ZAWIYAH, Libya (Reuters) – Libyan rebels launched an assault on an oil refinery on Wednesday to drive the last remaining troops loyal to Muammar Gaddafi out of a city on Tripoli’s outskirts and consolidate a siege of the capital.

After 41 years of supreme power, the 69-year-old Gaddafi is looking isolated, with reinvigorated rebel forces closing in on the capital from the west and south and cutting off its road links to the outside.

OUTSKIRTS OF ZAWIYAH, Libya (Reuters) – Libyan rebels aiming to topple Muammar Gaddafi are coming under fire from government troops as the insurgents fight to secure their latest gains and lay siege to the capital Tripoli.

But an increasingly confident rebel leadership dismissed reports that it was holding secret talks with representatives of the Libyan leader in neighboring Tunisia.

ZAWIYAH, Libya (Reuters) – Life-long friends Abdul Ghani and Majdi often played soccer and billiards together as youngsters, went to the same law school and then joined the rebel movement fighting to topple Muammar Gaddafi.

A sniper’s bullet shattered their dream of opening up a law practice together in a new democratic Libya where they intended to focus on human rights cases.

ZAWIYAH, Libya, Aug 16 (Reuters) – Libyan rebels said they
had seized a second strategic town near Tripoli within 24 hours,
completing the encirclement of the capital in the boldest
advances of their six-month-old uprising against Muammar
Gaddafi.

A U.S. defense official also said on Monday that Gaddafi’s
forces had fired a Scud missile for the first time since the
uprising against his rule began six months ago, but it landed in
the desert and injured no one.

ZAWIYAH, Libya, Aug 15 (Reuters) – Libyan rebels said on Monday they had seized a second strategic town near Tripoli within 24 hours, completing the encirclement of the capital in the boldest advances of their six-month-old uprising against Muammar Gaddafi.

In a barely audible telephone call to state television overnight, a defiant and apparently isolated Gaddafi called on his followers to fight rebels he referred to as “rats.”

ZAWIYAH, Libya (Reuters) – At a checkpoint on the road leading south out of Zawiyah, a rebel fighter on Sunday sat at a table with a sheet of paper listing suspected agents working for Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

Anyone passing whose documents matched a name on the list was likely to end up in a makeshift prison attached to a nearby clinic where about 15 government soldiers were already held.

ZAWIYAH, Libya (Reuters) – For 12 hours, Libyan rebel Ahmed Oraybee had been moving from one building to the next in the town of Zawiyah, trying to hunt down the pro-government snipers stalking its neighborhoods.

Suddenly he became a victim himself when a bullet struck him in the leg.

“These snipers are really good. The sniper shot me in the leg as I was climbing a staircase so that a comrade or two would come and help me, and then he would try to kill all of us,” he told Reuters, speaking from a bed at Bir Muammar Hospital.

ZAWIYAH, Libya, Aug 15 (Reuters) – Muammar Gaddafi urged
Libyans on Monday to free the country from NATO and “traitors”,
as rebels in the west began to strangle a major lifeline to his
capital.

His broadcast appeal was made over a bad telephone line from
an undisclosed location. In the following hours, a senior figure
in the Gaddafi government showed up in Cairo with members of his
family, amid reports that he had defected.

ZAWIYAH, Libya (Reuters) – Libyan rebels raised their flag over a strategic town near Tripoli on Sunday after their most dramatic advance in months cut off Muammar Gaddafi’s capital from its main link to the outside world.

The swift rebel advance on the town of Zawiyah, about 50 km (30 miles) west of Tripoli, will deal a psychological blow to Gaddafi’s supporters and severs the coastal highway to Tunisia that keeps the capital supplied with food and fuel.

ZAWIYAH, Libya (Reuters) – For Issam Legun, the fact that he and his fellow rebels were standing inside this town near Tripoli Sunday felt like a turning point in the six month conflict with Muammar Gaddafi’s forces.

“I hope we can go and attack Tripoli in a few days,” said Legun, a taxi driver turned anti-Gaddafi fighter who was wearing a T-shirt with the word “Raw” written across it. “Now that we have Zawiyah, we can free Libya,” he said.