From Dublin to Tripoli to Idlib
There are reports that Mehdi al-Harati is now leading a group of fighters in Idlib! He was living in Dublin with his wife and four children when the revolution began in LIbya-and then went off to fight becoming a rebel commander. Certainly worth a read of Miles Amoore’s – a Sunday Times correspondant- piece on him.
Six months ago Mehdi al-Harati, an Arabic teacher, said goodbye to his wife and four children in Dublin and went off to war. Last week I was alongside him and his men — many of them from Britain — as they prepared to storm the Bastille of the Libyan revolution.
In quick succession both he and I were hit by snipers’ bullets, but we survived and raced on towards Colonel Muammar Gadaffi’s heavily fortified palace in central Tripoli.
The high walls of the Bab al-Aziziya compound embodied the 42 years of oppression that Gadaffi had inflicted on his country.
“Sheikh” Mehdi’s 350-strong brigade of Libyan exiles, buzzing with the accents of Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester, were determined to be the first insurgents to breach the walls as the regime tottered last week.
The Tripoli Brigade, as they called themselves, had trained for four months in Libya’s western…
View original post 3,347 more words
