French warplanes destroyed a Libyan plane and bombed an air base on the sixth day of allied attacks on forces loyal to Moammar Gaddafi

French warplanes destroyed a Libyan plane and bombed an air base on the sixth day of allied attacks on forces loyal to Moammar Gaddafi.
Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu told reporters in Ankara that a “compromise has been reached in principle” on transferring control of the Libyan operation from an ad hoc U.S.-led coalition to formal NATO command. The arrangement was hammered out in a conference call among U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and her counterparts from France, Britain and Turkey. As a NATO member, Turkey had insisted on conditions for NATO’s takeover of the operation.

The transfer from U.S. leadership, sought by President Obama, is expected to take a few days to complete after it is officially approved.

The move comes amid an apparently intensifying campaign of airstrikes and missile attacks that are taking a toll on Gaddafi’s forces but have not relieved the siege of rebel-held Misurata, where a humanitarian crisis is unfolding.

In Benghazi, the de facto rebel capital in eastern Libya, a spokesman for the anti-Gaddafi forces said that loyalist troops in the strategic city of Ajdabiya were trying to surrender.

“We are trying to negotiate with these people in Ajdabiya because we are almost sure that they have lost contact with their headquarters,” said Col. Ahmad Omar Bani, a former Libyan air force pilot. “We received information from freedom fighters in Ajdabiya saying some [Gaddafi] fighters have offered to leave their tanks,” he said, adding that a local imam was helping in the negotiations.

Bani said the opposition is forming a “new army” that will be more organized than the rebels, but he could not say how long that would take.

Earlier Thursday, French fighter jets destroyed a Libyan plane near Misurata and bombed an air base deep inside Libya, as U.S. and British cruise missiles struck targets in and around the capital, Tripoli.

The strikes further pounded the already decimated Libyan air force, but they failed to prevent Gaddafi’s tanks from reentering Misurata overnight and shelling the area around its main hospital, news services reported.

The continued fighting aggravated a humanitarian crisis that doctors in Misurata, Libya’s third-largest city 130 miles east of Tripoli, say has been growing worse.

The transfer to NATO of Operation Odyssey Dawn, as the coalition’s Libyan mission is known, began to take shape when Turkey announced it would not longer oppose the shift, paving the way for the United States to turn over command in the coming days.

Turkey is the only Muslim-majority member of NATO, and the alliance needs all 28 member nations to approve any military action. Davutoglu told Turkish state television Thursday, “Our demands have been met on Libya. The operation will be handed over to NATO.”


Obama has said he intends to turn the mission over to international command in “days, not weeks,” and the announcement of Turkish support apparently allows that to happen over the weekend.

Obama, along with French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister David Cameron, reached a tentative agreement earlier this week for NATO to command the military mission. In addition, a steering committee of NATO and non-NATO members, including Arab countries participating with military aircraft and humanitarian support, has been proposed to provide political guidance for the operation, but it is unclear whether that is still under discussion.

Obama is facing mounting pressure from Congress to explain the Libyan operation, which represents America’s third military front in a Muslim nation. He has sought to play down U.S. participation, saying that the U.S. military would lead the operation’s first phase, particularly in taking out Gaddafi’s air-defense system, and then fall back into a supporting role.

In a Pentagon news briefing Thursday, Vice Adm. William E. Gortney said, “We are going to give up the command position . . . and be participants” in the Libyan operation. he said the United States would “continue to provide predominantly those capabilities we have that are unique,” such as refueling tankers, “ISR [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] platforms” and “some of the interdiction strike packages.”

Gortney said coalition planes are not attacking Gaddafi’s forces inside cities because of the risk of civilian casualties but are focusing on isolating those forces and cutting their supply lines.

Asked about the prospect that more restrictions could be placed on coalition strikes under the new command structure, Gortney said: “I’m not sure how the rules of engagement could be any more restrictive than they already are.”

He said the coalition is using “every tool in our toolkit” to send messages to Gaddafi’s forces telling them to stop fighting or face attack. “They need to cease fighting and either stay in place or abandon their equipment,” he said. To be on the safe side, he suggested, “maybe they ought not use their tank or their armored personnel carrier as a mode of transportation to get home.”

In Tripoli, officials took journalists to a hospital to see the charred and mangled bodies of 18 men they said were victims of Western airstrikes, Reuters news agency reported. A Libyan official said that some of the dead were soldiers killed in an airstrike Wednesday and that some were civilians, but the reporters were not shown any bodies of women or children, and it was not possible to determine whether any civilians were among the dead. The bodies were also shown on Libyan state television.

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