Anaylsis: Running into the enemy’s arms, hiding place that sealed Gaddafi’s fate

IN THE end Gaddafi fooled everybody. Rebel fighters battling their way into Sirte little suspected that their nemesis was hiding in the town, for the very good reason that such a choice would be insane.

Gaddafi vanished in late August, when Tripoli fell to rebel forces in an attack so swift that many rebels came to believe the 69-year-old tyrant might still be hiding in the Libyan capital.

Specially formed squads of Misratan fighters – the best-equipped units of the rebel army – set out on nightly raids in the capital, hoping to find, if not the colonel, than one of his operatives who might volunteer his hiding place.

Other units fanned out in the vast southern deserts, where as late as Thursday morning the acting prime minister, Mahmoud Jibril, was insisting the dictator was hiding.

Yet it is now clear that Gaddafi eschewed of flight, choosing, for reasons that may never fully be known, to make his last stand in Sirte. He made a perilous journey from Tripoli, travelling south on a single road to reach Bani Walid, and from there an elaborate detour to Waddan, 150 miles south of Sirte, to avoid Misratan rebels.

The sensible course from Waddan would be to continue south, either crossing the border to one of a half-dozen sub-Saharan countries that had received Gaddafi’s largesse in the past, or simply to lose himself in the desert. But it is now clear that the dictator drove north to Sirte, his final coastal stronghold, despite the fact that rebels from Misrata were closing from the west and those from Benghazi were advancing from the east.

By the time he arrived in Sirte his fate was sealed, as Nato jets switched from bombing Tripoli to pounding the town’s military bases and the main highway that offered his only escape.

What motivated him to run, not for safety, but into the arms of his enemies remains a mystery. Possibly it was to do with a simple homing instinct. Just as Hitler preferred to die in his Berlin bunker, and Saddam Hussein to hide close to his own birthplace, Tikrit, so Gaddafi chose to hide – and die – in the town that gave him life.