The date that rebel leaders chose for the final assault on Tripoli was auspicious: 20 August 2011 coincided with the 20th day of Ramadan by the Muslim lunar calendar, the date on which Muslim forces led by the Prophet Muhammad conquered the holy city of Mecca for Islamic rule in AD 680. It was also exactly six months since the Libyan people had risen against Colonel Muammar Gaddafi and his regime.
The nomenclature of the operation — Mermaid Dawn — was no less bizarre than the regime it sought to overturn. Neighbourhood co-ordinators roused sleeper cells with the agreed code phrase ‘We’re going to have soup tonight.’ After sunset, when Muslims broke their Ramadan fast, the assault began. So thorough was the secrecy that neighbours surprised one another by responding to the call. ‘I thought I would be the only one on my street with a gun,’ one man told Channel 4 News’s International Editor, Lindsey Hilsum, ‘but when I came out I found 50 of my neighbours had guns.’ That night, Gaddafi and his regime were driven from power. The Libyan dictator met his violent end two months later, on 20 October, when his home town of Sirte fell to the rebels.
Hilsum’s book demonstrates conclusively that no Arab people had more reason to demand the fall of the regime in 2011 than the Libyans under Gaddafi. He squandered the wealth of the nation, leaving his oil-rich country chronically underdeveloped. He imposed his dysfunctional ‘government of the masses’ as the alternative to a state. He insulted their intelligence with the political delusions of his little Green Book, which was taught in Libyan schools as doctrine. (It comes as no surprise that one of the first acts of defiance against Gaddafi was the destruction of one of the ubiquitous concrete statues of the Green Book in the eastern town of Tobruk in February 2011.)
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