The man is finally sitting on the fine sandy beach of Tripoli. The sea is calm and the water a deep turquoise blue. He says that he's a very good marksman, and has a black rifle lying across his knees. Now, after all that's happened, it doesn't bother him anymore to shoot black Africans he believes are mercenaries. But shooting Libyans, says Abu Bakr Uraibi, is still difficult for him. And the first time he killed someone was the most difficult of all.
It happened during the first few weeks of the war, in Jabal Nafusa, a rugged mountain chain southwest of Tripoli. Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi's generals had dispatched 150 soldiers to close the border to Dahiba in Tunisia. The rebels were bringing in much of their supplies through the small border crossing, and a nearby mountain offered a good vantage point to control the road below.
The soldiers came at 4 a.m. They climbed the mountain, not knowing that Uraibi and 30 other rebels, a small group of inexperienced men, were there waiting for them. But the rebels were intimately familiar with the terrain, unlike Gadhafi's soldiers . The soldiers were exhausted from the climb, while their enemies were wide awake and alert.
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