Gaddafis Compound: Inside Bab al-Azizya
The last major bastion of Muammar Gaddafi’s 42-year-old regime has fallen, as rebels overran the colonel’s Bab al-Aziziya compound in Tripoli Tuesday, uncovering large caches of weapons—but so far, no sign of the mercurial dictator, who had been expected to hunker down there for a final stand.
"This is Gaddafi's Pentagon," Noman Benotman, a British think-tanker and former Libyan Islamist opposition guerrilla commander, told Reuters. But the comparison doesn’t hold. Unlike the Department of Defense’s headquarters, which is more of an office building than a siege-ready castle, Bab al-Aziziya is part monument, part fortress, and part palace—more akin to a combination of the Kennedys’ Hyannis Port and Israel’s Masada.
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