Even as the struggle ends Gaddafi’s dying regime takes its toll

I FIRST met Feras Asheni on the frontline west of Misrata one day in early June in the midst of battle. Gaddafi forces, recently pushed out of Misrata itself, were trying to claw back lost ground, launching a furious assault on the rebels at the battered village of Dafniya.

I arrived where a huge pall of black smoke was rising from a burning warehouse, seeking shelter from the incoming artillery fire and sniper bullets in a mosque that doubled as an aid station, 300 yards from the sand berm that marked the frontline.

Asheni was fresh faced and 20, and had just started medical school earlier this year when war erupted in Misrata. Along with other medical students, he volunteered for the dangerous work of crewing ambulances that raced through the city streets picking up the rebel wounded.

They had no flak jackets or other protection from the shrapnel and bullets that found ambulances with alarming frequency.

It was the proud boast of Asheni’s comrades that, while many wounded fighters could not be saved, no crew ever refused to race off and pluck them from the battlefield.

The noise of battle was terrific, the crash of the Grad rockets mixed with the howl and thump of mortar bombs landing all around Dafniya. Sweating in my flak jacket I went inside the cool mosque and slumped down, feeling the walls rattle. Ashani sat beside me and asked me not about the war but about football.

He was pleased to find we both supported Chelsea and fired questions at me about the team’s prospects under a new manager – it took my mind off the inferno raging around us.

In the days that followed we met most days at Misrata’s Hikma hospital, regularly filled with the dead and dying.

Ambulance doors would open and there would be Feras in the back. One night I found him, amid a squad of crying soldiers, with a plaster on his cheek. No, he explained, he was not wounded – a friendly doctor had removed a mole.

Rebel forces in Misrata and across Libya had survived the shocks of March and April, and thanks to Nato air support were able to hold the frontlines around Benghazi, the capital, and this besieged, isolated, city. But there was no question of being able to expand their territory.

The bad days earned nicknames around the town: There was Crazy Wednesday and Crazy Friday, when the cacophony of rockets landing at Dafniya would merge into one boiling rumble and the mosques would broadcast Islamic chants to calm the population and ambulances would scream in from the front bearing terribly injured fighters.

In July, things eased. Nato bombing began to change the shape of the battlefield, both in Misrata and far away at Brega. Rebel units began to appear in fresh uniforms with new weapons, and far in the west, rebel uprisings took control of the Nafusa mountains.

And Feras began to have free time. He was as new to emergency work as the rebels were to soldiering, and was keen to take time off.

One day, a group of us went to the beach for some respite. Another time, proudly wearing his Chelsea gear, he took me to play football with the other medics in a nine-a-side football game on a floodlit court on the edge of town, playing at 10pm because they were sure that the battlefield was then quiet.

The tide of war was changing. The rebels still failed to co-ordinate well, but government forces had their own problems, something best seen from Dafniya on a clear night as Nato jets hammered tanks, artillery and command centres on the far side of the line.

The regime of Gaddafi was meanwhile losing the propaganda war, culminating when on 23 June the International Criminal Court indicted the Libyan leader for crimes against humanity.

Feras once explained to me that for the rebel fighters, the V-for-victory sign, which means for them victory or death, was a totem: The choice was not whether to live or die – that was made by Allah – but whether to fight or refuse to fight. Like the rebel fighters he tried to save, he believed fiercely that the fight was correct, pointing out Gaddafi’s promise, made on live television, to “show no mercy” to the “rats” who opposed him.

But how could he – and the rebels – stand every day in the face of an artillery onslaught that left me paralysed?

Again, the answer seemed to be found in religion. He believed that someone who dies doing the right thing would become “Shaheed”, a martyr, and would enjoy a glorious path to heaven, bringing honour to himself. Anywhere else, it would sound like bravado. Watching him at work, calm amid the chaos, confirmed the depth of this belief.

In early August, Misrata’s rebels broke the ring around their city, storming towns nearby and in the west, and all at once it was clear the months of attrition were taking their toll.

By that time Feras had gone: He told me two weeks ago he was tired, and wanted a break in Tunisia, intending to hitch a ride on one of the evacuation ships that take wounded to hospitals in Tunis. Before he left he gave me a memory stick, asking for photographs of the day on the beach.

It is now clear he did not stay in Tunis, but crossed back into Libya, crewing an ambulance in the vicious fighting around Zawiya. On Sunday, with rebels already celebrating what seemed the end of the war in Misrata, Feras Asheni, 20, was shot dead by a sniper’s bullet.