Western powers pounding Libya's defenses will wind up in the dustbin of history, said leader Moammar Gadhafi as his troops held back rebel advances despite four nights of attacks from the air.
While Western air power has grounded Gadhafi's planes and pushed back his troops and armor from the brink of rebel stronghold Benghazi, disorganized and poorly equipped insurgents have failed to capitalize on the ground and remain pinned down.
The rebels have been unable to dislodge Gadhafi's forces from the key junction of Ajdabiyah in the east, while government tanks dominate the last big rebel hold-out of Misrata. There is big risk of stalemate on the ground, analysts say.
At least two explosions were heard in the Libyan capital Tripoli before dawn on Wednesday, Reuters witnesses said. The roar of a fighter jet was heard above the city and a barrage of anti-aircraft gunfire lit up the predawn sky.
Defiant speech
"We will not surrender," Gadhafi earlier told supporters forming a human shield to protect him at his Tripoli compound.
"We will defeat them by any means ... We are ready for the fight, whether it will be a short or a long one ... We will be victorious in the end," he said in a live television broadcast, his first public appearance for a week.
"This assault ... is by a bunch of fascists who will end up in the dustbin of history," Gadhafi said in a speech followed by fireworks in the Libyan capital as crowds cheered and supporters fired guns into the air.
State TV said Gadhafi was speaking from his Bab Al-Aziziya residential compound, the same one hit by a cruise missile Sunday night. Reporters were not allowed to enter the compound as he spoke.
The U.S. military warned it was "considering all options" in response to dire conditions that have left residents cowering in darkened homes and scrounging for food and rainwater.
"Gadhafi may try to hunker down and wait it out even in the face of the no-fly zone, even though his forces have been degraded,'' President Barack Obama told CNN in an interview Tuesday.
With anti-Gadhafi rebels struggling to capitalize on the ground on the strikes against Libyan tanks and air defenses from the air, Western countries had still to decide who would take over command once Washington pulled back in a few days.
Misrata shelled
On Tuesday, Gadhafi's tanks shelled Misrata and casualties included three children killed when their car was hit, residents said, adding the death toll for Monday alone had reached 40.
Residents there painted a grim picture of the situation, under siege by Gadhafi loyalists for weeks, with tanks in the city center and doctors operating on people with bullet and shrapnel wounds in hospital corridors.
"The situation here is very bad. Tanks started shelling the town this morning," a resident called Mohammed told Reuters by telephone from outside the city's hospital, adding: "Snipers are taking part in the operation too. A civilian car was destroyed killing three children on board, the oldest is aged 13 years."
Early Wednesday, three journalists who were captured and held by Gadhafi's regime since the weekend were released in Tripoli, according to AFP news service. Two of the journalists — a reporter and a photographer — were working for AFP; the third was a Getty photographer.
In the first Western air force loss of the campaign, a U.S. F-15E crashed in Libya overnight and its two crew members were rescued, the U.S. military said. The crash was likely to have been caused by mechanical failure and not hostile fire, it said.
Explosions and anti-aircraft fire have reverberated across Tripoli for the past three nights and state television reported several attacks by the "crusader enemy." Twenty Tomahawk missiles were fired at Libyan targets overnight, the U.S. military said.
A Reuters correspondent taken to a naval facility in east Tripoli by Libyan officials saw four Soviet-made missile carrier trucks which were destroyed. They were parked inside a building whose roof had collapsed, leaving piles of smoldering rubble.
"Yesterday six missiles and one bomb from a warplane hit this facility," said Capt. Fathi al-Rabti, an officer at the facility. "It was a massive explosion."
One of Gadhafi's sons may have been killed, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told ABC News on Tuesday. She cited unconfirmed reports and did not say which son she meant. She said the "evidence is not sufficient" to confirm this.
Clinton also told ABC that people close to Gadhafi are making contact with people abroad to explore options for the future, but she did not say that one of the options might be exile. She said they were asking, "What do we do? How do we get out of this? What happens next?"
U.S. Navy Adm. Samuel J. Locklear said intelligence confirmed that Gadhafi's forces were attacking civilians in Misrata, Libya's third-largest city, and said the international coalition was "considering all options" there. He did not elaborate, but Misrata is one of the cities that Obama has demanded that Gadhafi forces evacuate.
Rebels pinned down in east
Gadhafi's forces were trying to seize the western rebel-held town of Zintan near the Tunisian border in an attack using heavy weapons. One resident said 10 people were killed on Tuesday. People fled to seek shelter in mountain caves.
Security analysts say it is unclear what will happen if the Libyan leader digs in, especially since Western powers have made it clear they would be unwilling to see Libya partitioned between a rebel-held east and Gadhafi-controlled west.
Rebels in east Libya were stuck just outside Ajdabiyah on Tuesday, making no advance on the strategic town despite three nights of Western air strikes on the oil-producing state.
