like for the “rebels” in their fight.