EARLY ON THE morning of May 9, 2011, Majdi el-Mangoush said good-bye to his companions at the isolated farmhouse on the outskirts of Ad Dafiniyah and headed alone into no-man’s-land. His destination was his hometown of Misurata, some ten miles to the east.
As he walked, the sound of gunfire grew in intensity, and there was the occasional rumble of distant artillery explosions, but between the light wind and the rolling-hill topography of the Misurata coastal shelf, it was quite impossible for Majdi to determine how close any of it was or even its direction. He tried to bear in mind something he’d picked up in basic training, that the most worrisome noise on a battlefield wasn’t gunshots but rather a soft popping sound, like the snapping of fingers. This was the sound the air made as it rejoined behind a bullet, and you only heard it when a bullet passed close to your head.
In the right front pocket of his pants, Majdi carried his military identification card, listing him as a third-year cadet in the Libyan Air Force. If he was stopped by the rebels, this card in itself was unlikely to cause him problems; by now, three months into the conflict, countless government soldiers had deserted, and the fact that Majdi was from Misurata would certainly lend credence to his explanation that he was trying only to go home. The Thuraya satellite phone in his left pocket was a very different matter, though. With the severing of Internet and cell phone reception in Libya, the Thuraya had become the standard mode of communication for regime operatives in the field, and if the rebels discovered Majdi’s—sure to be found in the most cursory of searches—they would inevitably conclude he was coming into Misurata as a spy. Under those circumstances, summary execution was probably the most merciful outcome he could hope for.
If this was the scenario that had played out, Majdi’s executioners would have had it exactly right. The soft-spoken twenty-four-year-old air force cadet was returning to his hometown on a secret mission: to ascertain where in Misurata the rebel leadership was based, and to then relay that information to Libyan military intelligence so those leaders could be assassinated.
On that day, it would have been difficult to find anyone among Libya’s six million citizens with less of a grasp of what had happened in the country over the previous three months than Majdi el-Mangoush. Making his ignorance all the more remarkable, he hadn’t spent that time in some remote desert outpost but rather at the very epicenter of the Libyan civil war.
On their sprawling compound in southwestern Misurata that January, Majdi and his fellow air force cadets had watched the news of the upheavals in Tunisia and Egypt in astonishment. In Majdi’s case, his knowledge of the spreading chaos abroad was augmented by the time he spent with his family and civilian friends on weekend breaks. Still, neither he nor any of his classmates connected that tumult to their situation in Libya, much less imagined it might spread there.
Then, on the evening of February 19, a Saturday, the cadets heard a series of crackling sounds coming from within the city. At first, they thought it might be firecrackers, but the sounds intensified and drew nearer, until the students realized it was gunfire. Soon they were ordered to assemble at the drill ground, where they were informed that all leave had been canceled. By then, the watchtowers that ringed the compound—usually empty or occupied by a single bored sentry—were manned by squads of soldiers with mounted machine guns.
“That’s when we knew something big had happened,” Majdi recalled, “because this was unlike anything we’d seen before. But still, no one would tell us what was going on.”
Majdi hoped he would get an explanation when classes resumed the next morning, but when the civilian instructors failed to show up, that potential source of outside information was cut off, too. All that day and into the next, the gunfire beyond the walls continued sporadically, the sound drawing nearer at times, only to recede, intense exchanges followed by long periods of quiet. Throughout, Majdi stayed in the constant company of his best friend at the academy, Jalal al-Drisi, and in the bizarre news-free environment in which they now existed, the two young men tried to puzzle out what was happening.
A measure of clarity finally came on February 22, when Muammar el-Qaddafi, clad in an olive-drab robe, addressed the nation. In what almost instantly became known as the Zenga Zenga speech, the dictator laid blame for the social unrest then spreading across Libya on foreign conspirators and “rats,” and he vowed to purify Libya “inch by inch, house by house, room by room, alley by alley”—zenga zenga in Qaddafi’s pronunciation of the Arabic word for alley—“person by person.”
No sooner did Qaddafi’s address end than the gunfire in Misurata spiked. “It was like the security forces had been awaiting orders for what to do,” Majdi said. “After the speech, they just opened up everywhere.”
What didn’t change, though, was the cadets’ peculiar quarantine, purportedly in danger from elements outside the compound walls whose goals remained mysterious and kept within those walls by soldiers who clearly didn’t trust them. As the days passed and the unseen gun battles raged, the students lounged around their barracks or wandered the vast compound wondering what was to become of them. It was virtually all Majdi and Jalal could talk about. “We would sit together for hours and go over every little detail, every clue we had picked up,” Majdi said. “ ‘What did it mean? Did it mean anything?’ But sometimes it got to be too much. We had to stop. We had to talk about football or girls, anything to distract us.”
Their peculiar limbo ended on the night of February 25, when soldiers of the elite Thirty-Second Brigade suddenly appeared on the base. Announcing that they had come from Tripoli to “rescue” the cadets, the commandos ordered the students to pack their things and run to a gathering point at the edge of the compound where buses were waiting.
Perhaps the Thirty-Second’s hallowed reputation didn’t extend to their logistical personnel, for to transport the 580 cadets, someone had decided to order up just two buses. With both vehicles filled to bursting, the excess students were crammed wherever they might fit in the brigade’s jeeps and armored cars, and then the convoy trundled into the night for the long journey to Tripoli.