At the front line in the desert scrub about 3 miles outside the town, gateway to the rebel-held east, fighters said air strikes were helping to cripple Gadhafi's heavy amour.
When asked why rebel units had not advanced, Ahmed al-Aroufi, a rebel fighter at the front line, told Reuters: "Gadhafi has tanks and trucks with missiles."
Commenting on the air campaign to protect civilians in this uprising against Gadhafi's 41-year rule, Aroufi said: "We don't depend on anyone but God, not France or America. We started this revolution without them through the sweat of our own brow, and that is how we will finish it."
Sheltering from tank fire behind sand dunes near Ajdabiyah, rebel fighters lack leadership, experience and any clear plan of action. One fighter, Mohamed Bhreka, asked who was in command, shrugged and said: "Nobody is. We are volunteers. We just come here. There is no plan."
With Western allies reluctant to send in ground forces, it was unclear whether such a disorganized group could dislodge tanks concealed from the air in densely packed towns.
A U.S. fighter jet on a strike mission against a government missile site crashed Monday night in eastern Libya, about 25 miles (40 kilometers) outside the rebel capital of Benghazi. Both crewmen ejected safely as the aircraft spun from the sky during the third night of the U.S. and European air campaign.
One of the pilots parachuted into a rocky field and hid in a sheep pen on Hamid Moussa el-Amruni's family farm.
"We didn't think it was an American plane. We thought it was a Gadhafi plane. We started calling out to the pilot, but we only speak Arabic. We looked for him and found the parachute. A villager came who spoke English and he called out, 'We are here, we are with the rebels,' and then the man came out," el-Amruni said.
A second plane strafed the field where the pilot went down. El-Amruni himself was shot, suffered shrapnel wounds in his leg and back. He propped himself up with an old broomstick and said he bore no grudge, believing it was an accident.
The pilot left in a car with the Benghazi national council, taking with him the water and juice the family provided. They kept his helmet and parachute.
Washington, wary of being drawn into another war after long campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, has ruled out specific action to overthrow Gadhafi, although France said on Monday it hoped the Libyan government would collapse from within.
Coordinating role
Obama on Tuesday won British and French support for a NATO role in the air campaign as Washington seeks to cede operational control within days. France had been against a NATO role for fear of alienating Arab support.
Turkey had also opposed a NATO command role as it said coalition air strikes had gone beyond what was authorized by the United Nations. However, its concerns had largely been settled, a senior U.S. official told reporters.
Another U.S. official said Washington believed NATO would effectively have to take operational, if not political, control due to its superior command structure.
President Nicolas Sarkozy's office said France and the United States had agreed on how to use NATO command structures but did not agree any further details.
France and Britain had agreed to put together a "political steering body" of foreign ministers of countries participating in the coalition and the Arab League which would meet in the next few days in Brussels, London or Paris and hold regular meetings, French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe told parliament.
Two Qatari fighters and two C-17 transport aircraft landed in Crete on Tuesday and the U.S. military said the aircraft would be "up and flying" over Libya by the weekend. That would be the first direct outside Arab involvement in the operation.
Four more Qatari aircraft and 24 UAE warplanes were also expected in Crete on their way to a forward base in Sicily.
Washington expected more Arab states to contribute to the no-fly zone in the coming days, a senior U.S. official said.
'Gadhafi'S lies'
Rifts were growing internationally over the U.N. resolution, with Russia saying the U.N. Security Council would discuss on Thursday whether Western countries were going beyond the bounds of their authority to intervene to protect civilians.
China and Brazil urged a cease-fire amid fears of civilian casualties and Algeria called for an immediate end to military intervention in Libya, calling the action "disproportionate."
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said those responsible for civilian deaths in Libya should pray for their souls.
U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said on Tuesday during a visit to Moscow some people in Russia seemed to believe what he termed Gadhafi's "lies" about civilian casualties in Libya.
Libyan officials have said air strikes have killed dozens of civilians. They say the rebels are al-Qaida militants assisted by Western powers who are trying to steal Libya's oil.
In Tripoli, Reuters correspondents said some residents, emboldened by a third night of air strikes, dropped their customary praise of Gadhafi and said they wanted him gone.
"My children are afraid but I know it's changing," one man said. "This is the end. The government has no control any more."
Meanwhile, two Libyan opposition leaders held a press conference Tuesday in Paris organized by French philosopher Bernard Henri Levy, who visited Benghazi three weeks ago. Mansour Sayfalnasa, a Libyan exile living in the U.S. for the past 42 years and an official member of the Opposition Council, and Ali Zeidan, spokesman for the International Federation League of Human Rights in Libya, are touring European capitals to meet government representatives before going to Benghazi to join other council members.
The opposition council, made up of 30 members representing Libyans from all regions and tribes, is a transitory council that will operate until Libya is liberated and a system is in place to install a democratic government, the two said.