Violent clashes in south Libya claim 147 lives

Tripoli: Six days of tribal clashes in a remote desert town in southern Libya have killed 147 people, the country's health minister said Saturday.

Fatima Al Hamroush said in a press conference in Tripoli that the fighting in Sabha has also left 395 wounded. Around 180 people have been transported to the capital Tripoli for emergency treatment, she said.

The clashes in the oasis region some 650 kilometres south of Tripoli show the fragile authority of the Libyan government, particularly in the isolated settlements that dot the southern desert.

With only a nascent national army and police force, Libya's ruling National Transitional Council relies on militias comprising former rebels to keep the peace, and the country's vast distances makes it difficult to deploy them to trouble spots.

Video posted on YouTube dated Thursday purportedly from Sabha showed men in civilian clothes and the occasional camouflage jacket armed with assault rifles moving through a maze of mud- and stone-walled alleys, as flames rose from burning cars parked nearby. The authenticity of the video could not be verified.

Some families from Sabha said they fled the city by foot as bullets whizzed by. Some hit women and children.

In one of Tripoli's hospitals on Saturday, 14-year-old Mohammad Koukani Allafy was being treated for a gunshot wound that he sustained walking to school last week. His family said they moved him to the Tabu stronghold city of Morziq, around 100 kilometres south of Sabha, before he was transported by airplane to Tripoli.

Adam Ahmad Saeedi, 12, was also being treated in a Tripoli hospital after he was injured fleeing with his family.

"I fell off the back of the pick up truck as we were trying to escape. They attacked our neighbourhood inside of Sabha, and we managed to get out in time," Saeedi said.

Libya's Tabu have kinsmen living across the border in Chad, and the defence ministry said Saturday that it sent a number of militiamen and national army soldiers to the country's southern border in case other African tribes try to join the fight. It also dispatched airplanes to survey the area.

Other militiamen as well as tribal chiefs from around Libya were dispatched to Sabha over the past few days. On Thursday they said they brokered a cease-fire that residents say has held in the city, but not outside.

Tribal conflict

Deposed dictator Muammar Gaddafi's 40 years in power left behind a patchwork of local rivalries. The Sabha fighting pits southern Libyan Arab tribes that reportedly had close connections to Gaddafi against the African Tabu tribe, which fought against him.

Residents of the oasis say that the rivalry burst into open conflict last Monday after a Tabu shot a member of the Arab Abu Saif tribe, and then a delegation of Tabu elders and armed men going to participate in reconciliation talks was ambushed.