For a regime in desperate need of a positive photo-op, the air force cadets from Misurata proved a boon. The following afternoon, they were led into a Tripoli assembly hall where the better spoken among them were hustled before television cameras to give profuse thanks to the Thirty-Second Brigade and to “the Leader” for their rescue, even if just who they had been rescued from remained unclear. To provide a pleasing backdrop during these testimonials, the rest of the cadets, including Majdi, were instructed to crowd in, smile, and wave the small Libyan flags they had been given. With his core shyness, Majdi stayed at the back of the crowd and was surprised by how many of his flag-waving classmates competed to mug in front of the cameras, until a thought came to him. “They were doing that so their families back home would see them and know they were still alive. I wish I had figured that out sooner, because I hadn’t talked to my family since the start of the fighting, and they had no idea where I was.”
Beyond effecting their “rescue” from Misurata, the regime in Tripoli didn’t really seem to know what to do with its young charges either. Bused to a vacant military high school compound on the southern outskirts of the city, the cadets were billeted in barrack halls and empty classrooms but barred from leaving or having any contact with their families. That edict was enforced by armed soldiers posted at the gates.
But the confines of the Tripoli high school were a good deal more porous than those of the air force academy, and from their minders the cadets gradually learned something of the conflict that had befallen their nation. Although the unrest was fomented by criminal gangs and foreign mercenaries in the hire of Libya’s Western enemies, they were told, enough misguided segments of the population had joined in to cause its spread. By the beginning of March, this foreign-spawned criminality was most intense in Misurata and Benghazi, Majdi’s and Jalal’s hometowns, and both those cities were now pitched battlegrounds.
Provided with this narrative, Majdi was not altogether surprised when, in mid-March, Western alliance warplanes began appearing over Tripoli to bomb government installations. To the contrary, those strikes seemed merely to confirm that the nation was being attacked from beyond. Naturally, the situation also caused both Majdi and Jalal to worry about the fate of their hometowns and wonder which of their friends might have been seduced into joining the traitors’ ranks. “That’s something we talked about a lot,” Majdi said. “ ‘Oh, Khalid was always a little crazy; I bet he’s gone with them.’ ”
As the rumors from Misurata and Benghazi grew steadily worse—by early April, there were reports that whole swathes of the cities had been destroyed—life inside their gilded cage became that much more excruciating for Majdi and Jalal. Their predicament also gave rise to a moment of gallows humor.
One afternoon, as the two friends dejectedly wandered the high school grounds, a passing army officer took notice of their manner and drew them up. “Why so grim, boys?” he asked. “It’s all going to work out.”
Falling into conversation with the cadets, the officer finally asked where they were from. Upon hearing Misurata and Benghazi, the officer shook his head, whistled through his teeth. “Well, like I said, it’s all going to work out—but just maybe not for you guys…”
The air force cadets seemed gradually to win the trust of the regime, enough for one large group to be transferred to a military base in mid-April to begin training on missile-guidance systems. Neither Majdi nor Jalal were selected for this mission, however, and their stay at the high school dragged on. Then one day in early May, Majdi ran into an old acquaintance at the barracks. The acquaintance, Mohammed, was now a military intelligence officer, and he wanted to talk to Majdi about Misurata. The two chatted for some time, with Mohammed asking about different locations in the city and if the young cadet might know who the town’s “civic leaders” were. Majdi thought nothing of the conversation, but one afternoon a few days later, he was called to headquarters.
There, an officer informed Majdi that he had been selected to join the cadets undergoing missile-guidance training; the jeep that would transport him to the base was leaving immediately. So hurried was his departure that Majdi didn’t even have time to say good-bye to Jalal.
But the jeep driver didn’t take him to the army base. Instead, he followed the Tripoli ring road to the coastal highway and then turned east. Majdi had no idea where he was going, and the driver wasn’t in a talkative mood.
By early evening, they had reached Ad Dafiniyah, the last town before Misurata and the farthest limits of government control. There, Majdi was led into a small farmhouse, where he was told someone wanted to speak to him on the phone. It was Mohammed, the military intelligence officer.
As Mohammed explained, the air force cadet had been chosen for a “special patriotic mission”: Majdi was to slip into Misurata and find out who the rebel leaders were and where they lived. Once he had done this, he would pass the information to a liaison officer secreted within Misurata, a man named Ayoub. To make contact with Ayoub, Majdi was given a Thuraya satellite phone and a number to call.
Upon hearing all this, Majdi had two thoughts. One was about his friends at home; ever since hearing about the scale of fighting in Misurata, he assumed that some of his friends must have joined the other side. If he carried out this mission, it might very well result in their deaths.
The other thought was of a conversation he’d had with Jalal just days earlier. His friend had awoken in a despondent state of mind, explaining that he’d had a terrible dream, and it took Majdi some time to coax out the details. “I dreamt that you and I were sent to fight in Misurata,” Jalal finally revealed, “and that you were killed.”
But any hesitation swiftly passed. In his goldfish-bowl existence in Tripoli, Majdi had heard only what the regime wanted him to hear, and if he didn’t believe all of it, he believed enough of it to want to help defeat the foreigners and their followers who were destroying Libya, even if this included people he knew. Perhaps most of all, he just wanted the limbo to end. For nearly three months, he had been cut off from both his family and the outside world, and he simply wanted something—anything—to happen. So he agreed and early the next morning set off into no-man’s-land.
Majdi’s memory of that journey is vague. He doesn’t remember how long it took; he estimates that he walked for about three hours, but it could have been shorter or twice as long. Only one moment sticks out in his mind. About halfway across no-man’s-land, Majdi was suddenly filled with a sense of joy unlike anything he had ever experienced before.
“I can’t really describe it,” he said, “and I’ve never had a feeling like it since, but I was just so happy, so completely at peace with everything.” He fell silent for a time, groping for an explanation. “I think it’s because I was in the one place where I was out from the shadow of others. I hadn’t betrayed my friends yet, I hadn’t betrayed my country yet—that is what lay ahead—so as long as I stayed out there, I was free.”