Killing Abdul Fattah Younes - New Yorker (blog)

Arriving in Benghazi a few days after the uprising had begun, I had been intrigued by the apparition of Younes as a "rebel commander," and questioned some of the human rights lawyers and youthful student who had led the revolt about him. Their lips invariably curled, and some even expressed their distrust of him, but said they had no choice but to include him as a newfound ally, since they needed experienced military men. Nonetheless, in the weeks that followed, as fighting broke out, and surged back and forth along the highway between Benghazi and Ajdabiya and the towns of Ras Lanuf and Brega to the west, Younes and his vaunted "special forces," always reported to be somewhere out in the front, fighting against Qaddafi's troops, were never visible. Instead, there were untrained youngsters, students and workers, who tried to fight at the frontline, and who, whenever Qaddafi's superior firepower and forces came forward, fell back in bloodied, panicked retreat.

It was only after Younes was confirmed in his position—besting Hefter in what was reported to have been an angry closed-door confrontation with other members of the rebel council present—that he made an appearance at the front. He drove up in a convoy to the frontline outside Brega and waved; the fighters mobbed his vehicle. At one point, he drove off toward Brega, where fighters were seeking to keep reporters back from an ill-defined frontline. After I saw Younes reemerge and drive past me in the other direction—back toward Benghazi—I drove to where he had come from with several companions, curious to see where the frontline was. A couple of miles down the road, we found the usual mob of untrained, excitable, and undisciplined youths with guns. We drove on, thinking that if Younes had been there, surely it meant that his "special forces" were on up the road ahead—we would find them, and then know where the "real" frontline was. A couple of hundred yards down the road, however, artillery shells began landing near us, and we turned our car around and retreated quickly. We realized that we had found the front line, and passed it, and were now in no-man's land.

Back in Bengahzi, the news was all about Younes 's triumphal visit to the "Brega frontline," where the rebel troops were said to be advancing. They were not, however, and have not truly advanced from where we last saw them, from then until now.

It's being said that Younes was back at the Brega front when he was recalled to Benghazi yesterday for questioning, on suspicion, apparently, of betraying the rebels by maintaining links to Qaddafi. Younes was then apparently shot, along with a pair of his officers, and his body was burned; the corpses were dumped in the streets. The head of the Transitional National Council first said he had been assassinated by pro Qadaffi loyalists, but a rebel minister, Ali Tarhouni, later said that another rebel leader had confessed that his men, who had been sent to bring Younes to Benghazi, had killed him.

With someone like Younes —a man of no allegiances, or too many —anything was possible. For now, the question of identity that has hung over the anti-Qaddafi enterprise since it's beginning has deepened considerably. Who are the rebels?