Moammar Gadhafi, North Africa | featured news

They arrive by the carload day and night: Liberated Libyans coming to experience Tripoli's latest tourist attraction. It’s called Bab Al-Azizyia, but it is better known as Col. Moammar Gadhafi's compound. For most Libyans it was strictly off-limits during Gadhafi's 42-year reign of Libya – but not anymore.

Fighters for Libya's new leadership managed to take over the port in Sirte on Tuesday morning, a senior military commander in Tripoli said.

Diehard loyalists of Muammar Gaddafi unleashed barrages of rockets and mortars to beat back an assault by interim government forces on one of their last bastions in Libya's desert and also held off an advance into his home town.

The U.N. General Assembly voted Friday to give Libya's seat in the world body to the former rebels' National Transitional Council which led the rebellion that ousted Muammar Qaddafi. The vote means that a senior council official will be able to join world leaders and speak for Libya at next week's ministerial session of the General Assembly and also participate in meetings.

In addition to the assault on Sirte, opposition forces continue their fight in Bani Walid, another Kadafi stronghold. Fighting continued in Moammar Kadafi's hometown of Sirte on Friday, with 13 anti-Kadafi troops reported killed and at least 25 wounded.

Airlines are readying their return to Libya, ports largely shuttered during the fighting are receiving cargos and foreign oil companies that had fled the country's civil war are making tentative steps back....

Forces loyal to the deposed Libyan leader attacked the Mediterranean port of Ras Lanuf on Monday, killing at least 15 anti-Qaddafi fighters, the transitional rebel government reported.

As Interpol issued arrest warrants for the fugitive Libyan autocrat Col. Muammar Qaddafi and two others on Friday, reports came from Niger of a new convoy of high-ranking Libyan officials arriving across the desert.

Sitting on a carpet under the shade of a tree, the men say they know where Moammar Gaddafi is today — and where he will always be. “He is in our hearts,” they say, almost in unison, tapping their chests with their right hands. Two weeks ago, almost every house in the town of Ajaylat, a Gaddafi stronghold about 50 miles west of Tripoli, flew the green flag of the autocrat’s regime. Today, those flags have been taken down, but the rebels’ red, black and green banner flies over only a handful of government buildings.

Scores of Libyan army vehicles have crossed the desert frontier into Niger in what may be a dramatic, secretly negotiated bid by Muammar Gaddafi to seek refuge in a friendly African state, military sources from France and Niger told Reuters on Tuesday.