"The way things turned out in Misrata was not what Khadafy had hoped for. Right to the very bitter end, he remained a prisoner of his illusions. For four decades, he had heard people, men and women, shouting themselves hoarse with promises of dying for him. For four decades, he had distributed vast sums of money, generated by Libyaâs huge oil exports, among a few hundred thousand âFedaeesâ or âself-sacrificers,â individuals who were supposed to fight for him to the end. When high on hubris and the âstimulantâ drugs he took, the colonel claimed to have âan army of Omar Mukhtarsâ under his command, named after a bandit who became a local hero by fighting Italian colonialists in 1912. Yet the first city to rise against Khadafy was Tobruk â Omar Mukhtarâs birthplace. Then Benghazi rose, followed by Braiga. As each town and city rose against him, the colonel promised to fight back from another. His last stands were in Bani-Walid and Sirte. Tens of thousands of Omar Mukhtars did enter the battlefield. But they were fighting not for but against him."
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Amir Taheri, "Khadafy, kha-put", New York Post (October 21, 2011)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Muammar_Gaddafi
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Muammar Gaddafi
Muammar abu Minyar al-Gaddafi (7 June 1942 â 20 October 2011) was the leader of Libya from 1969, when he overthrew the monarchy in a bloodless coup, until 2011 when he was overthrown by a NATO-backed internal rebellion. He declared Libya a directly democratic state (jamahiriya) in 1977, and stepped down from government office two years later, although he remained the effective center of power. Gaddafi pursued an anti-colonial and pan-African foreign policy that the United States and European cou
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