**Libyan rebels attempting to advance on Tripoli from the south-west launched a counter-attack on Thursday, driving regime forces out of a key village lost the day before.
(NSI News Source Info) TORONTO, Canada - July 14, 2011:The rebels retook Qawalish, a hillside village 60 miles from the capital, and pushed further on towards Gharyan, a loyalist town regarded as the gateway to Tripoli.
Despite the unexpected setback on Wednesday, when their undermanned posts were caught by surprise by regime troops, morale was high enough to fight back immediately.
Hundreds of young men piled into pickup trucks bound for the front line, many dressed in T-shirts and flip-flops. Most were fighters from local villages, a mixture of Berbers, who are generally fiercely anti-Gaddafi, and Arab tribes.
"All the military heads from the different villages are here – from Kikla, Zintan, Jadu, Rojban," said one fighter, Osama Azumi, who came to the front line in his taxi. "We are just waiting for the order to attack."
Moktar Akhdar, chief operations field commander, said four government soldiers had been captured, of whom two were Algerians and one Somali. The fourth was Libyan.
Eight rebels were killed in the fighting on Wednesday, six from the single small mountain town of Zintan. They were buried there on Thursday.
"This does not just make us determined to fight harder, it makes us determined to finish this," said one rebel, Abdullah Ahmed With their proximity to Tripoli, the battles in Libya's western mountains are increasingly regarded as the most promising of the rebel's three main front lines, though even here they are impeded by a lack of co-ordination.
There is also a mixture of anti- and pro-Gaddafi villages in the area.
Al-Sabha, the village before Gharyan, is also traditionally loyal to the regime. Meanwhile, though the rebels are said to have been re-equipped by France, who airdropped light munitions last month, men on the ground say they have not seen a single new weapon.
In the central front, rebel forces who broke the siege of Misurata have been unable to break through the government-held town of Zlitan, while in the east, they are still trying to take the oil town of Brega where they have been stuck for several months.
The Nato alliance is keen to see an end to the four-month bombing campaign, and in Istanbul on Friday leaders including William Hague, the foreign secretary, and Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, will hear new proposals to bring the conflict to an end.
Turkey is to set out a "road map for peace", while France and the African Union have also been conducting their own negotiations, directly or through proxies.
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