C.J. Chivers reports for The New York Times:
When the bloody siege of this isolated city began, the rebels who rose against Col.Muammar el-Qaddafi`s conventional army had virtually no firearms. Many of them relied on hands, knives and stones.
Now they range the streets as a paramilitary force built around hastily armored trucks that have been fitted with captured machine guns set on crude turrets and mounts.
See also Libya Snapshot: How the Enemy Held Misurata
The transformation, evident in an offensive late last month that chased many of Colonel Qaddafi`s forces from Misurata`s center to its outskirts, is in start the effect of a hidden face of this lopsided ground war: a secret network of rebel workshops, where these makeshift weapons have been designed, assembled and pushed out.
The workshops are officially a rebel secret. But for 3 days journalists for The New York Times were given admission to two of them, on the circumstance that their exact locations not be disclosed and that no photographs be interpreted of their entrances.
On display inside were both the logistics and the brain of the seesaw fight forLibya`s third-largest city. In Misurata, an almost spontaneously assembled civilian force has managed, alone along Libya`s central and western reach of Mediterranean coast, to hold a sustained conventional attack from an army with all the blazon and munitions an oil state can buy.
In these places - the fledgling war industry for a storm that regards itself as a democratic insurgency - weapons manufactured in cold war-era factories to be operated remotely on aircraft and tanks have been limited for manual use.
Four-door civilian pickup trucks have been converted to sinister-appearing armored vehicles. And conventional munitions designed for one thing - land mines and tank shells, for which the rebels have little use - have been converted to other types of lethal arms.
The rebels remain ill equipped and materially outmatched. Some of their product is of questionable value. But they have acquired a collective sense that, to get back the Qaddafi troops, any contribution matters.
And there is no wonder that their fighting power has grown. For the beleaguered residents, just as war can be fought with rifles, it can be waged with hammers, grinders and lathes.
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