Haroun Milad and his brother Moussa amid the wreckage of Gaddafis museum in Tripoli
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Zintani fighters are all over Libya, patrolling the southern and western borders, securing oil fields, intervening in tribal conflicts. At one point, the Zintanis even controlled Tripoli's international airport. While it has given up the airport, Zintan has shown very little interest in surrendering its newly acquired muscle. "We were the first to carry weapons, and we will be the last to give them up," says Ali Youssef, a spokesman for the Zintan local council. "Zintanis are involved in security for all the tribes in Libya. What would happen if we gave up our weapons now? There's potential for a civil war to explode."
The transitional government is trying to absorb former rebels into a new national army and police force, perhaps including veteran officers from the old regime. But the revolution has created a new paradigm for those who hold the guns in the new Libya. "A rebel who fought on the front lines is, for us, better than any colonel or general from the old regime," says Ismail Mohamed al-Salabi, a young former rebel, in Benghazi. "We're supporting the real fighters--the revolutionaries--those who fought for the liberation of the country without any orders from the top."
The Wounds of War
The psychological trauma of the civil war is still fresh and may take generations to heal. Appearances can be deceiving. Misratah, so recently the symbol of Gaddafi's brutality and the rebels' fortitude, has gone from bombed out to boomtown. BURGER KING, COMING SOON TO TRIPOLI STREET, reads a colorful billboard on Misratah's main drag. (It refers to a counterfeit of the American fast-food chain.) Many locals lost their lives on Tripoli Street, but now it is full of florists, restaurants and grocery stores. Young men joyride on motorcycles up and down the avenue, past uniformed traffic cops. Everywhere, buildings are under construction.
But there is bitterness amid victory. Nassima Abdul Halim lost her son Mahmoud to a regime sniper the day before NATO intervened in March 2011. As the fighting raged in Misratah, rebels gave her a chance for revenge. They brought her a regime soldier they had captured. They also handed her a gun. "He gave me his back," she recalls. And then she killed him. "The people who were fighting us--we shouldn't be merciful with them because they had no mercy for us. Other mothers did the same," she says, her eyes filling with tears. But she still finds it hard to move on. "We are psychologically destroyed," she says. "We need doctors to help us cope with this suffering."
If the victors are wounded, the defeated are disconsolate. Gaddafi's hometown of Sirt in central Libya has been the biggest loser. There, the ground is still littered with shrapnel and bloodied clothing. Houses and schools have had their walls smashed in by rockets and tank shells. Electric poles are uprooted like trees after a hurricane. At a new children's center run by a local NGO, one child used crayons to illustrate NATO planes dropping bombs on his town--his terrifying remembrance of the Western intervention that saved the rebellion but doomed the regime. Another sketched Gaddafi's old green flag with a check mark and the new Libyan flag crossed out.